Navy family. Moving every eighteen months. Plymouth now, Faslane before that, Portsmouth before that, and my medical records have never once arrived anywhere at the same time as I have.
Here is what happened and I think it is a story about paperwork rather than about medicine.
In 2019 I had six months of investigations at a hospital in Hampshire. The upshot was a diagnosis of mildly delayed gastric emptying — not severe, not gastroparesis in the full sense, but documented, with a scan and a letter, and I was told at the time to mention it if I was ever offered anything that slows the stomach down.
I mentioned it. At my first appointment here in September I said the words. My prescriber wrote something down, did not have the letter, and said we would keep an eye on it. I assumed that meant she had looked at something. She had not, because it was not there — my records from Hampshire had gone to a surgery in Scotland that I left in 2021.
By week five I was very full, very early, for a very long time. Not nausea exactly. A brick under the ribs from lunchtime until bedtime, and food coming back up hours after I had eaten it, which is a specific and unpleasant thing that I had not had since 2019 and recognised instantly.
What sorted it out: I rang the Hampshire hospital myself, asked for a copy of my own letter, and it arrived in eleven days. I took it in. My prescriber read it, said ah, and everything changed in that appointment — a pause, a referral back to gastroenterology, and a plan we made together instead of one she was guessing at.
So this is a post about getting your own records. Nobody tells you that you can just ring up and ask.
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