Pain. Pain pain and more pain is my overriding mem...

Pain. Pain pain and more pain is my overriding memory of this place. I would give 1* but the surgeon did do an excellent job of putting me back together and there were a few staff who tried to make things better. It was so bad at one point though that I rang A&E from my hospital bed to get pain relief as I had been calling out and ringing the nurse button, in agony, for 45 minutes before anyone came. They wouldn't even allow you 24 hour supply of paracetamol and ibuprofen in personal possession so what inevitably happened is they give you the last dose at 10:30pm and the morning dose at 8:30am - that's 10 hours between doses, which, when you have had 17 titanium screws and a titanium plate in your leg, is unacceptable. In addition my consultant surgeon said I needed more pain relief, an anesthesiologist noted no physiological response after 30mg of IV oxycodone and said I needed more pain relief as I was showing a tollerance for the medication i was on, then a "pain nurse" cut the dose I was on!!! Additionally I asked to be
switched from oxycodone to morphine which is half as strong and explained when they did this they would need to double the dose to make sure I had the same (still inadequate) pain relief) and was told it would be. When it came they actually halved the quantity rather than doubling it - equivalent to cutting my dose by 75%! Eventually I got them to double my dose but that still represented a 50% drop in dose. In France when I had titanium plates put in my arm I was given diacetylmorphine in my drip which actually worked. I asked for that here but they wouldn't give even immediately post-operatively to kill pain. Nothing has done more to encourage me to get private health insurance than this stay in this hospital. Shameful.