The distance is the first thing Declan Keane mentions, before the diagnosis and before the surgery. Two hours each way, and in February that is a day gone.
The other half of the programme was a twenty-minute call every two weeks with the same practitioner. Not a different person each time reading notes. The same person, who remembered.
Eleven years of averages
The fix, when it came, was unglamorous. One dose moved. One meal moved earlier. That was most of it, and it had been available the whole time.
We lose more people to missed follow-up than to the event itself. Not dramatically. Slowly.
Dr. Yusuf Marchetti, cardiology
What she would tell someone else
The review in the spring moved contact from fortnightly to monthly — the first time in three years that the frequency of appointments had gone down rather than up.
“Ask what happens after,” he says. “Everyone tells you about the operation. Nobody tells you the operation is the short part.”
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