Chronicles of the Heart, Part 16 – a diversion…

This is not the usual medically-orientated rant, but more a technophile’s guide to being ill in hospital which will probably feature in my future. More than once if I’m lucky. )For a given values of lucky, if it’s APH.)

When I was incarcerated in the Arrowe Park Hospital, Wirral (APH), fiction factory earlier this year all I had was my tiny Sony Ericson Xperia Mini Pro mobe (and, luckily, the charger). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cracking little phone, with a slide-out qwerty keyboard (just had to think how to spell qwerty – mind’s going!), but the battery is tiny, lasting for just a day of fairly moderate use. Other than that I find it very hard to fault (oh – a biggie – no internal modem so can’t use it to connect my netbook to the Web, but as I got that after the phone, I can’t really criticise the mobe).

What I needed was

Chronicles of the Heart, part 15…

A few days ago, as you might have read, I had to discontinue my heart failure med, Candesartan, as the side effects were just too serious to ignore, and causing injury.

Now, as I said in Part 13, the idiot doctor who reviewed my echocardiogram said I have calcification of the aortic valve, not heart failure (even though the former makes the latter

Chronicles of the Heart, Part 14…

Since part 13, I have been rewriting my letter to my GP, I’ve lost count of how many times – nope, still not sent, faxing it later today; it now runs to over 2,200 words – as all the research I’m doing into aortic valve calcification and stenosis (narrowing, an inevitable result of calcification), keeps piling up the bad news.

The idiot “GP with a special interest in cardiology”, which is what you get instead of a consultant cardiologist at

Chronicles of the Heart, Part 13…

And here we have – yet another letter to my GP! The hospital doctor isn’t Dr. Dingbat, of course, but bloody should be! Incompetence personified.

My advice, and I say this in all seriousness, is to refuse point blank if your appointment at St. Cath’s Hospital, Wirral (or any other for that matter), turns out to be with a GP with a special interest in – whatever it might be. It really is no substitute for the in-depth knowledge and experience of a consultant. Cut-price medicine at it’s most inexcusable.

June 6 2011

Dear Dr. Xxxxxx,

I thought I’d let you know the outcome of my echo, which I had on Thursday as, apparently, there is a delay of several weeks in St. Cath’s correspondence.

First, though, I have to say that I have

Chronicles of the Heart, part 12 – the echocardiogram…

First, I have to say that, as I mentioned last week, I have zero confidence in the doctor, who, to protect her identity and me from a libel writ, as she is staggeringly useless, I shall call Dr. Dingbat.** When we discussed my medication last week, I mentioned that the oedema in my legs had improved since starting the Candesartan, and that I put this down to the fact that it improved kidney function.

**Her “I’m the doctor, your opinion doesn’t matter” attitude needs to bloody change, too!

She argued that Candesartan had