Part 4 – Before The Operation

With only limited experience of using the services of the NHS, the next period was a learning curve of parabolic dimensions.

It started well, or so i thought. I very quickly had a pre-op assessment, blood pressure, existing conditions, allergies etc. and was told that this was good for 4 months. Plenty of time.

Then it all went very quiet. 2 months passed, and here i played a card not available to many. My children are both medics, one of whom is a consultant herself. She contacted the consultant urologist and pushed for more information. They discussed the clinical situation and he agreed to up my priority . By now 4 months had passed.

It transpires that a Consultant has no idea of waiting list times, nor any control of them. In hindsight this is perhaps obvious. Theatre time, anaesthetists, operating room staff, recovery beds and so on all have to be available in a coordinated fashion and this is handled by a scheduling team. All the consultant can do is set a priority rating based on clinical judgement, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being the highest. I was clearly not 1 or even 2.

All this i found out after trying to get some information on the waiting time. I called my assigned Nurse Specialist, she couldn’t find out, i called the consultant’s secretary, she couldn’t find out. I wanted 2 pieces of information. 1. How long is the waiting list time.? 2. How much notice would i get before being informed.? Eventually, i found the contact details for the scheduling team and spoke to someone who finally answered question 2. I would get 2 weeks notice. So at least i could organise my life and a holiday. But he couldn’t say when the operation would take place because they only plan one month in advance. So clearly it was not going to be in the next month either.

More waiting. Finally I got a date, 6 months after the joining the waiting list. October 2024. Of course my pre-op assessment was now out of date so i had to do that again.

The day before the operation, i got a call to say the list had been cancelled due to surgeon unavailability.

It was November 5th 2024 before i finally hit the table, 7 months of waiting and 12 months since my psa had started to climb quickly. This had continued to increase and as it turned out, the cancer was out of control.