Well Ivykaty all I can say is that after 7 months of being fobbed off by his GP we have finally taken my father to a private doctor to see if he can diagniose what is wrong.
My father is 81 years old and speaks poor English, it it obvious that most of his symptoms are being writtien off as old age, depression and anxiety by a very nice and no doubt well qualified but obviously overworked GP.
The fact that my father has never in his life suffered from anxiety or depression and is currently unable to sleep (waking 9+ times a night) or eat seems to have made no impression. His many and increasinglly severe symptoms of dizzyness, breathlessnes and inability to eat or walk have been written off to old age and anxiety etc.
I wouldn't mind if he had at least been offered some sort of psychiatric care for this supposed anxiety disorder.
Instead we have had to watch my father's health deteriorate to an amazing extent with what seems to me absolutely no attempt to find out what is wrong apart from a couple of ECGS.
The ECGs themselves were done by sending my father to A&E and came after a 12 hour wait in one case and a 10 hour wait in another.
Finally in the last two months, my father was referred for a colonoscopy. He waited a month for the test and was told the results would be back in 5 days (by the consultant). 2.5 weeks later the results are still not here and the GP is unable or unwilling to do anything else until the results are through.
We went private in the end in sheer desperation not because we wanted to.
The private doctor we saw suggested we try and chase the results and said ideally we'd wait for those but took some bloods and called the next day with the results also recommended a scan of his stomach etc with a doctor. The scan clinic called the next day and my father was booked in for the test within 2 days.
In an ideal world we would have the colonoscopy results first but tbh we have waited so long to get this far that another 2 months to get the scan results would be impossible to contemplate.
I have never believed in the private health sector either but tbh don't give a f**ng f**k for principles when my fathet is begging me to help him and the GP is unable to come out and all I can offer my father is yet another pointless and frankly very distessing visit (for my father and very frail mother) to A&E