Dog's vomit and the apprentice radiologist

Warning: This is a thinly disguised whinge. If you do not want to read a medical whinge, leave now. Go on, click! There are many better things to read. You have been warned.

Oh good, you are at least a little bit interested.

Dammit, though, I didn't want to be blogging entry after tedious entry on my even more tedious health. But bits of Bruce happen and my current misgivings with the medical service, any medical service, need to go on public record. I have grown from a child who always trusted that adults knew best, into an adult who realises that, no, actually, we don't.

It's not just that, in Britain, my shoulder complaint was seen simply as an emergency procedure, with little or no follow-up. It's not just that there seems to be so little understanding of the anxiety that goes with recurrent dislocation. (And I mean real anxiety, like lying in bed worrying that you might fall out.) No, this time around, two small incidents have crystallised my suspicion that, actually, things are in complete chaos.

I thought I was treated relatively well in the emergency room in Helsinki. The whole thing took hours, of course. And to be left lying on a trolley in a corridor like that is what you expect these days. But when, later that week, I presented myself at my own doctor's surgery with the handwritten instructions from the trauma unit, I did not expect his reaction: "This is the specialist university hospital. Why have they given you this dog's vomit?"

Presumably the question was rhetorical. Sometimes I have difficulty telling. But my worthy, retirement-age Finnish doctor then proceeded to lecture me on my rights as a tax-paying European citizen in Finland. The scrawled note from the small hours of the morning and the lack of official records were, apparently, enough to convince him that I'd been treated as a shabby foreigner and chucked out onto the street.

Next up, my MRI scan results. Again, I was happy. I trusted. I believed what the radiologist's report said. And then I spoke to my specialist. With images of my shoulders on his computer screen, he was straight on the phone to the head of radiology. After a few minutes' conversation, he turned back to me: "The radiologist who wrote the report is new here. I think they will have some discussion." The report was, apparently, missing a crucial observation. In fact, it was missing an observation that was the main reason for my having the scan in the first place. An observation that means that I have now, after all these years, finally been recommended to surgery.

So here we are again. More doctors' appointments, more therapists. Time to gather the fragments of remaining trust in the system and decide how best to be sent to cutting, as a literal translation from Finnish would so happily have it.