The author asked that readers check with him before quoting this account. What follows is a retelling of his experience, not medical or policy advice.
A clock that never stops
The author opens with an image: a metronome ticking in the background, set to three beats every 24 hours. Each tick stands for a night-time seizure, a figure he took from a hospital EEG in Spain, which recorded four in one night, and he chose the more cautious number. The count begins on 8 May 2021, the day he flew back to the UK.
Coming home
After landing, he went to the Isle of Wight, where his parents live, to recover. He spent the first ten days in isolation, sleeping through most of it because of exhaustion. Toward the end, he began thinking about how to get treatment at home. His time in the Spanish public system had left him frustrated, and he assumed that returning to a system where he was registered and spoke the language would be simpler. In his telling, it was not.
Finding a doctor
On 18 May he tried to register for temporary care at a local GP surgery near his parents. He explained that he had returned with serious long-term conditions, but because he lived elsewhere in the country and was only staying for a couple of months, he was turned away. Forms to claim temporary emergency care went nowhere, and he was told to sort things out with his regular doctor in London.
He emailed his London practice instead, and this time got a quick and sympathetic response. He described his diagnosis of epilepsy linked to a severe traumatic brain injury, which he said had been set off by Covid, and mentioned that his anti-seizure medication from Spain was running low and not working well. He attached his records. A receptionist phoned urgently and booked him with a GP for two weeks later, explaining that only a GP can refer a patient to a specialist. The author recognised that staff were limited by the system, not unwilling.
The referral
The phone consultation went as he expected. The doctor reviewed the documents, agreed that a neurology referral was needed and arranged it for Kingston Hospital. He also checked that his prescription was renewed. When he later called the neurology department, he was told there was a large backlog but that as an urgent case he might wait five or six weeks.
On 5 July the referral letter came. For a moment it felt like hope, until he read the date: a telephone appointment on Wednesday 3 November 2021. That was seventeen weeks from the letter and, by his count, twenty-four weeks after his first attempt to get care. He described this as a long delay for someone with a serious brain injury, epilepsy and a range of lingering symptoms.
Counting the cost
Using the metronome idea, he multiplied the 169 days between his first contact and the appointment date by three nightly seizures and arrived at about 507. At that point, he and his family decided to pay for private care. He saw a neurologist on 29 July 2021, 82 days after landing in the UK, which on his reckoning was around the 219 mark on the clock.
Not everyone has a safety net
The author acknowledges that he was fortunate. He had a roof over his head, no dependants, and parents able to support him. He pointed out that many people lack that cushion. He cited a figure of 5,975,216 people on the NHS waiting list for non-urgent hospital treatment as of the previous October, and said the forgotten casualties of the pandemic include not only those on the list but also the doctors and nurses expected to clear the backlog.
He ends cautiously, saying he feels the metronome is starting to slow, though it has not stopped.
How the process works in general
In England, most people see a specialist only after a referral from a GP, which is why the author’s early contact with the surgery’s reception staff could not speed things up. A GP reviews the symptoms and records, decides how urgent the case is and sends the referral to a hospital department. That department then schedules appointments from its own waiting list. Because each step has its own queue, a patient can wait for a GP slot, then for the hospital, and the total may be far longer than any single wait suggests.
People who are new to an area, or who are staying somewhere temporarily, sometimes find the registration step confusing. Practices have different policies about temporary patients, and it often helps to ask directly about the options and to keep copies of medical records handy. Others consider paying for a private consultation, as this family did, though the cost puts it out of reach for many.
Why the story resonates
The post is not a clinical study, and it makes no claims about how common these delays are. Its value is as a human account of what a long wait can feel like when symptoms are frequent and frightening. The metronome device makes an abstract waiting list feel concrete, and the author’s thanks to the staff who tried to help shows that his frustration was aimed at the system rather than at individuals.
A note on tone
Although the subject is grim, the writing keeps a dry sense of humour, joking about holiday destinations and bureaucratic forms. That lightness runs through the whole series and helps explain why readers responded to it. The more serious reflections on mental health come in a later post.
Context for readers
Waiting times vary by area, condition and year, and the figures in this post reflect a specific moment during the Covid-19 pandemic. Anyone with seizures or other urgent symptoms should seek help from emergency services or a doctor rather than rely on a blog. You can read how the story began in Part I and what came next in Part III.