Health Update: It's Been a While!

Hello people! It’s been a while since I posted one of these health updates for you. The reason I haven’t posted anything is simply because I haven’t had anything to post, but for those of you who don’t know what’s been happening over the past couple of years or so here’s a brief rundown of what went on.

Just over two years ago a misdiagnosis from my GP led to me being hospitalized with pneumonia. I underwent a series of procedures and major surgery over two stays, totalling four weeks in total, to remove the fluid from my right lung and to repair my damaged diaphragm. The surgery left me with constant chronic pain in my right-hand side which affected my neck, shoulders, chest, ribs, back and hip. The chap who performed the operation said this was because I had a ton of deep-lying scar tissue which interacted with nerve endings to cause this pain.

So fast forward to this past Tuesday and having been on a waiting list for almost a year I finally had an appointment with the pain management clinic in Norwich, in the hope that something could finally be done about this.

The appointment went really well. After a thorough examination the doctor confirmed the surgeon’s previous diagnosis, adding that there could also be some muscle and nerve damage in my right-hand side which was inadvertently caused by the surgery.

I was presented with two possibilities, two ways that all of this could be dealt with. One would have involved a procedure which would have involved a series of cortisone injections to help deal with the pain. However, that was ruled out because there is so much pain, and it would be difficult to tie down the causes of the pain to any particular part of my body.

Which brings us to the second course of action, which will involve being prescribed yet more medication which, hopefully, will help me deal with the pain, and before you ask, no, it has nothing to do with the highly-addictive co-codamol my helpful GP prescribed for me about seven months ago.

So basically, at this moment in time, a letter is winging its way from the pain management clinic to my local GP’s surgery telling them what’s needed, and once this arrives the new program should start. I would say fingers crossed, but that’s quite a painful thing for me to do at the moment.

Now while I’m more than thankful for the way the local NHS has dealt with my issues, I still can’t help but think that all of this could have been prevented back in August 2023, when my GP diagnosed me with a simple chest infection and told me that all I needed was some over-the-counter medication. It’s now been over twenty-seven months since this all began, twenty-seven months of a whole lot of pain mixed in with a ton of emotions and stress.

You want to know the worst thing about all of this? While I will always be grateful to those who looked after me and to those who have supported me during all of this it still hurts like hell that the people who were meant to look after me refuse to acknowledge their mistakes, or offer an apology, and the irony or that is that their own mental health support team told me that an apology would go a long way in giving me the sort of closure that would aid me in my recovery.

So in closing, I’m going to end this entry by once again thanking those who continued to support me, and to those who take the time out to message me, during what has been a pretty bloody awful couple of years, and while I can’t quite see that light and the end of that tunnel, hopefully that will appear sometime soon.