Next Generation

It’s taken me a while to put my finger on it but something is changing in the NHS. Perhaps it’s post Covid but I think it might just be a generational shift. This time round I’ve met a new generation of doctors coming through, half my age nearly, able to communicate sensitively and with suitable gravitas. Tuned into your response. Listening. Even allowing themselves to be a little bit human. It gives me a great deal of hope.

After my results failed to arrive for a second week running, I followed through on my consultant’s suggestion to escalate his complaints and make a complaint of my own. It honestly wouldn’t have occurred to me to do anything more than sit quietly and wait and try to control my own emotions. I assumed that I must be a good patient and wait. Any delay must surely be on account of necessary work (and ground breaking research into how I can be riddled with cancer that looks like nothing the lab has ever seen before because I am…a unicorn). Now anyone in any industry who has been in their own business a while knows life ain’t like that. Fuck ups happen and people lose things and things get missed. And sometimes you’re not even in the queue. My unicorn cells might have galloped off into lalaland for all I know.

So I wrote a *stiff letter*, and I must confess I enjoyed the task. For good luck I added that as a former journalist and head of diversity I planned to talk to the BBC Disability Correspondent about health inequalities, cancer waiting times and also that I am hoping to work as a lived experience storyteller and advocate for Macmillan. I was giving them a right to reply because I would like, at the very least, to be able to say they replied. All this is true.

I get a call from my consultant around 5pm to say he still has no news for me but comically it has fallen to him to ring me to apologise and they have sent him my letter so my complaint went full circle. I feel bad as I expect they have just passed it back to him to punish him for encouraging me to complain in the first place and now there has to be a whole report written which no doubt will also fall to him. This is also not my problem. Nevertheless he reports that he has had an email by the end of the day to say the results will be in first thing in the morning and he says he will ring. I try to make him feel better by telling him that last time I was treated in the private sector the same thing happened but I was simply told all the lab technicians were on holiday. No accountability.

In fact last time I had a cancer diagnosis, marvellous as my private consultant was, he was a Man of a Certain Age and largely delivered my breast cancer diagnosis to my husband with me sitting in the room.

He looked at him and directed his advice for me to him and even he referred to me in the third person. He made little blokey jokes about this all happening during the husband’s male menopause (looking at his fitness and his fancy Garmin sports watch). No. I can and have put up with a lot of this sort of behaviour in my lifetime but this took the proverbial biscuit. This moment was definitely meant to be All About Me. The husband is sensitive to these things at least thank god and redirected him.

So the change to the new generation of (still mainly male) consultants is a good one in that they have the decency to address me directly and empower me as a patient. I feel seen. I feel I am spoken to respectfully . Every now and then they even use my title and call me Professor. But we’ll see.

Update Thursday 1pm:

Well this is very 2025. I have been ghosted by my consultant. Still no results. Fuck that