we want you to bring someone to your hospital appointment

Consider one of the hospital treatments they can do just in a day visit, without needing any cutting operation or inpatienthood. How it's a weight off our minds, a welcomed good, that space agey technologies, with lasers or sound or microsurgeries, save us trouble.

So, the appointment letter comes. Ever so casually, just by the way, it says: bring someone to acc ompany you home, in case you need the stronger painkiller, because under its effects you can't get home alone.

How the bloody'ell is a spectrumite supposed to arrange that? Many folks who are not autistic would have trouble arranging that, too, so I make the point for them too. For autistics it this request is in obvious conflict with our condition.

You are not going to know the work hour patterns followed by every friend + acquaintance. This is not only for single folks: if you have a partner or offspring who are working or away at the needed time, you are in exactly the same position. A conversationally afflicted spectrumite can't work up the brazenness, first to tell everyone in turn about a physical health condition, which is against privacy too, then to request sacrifice of hours out of that person's own time, for them to sit around in a hospital while you get your treatment.

It's a sharp practice for the NHS to ask folks to achieve something so impractical. It's practical common sense, that if the stronger painkilker will impair for a day your ability to get home, they should keep you in hospital for one night. Or at minimum, take you home in an ambulance. Surely the obvious reason for not wanting to do that, is the pressure from CUTS.

So they try to wing it by asking you for the most they hope you might be able to sort tor yourself.

So with phoning as an autistic difficulty too, you phone them about this. They say you can still come in and we will see how we get on - let's welcome that they have to say that rather than abandon the treatment. But when you are there, they say that because you are alone they can't give the stronger painkiller, so they are more limited in what level they can do the treatment at. Which leaves more question over whether it will work effectively. Clearly the wrong way to organise it. Not equality for us.

Maurice Frank
18 Jan 2020