The Escape Committee

My sister and I are forming an escape committee as we speak.  We are assembling spoons and checking maps to see the best place for a tunnel.

You read about them all the time.  The press is full of contempt for the elderly bed blockers who are clogging up our NHS.  All those old people, who quite frankly have outlived their usefulness and should just be put out of their and everyone else's misery, refusing to go home because they are still too ill to look after themselves, not sprinting out of bed after a hip replacement. I mean, how very dare they? Taking up beds that could be used by people who think their cold is going to kill them.

Obviously, if the journalist writing the article has a parent who has recently needed the services of the NHS they want them to bed block.  They can't possibly care for their parent: their job is too important.

What no one seems to write about is how difficult it can be to get out of hospital.  My mum had a very successful operation to repair a fractured hip.  She hasn't been in too much pain and is moving well.  However, she's not particularly well and wasn't before she slipped off the chair. She wants to go home.  She's ready to go home and has people at home to care for her. Being in a orthopeadic ward won't make her other symptoms go away, raise her blood pressure, or magic blood tests into a normal range.  They can't make her eat or stop her sleeping as often as she does because she is sick it has nothing to do with her hip.  No doctor, working over school Easter holidays, wants to be responsible for going against procedure and who can blame them? They've probably been working far too many hours to know if they are making a sensible decision.

So, to save them from the worry, we are off with our spoons.