The Addenbrookes Infection

*Other Trusts may apply

We’ve all heard about these deadly viruses that plague our hospitals. MRSA, C- Difficile. They creep into every ward, every bay, lurking unseen, ready to wreak havoc on any patient they come into contact with. Almost impossible to eradicate, once they’re in place, they’re virtually impossible to budge.

The beauty of these “Stories” is they let me share more than the latest “news”. Decades of experience have allowed me to watch whole NHS political programmes or Governments fail or succeed. Medicines be discovered, lauded, then abandoned as unsafe, after all. And entire generations of doctors trained and moved on to become consultants elsewhere.

An unsavoury but very evident part of medicine is its hierarchies. Not just within the medical teams, but between medical conditions and specialities themselves. The more funding a condition gets, or can raise through a sympathetic public, the better your experience of healthcare will be. Cancer wards are the obvious example, with playstations for the boredom and luxurious armchairs, extra Macmillan staff to help you through the pain and fear. Walking from a general medical ward onto one of these wards is like night and day. In most of my hospitals, transport was even arranged so that chemo patients could stay in their own beds at home at night. Something I could often have easily done too, if all healthcare was equal.

Perhaps even harder to hear and accept is that some conditions seem to be at the other end of that spectrum, and I’ve pondered for years over why. If I turned up at A&E as a younger woman, writhing in pain and begging for pain relief, I was almost always labelled a “junkie” or “attention seeker”. Invariably sent home without any of the care or referrals I so desperately needed. But I would see friends or family with maybe heart conditions or a stroke treated immediately and seriously. As we all know from appendicitis, peritonitis - or a ruptured bowel - is a Very Bad Thing Indeed and needs urgent attention, so it never made any sense to me.

I spent the first 18 long years of my treatment at Addenbrookes in Cambridge. At the time, certainly the top teaching hospital in the UK, leading the way in DNA research and the race to map the human genome. Even way back in the early 90s it was “monetarised” or “Trustified” as I might call it now. Even though Trusts didn’t officially exist then. It had a huge, gleaming foyer full of flower shops and cafes - even a burger joint? - long before other hospitals had more than the WRVA and some soggy ham sandwiches.

Addenbrookes set the rules, Addeenbrookes made the discoveries. Addenbrookes trained the “very best” junior doctors or surgeons specifically to go on and become the leading consultants in their field at hospitals all over he country.

When I went there, I was only 21, just a child, really. I went to take part in the famous diet trials of Professor John Hunter and his work is still used in hospitals all around the UK today. He pioneered exclusion diets, liquid feeds and so much more. He’s a brilliant, kind and wonderful man, as is the Doctor he trained to follow him, Dr Stephen Middleton.

But Addenbrookes itself was a cruel and uncaring place. It was toxic from the top down. Packed full of entitled, arrogant “Leaders of their Field” who wouldn’t learn from anyone or listen to anything. I called them “fiefdoms”. If A surgeon at Addenbrookes said a surgery was done a certain way, then that was how its was done. Mostly everywhere. No-one dared question them, they were like Gods, wafting onto the wards, with hoards of students and juniors, barking their orders, barely even acknowledging the patient was there at all. The board were mainly concerned with keeping the massive Trusts and Businesses funding their own research happy, I can’t imagine they thought about the patients much at all.

And over the years I was there it got worse and worse. But I was too young to know anything else. It was like the cold and uncaring hospitals we often saw on our TV screens from the 50s or 60s, so I just supposed it was normal.

But by the early 2010s, I knew better. It was Not Normal and a big part of what I wrote about on my blog. Surgeons were doing and saying outrageous things I knew very well were dangerous by then. Or administering drugs patients clearly wore allergy bands for. It was terrifying. And you can’t have an out of control surgical team without a Pain Team on board.

My God they were cruel! Addenbrookes doctors did not believe you felt pain in your bowel. I know, I’ll say it again, they didn’t believe you felt pain in your bowel. Despite us all writhing around, begging for relief, we could only possibly be addicts. Despite the fact that by then I could tell them precisely where any blockage was and my bowel was at least as painful as any appendicitis, they held onto this “belief” like obsessive lovers.

It’s complicated. I could go into all the details of visceral pain, nerve pain, referred pain, inflammatory pain, obstructive pain. They’re all different and all sent by Satan himself. Yet at the time, Addenbrookes doctors ignored all the weeping internal sores and distended abdomen’s so blocked they could burst at any time. The pain “wasn’t real” and that was that.

We were constantly judged, forever monitored. I always said to my Mum I felt “guilty before being proven innocent”, but I never knew my crime. Now I realise if they didn’t believe it was real, then we could only be making it up, right? We just had to stop malingering, stop wasting our lives not getting better. Bowel disease tends to start young and there is no “cure”. Most Addenbrooks gastroenterologists seemed to take this as an actual personal slight. It seemed to make some of them actually loathe us.

Some patients would come in on very high doses of morphine. Over time you become used to a lower dose, or “dependent” as they called it there. So you need more to give the same effect. The Pain Team at Addenbrookes - aptly named - would set about “reducing” these doses with a view to “getting them off those addictive drugs” entirely. Sometimes they would just stop the meds there and then and I would have to help some poor souls sweat and shiver the weekend away in agonising pain, vomiting alone in withdrawal, because they’d “be over it soon”. If you’ve seen the incredible Netflix series Dopesick with Michael Keaton, about the scandal with Oxy, It won’t surprise you by now to learn that they were heavily of promoting Oxy at Addenbrookes, even though it was a US drug with highly dubious “research” to back its “non-addictive” claims. They ended up causing MORE addiction in their relentless drive to leave us suffering.

Even if I had major surgery, my patient controlled pain pump came down after just 24 hours and I had to manage on just paracetamol. I found out later that this is definitely the most Not Normal thing about all of it and in fact quite terrible to other teams I told around the country.

However much Addenbrookes won’t like anyone writing like this, however much easier it would be to conclude I’m just bitter or vengeful, it’s all true and proven so in the end, by Monitor, after myself and others finally blew the whistle in 2012. NHS regulator intervenes after botched operations at ...The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com › society › nov › nhs-bot...Things got so out of control, operations were routinely so unsafe, Monitor had to stay for 18 months before they felt they could even allow surgeries to go ahead without them present. We are hearing stories like this now up and down the country, from Alder Hey to Chester,

And so for 18 long years, and probably way before that, Addenbrookes trained these misguided doctors to go on to be consultants elsewhere, with their cold learned cruelty and ridiculous “quackery” about pain and their own patients. And over the years, I’d finally be on a perfectly well run and caring bowel ward in another hospital, and one of these doctors would be appointed. They were from the mighty Addenbnrookes, so it would always be at consultant level, primed to rise high and fast.

Slowly, over the following months and years, everything changes. First you notice the doctor themselves. Sometimes I’ve even known them as registrars or junior Drs from years ago. They set the patients ajar, everyone seems upset. The next time you go back, the nurses aren’t quite as focussed on your pain, you start to hear the same old lines about “waiting a bit to see how it goes” or “get some rest, you’re probably just stressed. “

Soon, it’s like being back there, all over again. They rise and they rise, they’re corporate, they save the Trust money - usually at the patient’s expense. Not all of them of course, but my wards were always so highly specialist, I’ve often been on wards with 2 or even 3 doctors or surgeons who were trained in this way.

I’m sure - or at least I hope very much - that things are different today. That Addenbrookes is now the finely run centre of excellence it always claimed to be.

But the point of these stories is to show that often, it was the damage we did years or even decades ago that changes the way we live today. Maybe in 30 more years, we will have wiped this virus out completely, no more consultants or surgeons coming through from those toxic times. But at the moment, we’re just bearing the summer fruits. I fear it will be some time yet.