I didn’t have my eye surgery! I got a phone call late yesterday afternoon to inform me that there was no available theatre space and they would have to reschedule. Doh! I am now provisionally booked in for Saturday 9th February,  but I won’t get too excited about it just yet.

Actually, they did me a favour. I mean, yes I am in pain and it will be a very long week. I have to refrain from removing the ingrowing eyelashes myself, and tonight especially I have been itching to grab the tweezers and get plucking. It becomes something of an obsession on occasion, and not a very healthy one at that. Anyway, I will dose up on eye drops and power through.

There is another story of NHS glitches. I am being treated by the Manchester Eye Hospital for a rare genetic eye condition that most doctors have never even heard of. Subsequently, I don’t visit my local GP very often at all. In fact, I wouldn’t recognize my registered doctor if I passed him in the street! Every time I visit the surgery I see a different doctor, or more usually the nurse practitioner. I am not complaining about this, but I had a situation earlier this week.

I have to order repeat prescriptions for eye drops  and have done so for about the last 6 years. I am prescribed 6 boxes of artificial tears that are supposed to last a month. This fluctuates depending on the severity of my condition, and during the last month I managed to use up all 6 boxes within 3 weeks. When I ordered my repeat prescription from the pharmacy I was very unhappy to find that it was not there after a week of waiting.

The pharmacist told me that my doctor had refused to sign it off, because he thought I was ordering it too soon. Obviously he never looked at the correspondence from the Manchester Eye Hospital that is in my patient notes! What upset me more was the fact that nobody phoned or even sent me a letter explaining why my prescription was delayed. I had to trek up to the pharmacy twice before someone could tell me what was happening, and then I had to walk up to the doctors’ surgery and speak to a receptionist. Funnily enough, she got a doctor to sign my prescription within minutes! Job done.

How do we rectify this issue? I don’t want to keep visiting my doctor just to ensure my prescriptions are authorized when I order them. It’s a waste of their time and mine. But I need my doctor to understand the nature of my condition and to at least have some knowledge of his patient. Hmm, I will decide what to do about that issue at a later date.

For now I have more exciting things to attend to. I just received the final proof for my third novel Love Redeems (A Redcliffe Novel). I will now read through it and check for mistakes or errors, and then it can be sent off to the printer. Hooray! And those darn ingrowing eyelashes will just have to behave themselves, not bother me, and I will have them zapped next week. Yeah!

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