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  • The services at Kings College Hospital are variable and often unreliable. On the one hand, I'm grateful to the surgeons who cut open my skull and drained blood to reduce pressure on my brain. On the other hand, they stitched my head back together quite oddly, with multiple scar tracks covered with metal staples (some of which also bound with tissues held in place by the staples).

    I was kept in the ICU department for several days, where the nurses were completely unreliable and poor communicators; they put huge mittens over my hands and would not explain why. When I said I wanted the mittens off, they seemed to believe that I was going to start a fight and couldn't be trusted without the mittens on. Insane.

    Things improved some when I was moved up to a middle ward, but while if I worked hard at communication, I could have a reasonable conversation with a doctor about once a day, but the nurses would follow constant procedures which didn't satisfy the path the doctors talked about. I got zero sleep for 6 days because the nurses insisted on checking my blood pressure, heart rate, blood and urine standards every 2 bloody hours; they seemed incapable of reasoning that denying me sleep meant that my blood pressure got worse over time. Even though the surgery improved my perception and reactions (as did my determination to try and impress them and talk the way they understood), they kept making life difficult and depressing. Also, because the nurses refused for a long time to remove any of the staples, it was even more difficult for me to sleep because even slight pressure on my head pushed the staples into my skull. Fucksticks.

    Eventually I managed to have a conversation with a smart doctor who explained what simple things still needed to be done, and who said I could be checked out within two days. However, the nurses refused to cooperate; it took two days just to persuade one of them to remove most of the staples. So after that I just left the hospital and took my stuff home, checked myself out and went to see my GP. As a result, I'll have the remaining issues sorted out by the weekend and am getting rest and recuparation.

    If I ever have a serious injury again, don't want to go anywhere near that obtuse and destructive team.

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