More drama with ’24 Hours in A&E’ this week
We’re back for another 60-minutes of A&E drama this Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 4. This week the episode focuses on a group of women who come into the department needing treatment for a variety of illnesses and trauma.
59-year-old Becky is rushed to St George’s after a suspected stroke. Becky’s husband Ray dialed 999 when he couldn’t get her up off the floor for three hours.
“As soon as the bleep goes off I know that the clock is ticking. Every minute that a stroke goes untreated, the less likely somebody is to have a good outcome,” says stroke registrar Helen. “Unfortunately some people dismiss their symptoms, we see people who’ve been lying on the floor for a very long time, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to swallow. When you’ve got that sort of clinical picture, you really start to worry.”
The medics are concerned that Becky could have had a bleed on the brain and send her for a CT scan, which reveals a large clot on her brain.
Husband Ray talks about first meeting Becky when she was eleven and he was thirteen, falling in love and her passion for life. “We’ve been together so long, we/re never really apart. Wherever I go, Beck will be with me. I don’t know what I’d do without her,” he says.
19-year-old Georgia is brought to A&E by ambulance with suspected spinal injuries. Georgia locked herself out of her flat after going out with friends. She was trying to climb in through a second story window when she lost her balance and fell twenty feet onto concrete, landing on her back.
She’s sent for an urgent CT scan and doctors discover an unstable fracture in her back that could damage her spinal cord permanently, leaving her legs paralysed, if she moves too much. Georgia’s mum Anita talks about her fiery relationship with her daughter. “I went through a bad couple of years with Georgia, when she hit high school, that was it,” says Anita. “Smoking at an early age, bunking school, in trouble with the police. And the older she got, the worse it got.”
Meanwhile 88-year-old Edith has been brought to St George’s after collapsing at home. She’s given medication to lower her blood pressure and doctors want to keep her under observation to try to establish the cause of her collapse and rule out any underlying injuries.
“My mum is the head of the household. She knows how to cook, she knows how to clean, she knows how to organise the kids, she knows everything – she knows how to organise my dad!” says her son Patrick. “Her flesh is weak, but her spirit is as strong as a lion’s.”
