awnyah todaysay

A modern society grows out of  words: ‘compassion for our fellow man’

To see each individual as unique is a chance for the human spirit, the morality of a nation to shine.

To treat each other badly is a retrograde step and anyone who shows contempt for those least fortunate, most vulnerable and easily attacked is a person who lacks an ability to care enough or even at all.

In attacking anyone who is not as ‘big as yourself’ so to speak, is to behave like a bully.

All bullies go for the jugular of those who they feel they can attack easily, and such bullies are weak, lacking spine to do the same to those who would cut them down to size they go for the weaker, or smaller fry.  

History has this fact well sussed.

When it comes to our doctors being bullies, I think Ireland takes the biscuit.

No one becomes ill purposely, and no one benefits from being ill.

No one fakes illness unless they have a serious mental illness and that Is incredibly rare.

But Women are deemed to have this more than most and male doctors appear to judge any woman from being on this spectrum.

my belief is firmly rooted in the source of a male hating a woman.

I believe too that such professional bullying is corrosive to best practise and a male's distaste for treating female patients, who they have a contempt second to none.

When I became ill with crohn's disease in the early days, i met this phenonomen first, I was made to be psychiatrically assessed before I was treated.  This could even be at a time when the psychiatrist was on holidays, I still did not get attended to before she came back.

I have had doctors say to me ‘you don’t have parkinson's, you just want it' ,yet a decade later I am on parkinson's medication.

Also another one claimed ‘I am going to prove nothing is wrong with you and do tests to prove it.’

Only yesterday after about my third visit to a male doctor at my surgery I had a waving angry man cry out, ‘hey how many doctors are you going to, I am not referring you to any more doctors.’

You wouldn’t think that I had a multi-systemic progressive neuromuscular disease process and that the doctors I do attend I need.

Given that I have absolutely NONE at present its important that I go to those that actually will help me after disasters in Ireland second to none.

You never get better at facing such ignorance but I rounded upon him with my own type anger towards the male doctor species.  ‘you are not telling me who I will not be seeing, I am attending that doctor.  You wont have to refer me I have already been referred and he, did more for me than any Irish doctor who left me for dead years ago.  If it wasn’t for him I would be still rotting in my flat as I was.

This doctor I have to explain is in the UK, he was the first I saw who treated me exceptionally well. i am travelling through the 'cross border directive.'

He was and remains wonderful.

No Irish consultant ever responds to emails, this one responds to them all and has actively encouraged me to return to him for the help I need.  He knows how badly I am faring here and has insisted i return to Queens square London to see the Prof. of Neurology there.

He said to me that I had arrived at him in a ‘mess’ in 2008.  At a time when the Irish wouldn’t even do one single test, he diagnosed me quickly with mixed connective tissue disease and sjogrens syndrome.

Given I have not seen a consultant for this condition in two years and I am deteriorating, would you wonder I want to leg it across the Irish sea. No Irish male of any profession is going to stop me access medical care.

I have never been diagnosed with any disease here In Ireland apart from my hypothyroidism and my crohn's disease, which I think the Irish can just about handle.

What they failed to look at was my neuromuscular disease.

Even though we have geneticists here in Ireland,no one ever referred me.

No one has done a thing.

So once I got to the named doctor above, they then discovered I had a muscle myopathy and the path was set for a host of issues that accumulated alarmingly and to the present day, Ireland doesn’t care a toss and is doing nothing to assist me at all.

Finally I have a diagnosis of sorts, but a bit of a way to go yet, I wont depend on Ireland to go that extra mile with me either and I anticipate a fight second to none to get that help I do need.

I have a neuromuscular disease which is considered very rare.

I need tests to determine why the muscles are dying.

Only recently two phone calls to the UK consultants, gave me hope.  One at a centre of excellence  and (I remind Ireland we are far from creating any centre of excellence for any diseases in Ireland yet, that can be recognized by the EU as one), said do not give up trying to find the cause of the muscle wasting disease.

I wont.

Another doctor in Ireland on hearing of my case,which many have, said the Irish doctors have a difference of opinion on how to treat us twins.

I bet they do as I have already heard about it.

A tad bit of palliative care and that’s it.

But the UK doctors are very different.

They name the tests we should have and name the therapies we should be having.

It is now ten years since the therapies that were required for me were ever clinically advised.

Ten years on we have not had these implemented.

Nor have I had at least four different tests advised done,  for a complex postural issue at night time plaguing me during sleep and causing severe distress of a physical kind.

Many doctors in the uk and some here too say I need tests to determine what is going on and have their ideas, but nothing is being done.

This could have resulted in one stroke thus far when I got ignored by the Irish consultants, I found out I had a stroke in 2013 and was never told.  How did I discover this, on my FOI files.

I can make judgements too.

I judge that the Irish consultants will never treat their patients as partners in their own care and treatment but will bully them to a pulp and say he will do no more and down tools when he is in his pesky childish, arrogant mood.

And all this comes with a link to whether you are a private patient or public.

It will happen if you are public,and possibly never if you are a private patient.

The difference is utterly stark so it is.

I hate the way the men of the Irish medical confraternity are continuing to get away with such harassment of women at a time when they are at their most vulnerable – when they are sick.

Do you think there is a way to get them to behave better?

All ideas accepted.

I for one think they should be a way to name and shame them.