She is an ex nurse herself, but due to her hip and leg problems she had to give it up years ago, one leg is slightly shorter than the other, but she’d always wanted to be a nurse so went ahead anyway, in the in she realised that she physically couldn’t do it.

“The GP service isn’t fit for purpose. The out of hours clinic doesn’t even have a trained GP here. The nurse practitioner was reading notes on renal colic to try and work out if that’s what my pain was or if it was a deep back muscle! The whole system needs a ruddy good shake up because so many people are being failed by it now. It’s dangerous.

That’s something which made me cross yesterday - absolutely no follow up mentioned. I was obviously in severe pain because I couldn’t sit still and it had been ongoing for four days but all I got was a prescription for codeine and told to go to A&E if it got worse. There is absolutely nothing right about GPs now. So many people are going to fall through the cracks.”

Pat of today’s update.

She said the pain was so bad it was frightening, I know what she means, been there myself, and it does become scary if bad enough. Which is why it’s so important to either have proper pain relief or someone to be with the patient to try and keep them calm.