Should i take my grandmother to the gp or hospital or just leave her in bed i have no idea what to do.

[Anothernightofnosleep]

My grandmother has been living with us fir a few weeks - she was in hospital a week but has been home a while now. Since coming here she has improved - she is eating, not being sick and smiling.

BUT she is still saying she is in a lot of pain in her back/side and is extremely tired - refusing to get out of bed. She can just about walk down the hallway to the toilet by putting her arms around me but thats is.

She had loads of tests at the hospital and tbh they couldnt find much wrong with her - she is amazingly healthy. They called yesterday to say that the ct scan she had showed a cyst in her pancreas which they were asking an expert to look at but they may decide it needs no treatment.

the thing is she is still crying seriously complaining about back/side pain and is basically bed ridden - as i say despite being told she us medically healthy.

I am sure that being in bed 24 hours a day is not a good plan i managed to get her to a living room chair yesterday for 2 hours but she was saying she was in pain and tired and begged to go back to bed after 2 hours.

we are waiting for a registration appointment at the gp but they said use the walk in clinic there for any problems or a and e if needed.

The thing is though if theres nothing showing up as wrong with her i dont feel like theres a reason to bother them again! They will see she has perfect heart rate and blood pressure and send her home with paracetamol again!

social services assessments were not that much help tbh we have a toilet frame now but that isnt helping withe the pain. They just told her to move regularly so she doesnt get bed sores.

what the heck do i do tomorrow?!
do we just leave her in bed or should we take her back to a doctor about the pain?

GP home visits are not a thing of the past. I have had home visits.

I know they're not really, @rattymol I think we're just bitter as we couldn't get an appointment of any sort for my grandmother last week and we ended up using 999 as we simply had nowhere else to turn. She's very unwell now and in a medical ward in the hospital, and so we are extremely grateful for the paramedics who came within a couple of hours, following two triage calls.

Can you push for GP to do a visit to her in your home? Something cannot be right if she is in so much agony. Bless her. I hope they are able to help her with some kind of pain management if they are saying she’s otherwise healthy.

Unfortunately, there will be an underlying cause for this pain and frailty, it just hasn't been identified yet because doctors are often lethargic about diagnosis and prefer to treat symptoms instead, particularly in the elderly.

Your gm needs a proper assessment, in hospital, by people who can actually be bothered to address the root cause. The medical profession are fond of minimising concerns and fobbing people off, even more so if they're female.

Please get her seen ASAP. My mum wasn't seen as much as she should have been, just had codeine thrown at her and considered highly anxious. She died last week of previously undiagnosed colon cancer. The signs were there before. This is going to be investigated and already has a clinical incident logged.

Please don't allow her to be fobbed off because she's elderly.

What does your Grandmother want? Does she want to go back into hospital or would she prefer to stay at home if her pain can be controlled. This sounds like a perfect referral for an urgent care response team who can involve other teams such as the frailty team and OTs. I refer to them frequently in similar circumstances.