Archive for June 10th, 2008
10
Yet again I can only say that I am disappointed with the NHS. Rita and her family are part of our extended family, my father and her husband have a business together and have socialised for the past 50 odd years together in a big crowd of friends. Rita died two days ago from chemo treatment for pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, although Rita had been ill for several years the NHS did not manage to diagnose this cancer until very recently and therefore, by the time they did she was already too weak to withstand the punishing poison that is chemo.This is the second person in my dad’s ‘crowd’ of friends to die from cancer this year alone. Yet again cancer was not discovered until it was far too late to successfully fight against it. Why is it so hard for us to ‘test’ properly and discover cancer in the early stages so that we can cure it? The system is fine once we discover it, but is really poor at diagnosing it quickly. As a quick diagnosis for cancer is the key to successfully combatting it in most cases the fact that there are government calls for people who do not accept their GP’s advice when they suggest they only have something minor when in actual fact it may be something much more serious go private for the diagnosis to be penalised and not be able to then return to the NHS system for follow up treatment is ludicrous. If we could rely on the NHS machine to diagnose properly and quickly nobody would need to go private but unfortunately, the evidence I have seen is this is currently just not the case.