Thanks pmm, I really appreciate your kindness 🙂
Here in Au, I’ve been asking for a social worker to help for the last 6 years - haven’t seen one just yet; I think it takes a wait of around 10 years? If longer? Some people I’ve met in hospital haven’t seen one in over 15 years. We all joke that the system doesn’t actually have any, and they’re just billing for them to line the department pockets using patients as numbers because they don’t actually have to cut us up to show they’ve seen us (unlike a doc or nurse, who are taking samples or performing surgeries as evidence they exist albeit with long waiting periods) 😉
Hopefully this different haematologist will actually help me not continue to progress in CKD and place me on the trial register for interventions for MGRS/SMM 🙂
In terms of it being a big hospital that is also a teaching facility, I’ve experienced some life threatening events due to critical mistakes, which have been laughed off (in my face) as jokes or ‘mishaps’, including inadvertently suffocating me when the anaesthetic team forgot to switch on the ventilator when I was in surgery almost ending my life, dropping me on the floor causing injury, and extubating me too soon causing more significant lack of oxygen and resultant waking up with patches of very red irritated skin on my chest with significant abrasions in my airway (not the worst that’s happened, and when this happened I was late 30’s, so fragility of health was not a factor). So I think the lack of social worker support delivered isn’t a high priority in these hospitals. I think they have spent all their budget on their legal department instead 😉