Early morning

Having, for some peculiar reason as yet unexplained, woken early this morning, I was over the fields with the dog by eight o'clock.  A beautiful, sunny morning, albeit a touch fresh in the shade of the trees, but the sun was starting to warm things up.  Brighton, or the suburbs of Westdene and Patcham, almost sparkled in the sun.

My early morning could, I suppose, be caused by the strangeness of there being only me in the bed.  The Old Bat went to hospital on Tuesday as an outpatient and was admitted as an emergency, there being a suspected blockage in the intestines and an infection caused by that.  After a massive dose of antibiotics and a glucose drip she looked and felt much better by yesterday afternoon and better still in the evening.  She had a scan yesterday and now we wait for the decision on treatment.

I really have seen to best and, if not the worst, decidedly lower standards of the NHS.  Admission from an outpatients clinic has to be through A&E and that department was manic; over-stretched and under staffed as well as being under-resourced.  The poor nurses were run off their feet, which is why it took about four hours for somebody to prescribe and bring a couple of paracetamol tablets.  On the other hand, when I got home on Tuesday evening, the GP who had seen the Old Bat last week had rung and left a message just to say that she had sent the results of the latest blood tests to the hospital.  She rang again yesterday evening just to ask how the Old Bat was.  Now that's caring.