It’s a shame ‘Any Given Day: Cork University Hospital’ wasn’t a more warts-and-all portrait, but there was some TV gold among the humbling stories
So here comes the latest hospital drama, Any Given Day: Cork University Hospital. The first episode on RTÉ One concentrated mainly on the A&E of CUH. Unfortunately for any resident of the Republic, it bore little resemblance to our own experiences. Come on, you remember: the packed waiting rooms, the staff who can’t be found, the vending machines selling rubbish, the old people white with exhaustion as day turns to night and they still haven’t seen a nurse, and the addicts and the alcoholics who are verbal in their complaints.
Not on this programme. It did mention some of these issues on the voice over – not the vending machines. But we were always several trolleys away from real trouble: a male who had taken ecstasy was dealt with by filming a nurse on the telephone to one of his relatives. The voice over did mention that there were 20 patients waiting on trolleys, but we never saw them. And it did mention that some “non-serious” patients had been waiting more than 12 hours for their care to start, but we didn’t get to see them either.
Instead, the on-camera patients were wheeled along empty corridors with two nurses in attendance. Well, that was the case with Barry Power.
‘Kaytlin, who is 22 and very cool. Her injury would not put her off playing both camogie and football’
Barry was television gold. He had cycled his bike down his sister’s driveway straight out in front of a car. How was the driver faring, was one of the unaddressed questions here.
Barry was not wearing a helmet at the time. He was transferred to CUH by air ambulance – we have air ambulances! One of the team gave a thorough report on what had happened and on Barry’s health status. It was most impressive.
However, after six or seven years of following ambulances to A&E in Dublin, I’ve never seen ambulance staff do this. There is a queue of wheelchairs and stretchers, a few brief words are exchanged with the nurse (no doctor) and then off the ambulance people jolly well go. Is that because I was accompanying old people to A&E? Or do these photogenic briefings only happen on television. In fairness, old people admitted to our local A&E by ambulance are processed pretty fast. It’s when they have a bad cut on their head, or a suspected infection and are driven into hospital by worried relatives that the eternal waiting begins.
Barry is 46 years old, in a family of five children. Barry has Down’s syndrome and so is perhaps a lot more frank than the rest. His mother was a nurse, Barry said. “Is she much nicer than us?” asked the nurses who were being lovely to him.
“Yes,” said Barry.
As his sister told it, Barry cannot explain exactly where his pain was. His face had bad cuts but what he was feeling in the rest of his body was unknown. So it was decided to give a scan of pretty much his entire body. How the staff persuaded Barry into the tunnel of the scanning machine we will never know (sedatives?).
Then afterwards, when his parents had arrived, Barry grew restive and wanted to move. “F*** off,” said Barry to the people who were trying to dissuade him. Then…. nothing. We don’t know how they kept Barry lying down.
Shining light: Cancer patient Caroline Conboye
Caroline and Rory Conboye were expecting their third child. What a lovely couple the Conboyes were. We saw Caroline having her 35-week scan. But 18 weeks ago, a large tumour was discovered on her ovary. And her appendix. There was also cancer in her bowel. So the oncologist had to balance stopping the cancer with protecting her unborn child. Rory said that they were relieved that they did not have to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or not. Dr Richard Bambury said that because this type of cancer is very rare, there was a “lack of precedent” for treating a pregnant woman with it.
Through all this, Caroline shone, and not only with lovely pregnancy hormones. It was humbling to watch her.
Aa “lack of precedent”: Dr Richard Bambury
Then there was Kaytlin who had gone in on a hard tackle when she was playing Gaelic football. She got a nasty cut on her forehead. Her mother wanted her to talk to a plastic surgeon. But senior nurse Elaine Houlihan was going to sew her up. There was a good Cork vibe going on here.
“I wouldn’t see you wrong at all, OK?” said Elaine as she got ready with her needle. “Genuine now.”
Kaytlin, who is 22 and very cool, was fine with that. Her injury would not put her off playing both camogie and football.
“I could as easily have fallen off a bar counter,” she said cheerfully.
Joe Walsh, with his wife Mary and their beautiful daughters, had come to CUH to have an aneurysm removed from Joe’s brain. This was truly high-tech medicine, coherently explained by Dr Gerry Wyse. I just wish this had been a bit more of a warts-and-all portrait of our heath system. But the series continues. We’ll just have to wait.