A gut feeling

Having envisioned a fairly uneventful interlude between holidays in Crete and Sark, with nothing more stressful than a round of bill-paying, house cleaning and gardening, with a little catching up with friends to enliven my days, I was caught by surprise by a friend's suden illness. I have been commuting between her house and mine, trying to co-ordinate 2 households as well as communicating with her by text message to hear of her latest diagnosis/prognosis for our holiday plans, only days away.
After the hospital has run through three or four suggested diagnoses, we wait for the blood, X-ray and scan results. After the completion of these, she is finally permitted to eat again; it has been 29 hours since she had anything to eat or drink, although she was on a drip. They did eventually give her a nicotine patch to cope with her nicotine cravings.
Nearly all the information my friend was given by the hospital staff, or that given to concerned friends of hers who rang up, proved to be untrue. Fotunately, although her condition is probably chronic, it is treatable and with better diet management she will probably be relatively uninconvenienced by it.
However, it is a solemn wake-up call for those of us near twinned in age. It doesn't bode well for any future stays in hospital, as I suppose are almost inevitable as we age. The hospital system here seems to be more interested in running itself as an efficient institution, rather than patient care per se. Toward this end they ignore any gaps in treatment or good communication with patient or family as intruding on their organisation - - in other words, patients actually get in the way.
She should be out of there tomorrow and it can hardly come soon enough for all of us.