The phone call came on the Wednesday of half term as I was sipping my morning coffee. I was off later to see my friends in Suffolk as part of the pleasures of the week. The timetable of my half term was unfolding to plan. I didn’t pick up the call as there was no identification number or name. Too many times have I answered briskly to be met with a fractional delay and a script declaimed with faulty intonation. However, this time there was an answerphone message, not a nuisance call then. Far from it. The message was from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital bookings and could I call them. My heart leapt. Could this be my surgery? Yes, it was.
“I can
offer you a date for your surgery”
“Yes,
please, when?”
“27th
February”
10
days! Having waited for the original
appointment for some months, I was given a date in March 2020 only to have it
cancelled as the first wave of the pandemic overwhelmed. I had thought it would be until at
least next year before my name came up to the top of the list. I hadn’t reckoned with NHS systems.
Patients waiting more than two years are a stain on the hospital. Therefore, the N&N was running Sunday
operating lists in the Arthur South Day Procedure unit to attempt to cut the
numbers. I was one of those
numbers. I should have felt joy, or at
best relief. I felt neither.
