A CONVOY man suffering with an intensely painful condition has been told he must wait 25 months for his first consultation appointment at Letterkenny University Hospital.
Damien Sweeney says he doesn’t blame the staff at the orthopedics department at the hospital – just the system.
The 40-year-old told the Irish Sunday Mirror that he struggles to sleep at night, is in almost constant pain and is forced to use a number of strong painkillers, including a morphine patch on a daily basis.
He said: “I get about four hours of broken sleep a night. I can’t do anything basically. Like I say, I’m in pain 24 hours a day.
“I get a few hours at night, and then I usually wake up at about four o’clock in the morning with the pain. The way sciatica works, the sciatic nerve runs down the length of your leg.
“So you’re getting it in the lower back, I get it a lot in my knees, my lower calf and my toes on my left side.
“Walking is even an issue for me. At the minute I have a morphine patch on and I have an opiate based painkiller as well that I’m taking up to eight times a day.
“That’s along with another anti-inflammatory painkiller on top.
“That’s almost ten painkillers a day plus a morphine patch. It’s a low dose morphine patch, but it’s still a morphine derivative.”
He added: “You just can’t really do anything. I can’t even take the dog out for a walk.
“I’m bent over. It’s really bad in the mornings and it’s really bad in the evening times.
“There’s a few hours in the middle of the day, maybe from four until eight, that it doesn’t seem too bad.
“But I think that’s a combination of so many tablets during the day. First thing in the morning, I’m like a man of 70 doubled over.”.
Asked how he felt about the two year waiting time, Mr Sweeney replied: “I just think that’s typical of what Ireland has become, to be quite honest with you.”
He said that he did not blame the staff at Letterkenny Hospital, who he described as “fantastic”, but said they were facing an “impossible” task.
Read more: Almost 30,000 people have been on hospital waiting lists for over six months
He added: “I’ve been on anti-inflammatories for four months and it’s gotten a lot worse over the last month. So I honestly don’t know it’s going to get better.
“It’s obvious if you see me walking that something is wrong. I just don’t know.
“There’s absolutely nothing I can do. I can’t go private and there’s nothing you can do about the waiting lists, so what can you do?”
Hospital spokesman Michael Molloy said he could not discuss individual patient cases.
But he added: “Where patients have concerns, we would ask them to raise these with their medical team or local hopsital management.”
Under the Service Plan 2016 the HSE is aiming for a 95% compliance rate for 15 month waiting times, and say that they are currently at 94% compliance.
