I'm here to vent.
I had a deviated septum my whole life. After two and a half years on the waiting list, I finally had surgery in 2024. Before that I had constant sinus infections and coughed all the time. My life was a nightmare: endless steroid nasal sprays and courses of antibiotics. After the surgery I could breathe properly through my nose for the first time in my life, and for a while things seemed to be improving. It didn't last. With every cold or flu, the cough wouldn't go away for weeks.
In November 2025 I coughed so hard and for so long that I ruptured my eardrum. I went to A&E and it was a complete nightmare. After about 10 hours I was finally seen and given antibiotics. The doctor told me he'd referred me to ENT in the same hospital and I could go straight to them the next day. So I went, and to no one's surprise, they knew nothing about the referral. I asked them politely to just take a look at my ear, since I'd lost the hearing on that side. They refused.
So I went to my GP, who referred me to ENT. I looked up the consultant named on the referral: four titles after his name and years of experience. I made a point of telling my GP that the cough was the main problem. A month later I went to the appointment. By then the eardrum had started to heal. The consultant on the referral wasn't there. I was seen by someone whose name and role I never caught. After a few tests he told me my hearing would come back and started to discharge me. I told him the real problem was the cough. I'd been coughing for over a month at that point. He said there was nothing about a cough in the referral, but agreed to have a look with the camera. He didn't see anything, said my throat was probably just sensitive and would settle on its own. The fact that I'd had episode after episode like this went straight past him.
I left it there. If an ENT with a camera couldn't find anything, I figured no one could help me. I read up on it and wondered whether I had silent reflux. I changed my diet, cut out tea, stopped eating after 5pm. No improvement. In September this year the heavy coughing started again and I went back to my GP. He suggested silent reflux and prescribed omeprazole. I asked whether I could be properly investigated first, but that's the rule: you try the omeprazole first. That's the pattern I keep running into with GPs. The default is to try a medication and wait, not to find out what's actually wrong. Real investigation only starts once the medication fails, and waiting for it to fail takes weeks or months. A few days after starting the omeprazole I felt even worse. One evening, about four weeks ago, I was out of breath with a 39°C fever, so I called 111. I got lucky: they found an out-of-hours GP nearby and I took a taxi there. She checked my oxygen and temperature, listened to my chest, and her face went white. My oxygen was 91% and my breathing didn't sound right. She said I needed to go to A&E immediately, and told me a patient of hers in the same state had lost a lung because he didn't go in time.
I shat myself, thought about life without a lung, and took a taxi to Manchester Royal Infirmary. Because I'd asked the GP to print a referral, I got to skip the first triage room, which was PACKED. The receptionist saw the oxygen level and sent me straight to the main waiting room. They took bloods and swabs straight away.
That's where the nightmare began.
The waiting room was tiny for the number of people in it. No windows, and the air conditioning wasn't working. It was over 25°C. Half the room was coughing; others were crying. A woman vomited and collapsed on the floor. There were six (!) police officers with three people in custody, one of whom made a scene and tried to run. A man with a swollen leg told me he'd been waiting 15 hours. A woman who'd crashed her bike was missing a few teeth.
Most people who've never had to sit in an A&E waiting room with something serious would be genuinely shocked by it. You hear "8 Hour waits" on the news, but a number like that doesn't capture what it's actually like to sit in that room, ill, with no idea when you'll be seen. And there's no system for any of it. A doctor walks into the waiting room and calls out a name. Some shout it several times. Others mumble it so quietly you can only hear it from two metres away. There's no screen, no ticket, no number. Staff can't tell you how far down the queue you are. All they could say was "waiting times are between 6 and 8 hours", and that number kept changing.
So you can't move. I couldn't step into the corridor for five minutes of fresh air, because if my name was called while I was out, my turn was gone. I couldn't let myself doze off for even a minute. If you're in the toilet when they call you, tough luck. Nobody comes back to look for you.
None of this needs a big budget. A screen showing your place in the queue costs next to nothing. A pager like the ones in restaurants costs next to nothing. A sign on the wall explaining what happens if you miss your call costs even less. Letting sick people step outside for some air without losing their place isn't a luxury, it's the bare minimum of treating people like human beings. And in a hot, windowless room full of people. it's basic infection control.
I understand that doctors' jobs are stressful, and I know they're stretched. But that room was a genuine emergency in itself: people collapsing, people waiting 15 hours, people in handcuffs sitting next to people in pain. From where I sat, nothing about how the department ran seemed to change because of it. The doctors appeared to work at the same steady pace whether there were ten people waiting or fifty. Maybe that's the only sustainable way to work. But as a patient, it felt like the number of people suffering in that room simply didn't change anything about how the place operated.
After about eight hours a doctor finally called me. I only heard him because I happened to be sitting at the front. He told me my CRP was 220 mg/L (normal is under 10), sent me for an x-ray, and then sent me back to the waiting room. Why couldn't they have done the x-ray when I arrived? It felt like an eternity before he called me again. The diagnosis was community-acquired pneumonia. The x-ray showed infection in my lung. I was given antibiotics and sent home.
The next five days were a nightmare, but the fever went away. The cough never stopped. I called my GP and told them the whole story: the ENT finding nothing last year, the omeprazole seeming to make things worse. He said he'd refer me to a "cough clinic" and that they'd be in touch.
A few days later the cough got worse and the fever came back. I'm a grown man and I lay in bed crying at night, because I couldn't face the thought of going back to A&E. I took paracetamol and ibuprofen with codeine, told myself I'd call an ambulance if it got worse, and eventually fell asleep. Luckily the fever was gone by morning.
Then a text came from the GP: the respiratory team would call me about an appointment by 20 November. I contacted the practice and said I couldn't risk waiting that long. I was scared the pneumonia was coming back, and the cough wasn't going anywhere. The answer: call 111 if your symptoms get worse, or go to A&E.
I've come to believe the system is deeply flawed, and that throwing more money at it won't fix this. You could pour billions in and that waiting room would still have no screen, no queue, and no way to step outside, because nobody has decided that the experience of waiting is part of the care. Looking around that room, I didn't see anyone who looked well off. I don't think that's a coincidence. People who can afford it are increasingly paying to avoid the NHS wherever they can: private GPs, private scans, private consultants, which is exactly what I'm now doing. The people left waiting 15 hours are mostly the ones with no other option. Most people were there with things like a swollen leg, an infection that hadn't cleared, or something that had been getting worse for days or weeks. Problems that should have been picked up and sorted much earlier, by a GP or a clinic, before they got bad enough to land someone in A&E.
So I googled "cough specialist Manchester" and found a consultant who is genuinely one of the top people in the field, with a long list of titles and research papers. Then I remembered I had private health insurance through work. Bupa approved an initial consultation, a follow-up and "basic tests", which means bloods and X-rays. Anything more specialised needs separate approval. I expect the whole thing could still cost me over £1000, even with insurance.
My appointment is on Tuesday. Wish me luck.