The Day of Stupid

Package from a friend yesterday; I bought two of her home solutions and she popped in a third because she's lovely. First two are to be drunk very dilute, third to be taken externally. If only I had read the label before drinking it! I did dilute it in water, but still the moment I tasted the geranium sweetness and the oil washed down my throat, I realised that possibly I had done a foolish thing. Phoned 111, they went nuts and told me to get to the nearest A&E, probably the Urgent Care unit, because apparently some essential oils are toxic, so off I went.

Wow.

The first thing I realised is how desperate the situation would have been for people in this area had Lewisham hospital been closed as the last government planned. The Queen Elizabeth can barely cope as it is. The next obvious conclusion was that I had come to Bedlam.

There are 3 receptionists in A&E, and you must register with them before you go through to Urgent Care which is not quite the same as A&E, though no-one seems to quite know the difference... but there's no sign telling you this until you get to Urgent Care which is when you do see the instructions telling you to go back and register with A&E, so back you go to the receptionists, who have a sign asking you to bear with them because they are using a new computer system.

You register, you sit down until the 'Streaming' nurse calls you, and you discuss your symptoms with her and she decides what to do with you. She decided that if I wasn't suffering already, chances were that I was fine but she would send me to one of the urgent care GPs just to check me vitals. Back to Urgent Care I went. Cue the doctor staring at the bottle I had brought with me, saying, and I quote, 'I know nothing about this stuff.' She checked my stomach, pulse, etc, including my blood pressure which she did very roughly indeed.

'You are hurting me.' I told her, my sense of humour beginning to fade.
She shrugged. 'It will be tight,' she said.
'I have had my blood pressure taken many times,' I said, feeling said pressure begin to rise. 'It doesn't usually hurt. You're hurting me.'

She took it off. 'You're normal,' she told me, always nice to hear. Clearly I passed the ability-to-say-Ow-when-hurt test. 'But I can't tell you anything, I have no way of checking these.' She pointed at the listed ingredients. 'I can't help you.' I stared at her. 'Then why did they send me to you?' I asked.

'I don't know,' was her reply. 'Back there they have a leaflet about this stuff. I think you need to check this out with an A&E doctor.' She then took me back to the receptionists, waved some paper at them, told me to sit down and disappeared. I waited for a long time. Another 'Streaming' nurse called me in, and I explained what had happened. The first nurse joined us.

'I can't believe she's sent her back to us...' she said to her colleague. I told them both that it had been so long I was clearly all right, so I might as well go.

'Well, it is unresolved,' said the second nurse. 'You see, we have a toxins database and we can check these oils against that, only we can't. Only the doctors can access it.'
A little detective work revealed that the Urgent Care doctors could not access it either- indeed, my Urgent Care doctor was clearly unaware of its existence - the A&E doctors were the only ones able to do so.

'The good news is,' said the second nurse, 'that you are back in the queue in your original place, so you've probably got about an hour to wait.' At this point waiting time was three and a half hours. I waited for an hour and a half, checked with the receptionists who told me that I was one of the next, and it was just a matter of when a doctor 'clicked' my case, but they couldn't tell how long it was going to be. I went to the loo, accidentally broke a cord on the front of my favourite trousers and decided that enough was enough. Then I went home, disgusted with the day.

But the good news is that I am alive this morning, so it can't have been that bad. Must just remember not to drink massage oils in future...