What is a salad?

Today the hospital had NO vegan sandwiches. I was offered a ‘meal’ which was a vegan salad! It had a lot of lettuce, three squashy small tomatoes and some cucumber slices. No dressing. I looked at it in despair and asked for some brown bread and margarine. With this I made a ‘salad sandwich’. The bread was soft and insubstantial - as was the whole ‘meal’. If I was resident in hospital how could I recover with this level of ‘nutrition’?

I had MORE blood tests when I arrived at 9.38. I was told the results would be back in an hour. Then ‘the renal team’ would come and talk to me. They put in a cannula in case the test results showed I needed another drip. But Doctor Renal didn’t appear till 2pm!!! He was very nice to look at but I had real problems understanding his accent. He was Egyptian.

The most needed test result was going to take ‘a few days’ so the cause of my end stage 5 kidney failure’ is still unknown. My diabetes drugs may have contributed, so those had to be stopped immediately. He ordered a new medication and said the hospital pharmacy would supply them. No drip needed so the painful cannula could be taken out. An hour after he said that I went and asked a nurse to remove it. She said the doc hadn’t passed on that information! I had to wait another hour! And two hours in total for the pharmacy to send the medication!

The last straw was that when I phoned the taxi company that I had used on Monday ( a friend drove me in today but couldn’t collect me) they said there was no taxi available for the next hour and a half! The hospital ward clerk phoned a different company for me, but their fixed charge was £60!! I then tried other taxi firms but couldn’t find any who would do it, whatever the price! So I had to pay £60 to get home, in a beat-up Toyota Corolla with very worn seat coverings. And a driver who thought because I had come out of hospital I would want to hear all about his operations!!!

I now have to have more tests but these can be done at my local GP surgery next week.