There are essentially two types of hospital in Ireland.

The public ones are open to everyone while the private hospitals cost a bit.  In fact if you want to avail of the private service you first have to sell both kidneys, sell your daughters into slavery and take out a couple of mortgages on the house to get the necessary health insurance.

There are two ways of getting into a hospital.  If you have an accident of some sort the chances are you’ll end up in public A&E. The other way of course is for a planned procedure.

Public A&E is usually like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.  You will likely end up on a trolley, shoulder to shoulder with other victims patients [or in the case of Waterford, dead ones when their Mortuary overflowed].  There you will remain amongst the coughing, moaning and bloody bandages until it becomes your turn.

I hasten to add that the staff in public hospitals are generally excellent; there just isn’t enough of them

Now planned procedures are a different ballgame.  These are nominally free in public hospitals, but again you may have to forfeit a kidney for the car parking fees.  The other slight snag is that you’ll probably have to wait for a year or two just for the first meeting with a consultant.  The day before that meeting, there is a high likelihood of a budgetary crisis or an outbreak of Galloping Gut Rot in the hospital and you will be bumped down to the back of the queue again.  I presume the methodology is that the chances are you’ll have died before your appointment, thereby saving the health service some dosh.

Then there is the private planned procedure.  This is the joy I have been experiencing over the last three weeks.

First of all it’s quick.  You get a phonecall, a letter and a text message telling you to get your arse in there the next day [assuming you haven’t sold your arse for the health insurance].

Now private hospitals are a different world.  In our case it’s all glass and chrome, with lifts that whoosh you from floor to floor and door that automatically open when you approach them [I astounded Granddaughter the Younger by ordering doors to open as we approached.  She thinks I’m God now].  The corridors are all quiet efficiency with people quietly pushing beds and wheeling computers and things around.  The rooms are big and bright with en suite wet-rooms, multichannel televisions [one per bed] and private phones.

The nurses are generally good looking young foreigners with a smattering of Irish in the crew.

There are always exceptions of course.

I mentioned before about the episode of the electrofag and their simple answer to the smoking/vaping ban – just don’t do it.  Simple.  No problem.

There was another factor which I found very strange and that was their attitude to medication.

Now Herself has degenerative arthritis in both knees and her spine [actually the spine thing is a bit more serious but we’ll let that slide for the moment].  As a result she is in a lot of fucking pain most of the time.  As a result of that, she is on some pretty heavy duty pain killers including a Morpine based one.  When she was admitted, I gave them a list of all the meds including doses.

In their wisdom they decided [without any consultation] that the list was a load of nonsense.  Morphine is bad shit and is to be avoided.  So they quietly replaced the Morphine with a couple of paracetamol.  As for the rest – they just stopped giving most of them.

So now we have a patient who has stopped smoking overnight [against her will] with no backup whatsoever and at the same time has suddenly and drastically been forced off her prescribed medication.  She was NOT a happy bunny.

Needless to say I had several stand up arguments with the head honcho in the nursing departments.  I would point out that the medications were prescribed by an excellent family doctor and how she had been on them for well over a year.  The answer was that “they were bad for her”.  I would retort that they were prescribed by a DOCTOR [i.e. and she is a fucking nurse] and that she had no right to change things.  Reluctantly they agreed to give her the required medication, but only when Herself begged and pleaded for it, and even then they allowed one dose a day [the prescription says three].

Of course all the arguments with the staff over vaping and medication were just a technicality.  I argued for the fun of it.

Because Herself continued to vape and I continued to bring the correct medication in every day.

Yup.

I’m a drug dealer.