For years the inhaler you take when you have an asthma attack has been blue. Short of breath? Find the blue one. Off out? Grab the blue one. The preventers were light brown, dark brown, green, orange, white, red – but never ever blue. Until now. Glaxo Wellcome – hardly a small company – has produced a blue preventer. It’s got a big breen sticker on it that says to not use use it as a “reliever” but it’s still blue. How screwed up is this? I’m not the only one that ‘sees’ blue and reaches for it. Blue stands out. Blue is important. I went out with Winston the other day. It was really hot, the air was still and my breathing got worse. I needed the inhaler – and I find myself with a useless medication.
Glaxo have no excuse whatsoever for such a monumental f*ckup. Not one.

There are some very orange pictures of the UK from space which apparently is to show just how hot we are. First , I believe them without pictures. Second, as there is no image of what is normal for this time of year those images are useless. Third, as usual it’s a political motivation behind it.

P needs a scan and an appointment with a surgeon. They were given explicit dates for when we are available. When is her scan appt? In the middle of our holiday. Every day the NHS gets another muppet on the staff.

This is different from J who has now just about lost vision in her left eye. She cannot get an appointment at all. They are refusing to find her any space. That’ll be the another bloody muppet then.

What catastrophic event would it take for the NHS to actually go back to being the NHS? Right now it’s a “If we feel like it and you are cheap and you will never come back health (if you don’t count the free MRSA with every stay) service”. They’ve has pretty much every event from keeping the bodies of the dead through to embezzlement yet Trusts are still the way to go. This is no NHS.
Private clinics only make some people richer. The Tories said Trusts must always run with an annual profit of 6%. Yeah right .. but then we all know this.

Tin lid time. J has been using her electric scooter more. She is still deeply not liking it but she’s seen how it works – because the girls have zoomed around in it – and she has started using it late at night when it’s slightly darker, less people are around so she is less self-conscious. With the girls or me we go to the bridge near us which is easy to reach for her and she gets to see Winston out and about. It’s a nice thing. It stopped working the other night. Batteries were good it just would not work.
Next day she rings the company ‘Aquasoothe’ I think they are. This scooter cost around £1500 in February. It’s sole purpose is to move a disabled person about. And yet they gave J the third degree – where had she been, how had she used it, had she dropped the batteries, had she dismantled the scooter, had it been left outside, had it been misused, could she first try x, y and z and even more. I was listening to the conversation and it sounded like the company were trying to get out of doing a damn thing. In the end they said they would send a box, we put the front part (the mechanical bit) into the box, it will be picked up and they’ll look at it. Box arrives this morning. Half the internal packaging they state is essential and they will not be liable for any damage caused by us not packing it correctly is not there. We ring them. They say it is there. What? In the end they concede. And when will it be back? When it’s mended. When will that be? Err……. we are quite busy right now…. ….. the second part of their name seems inappropriate.