🇺🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺Nik Rik nurse 💙

Emergency Care worker NHS. Faith/politics/health/peace/mountains. Med Ed. All views my own. R/t not always endorsements blah blah. 🦅🦉🌲 🌳🌊🌹🐬💙

[🇺🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺Nik Rik nurse 💙 @YearsNurse]

@OldWaysNewEyes @MJRabble_Rouser @25JJJS06 What utter shite

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This really worries me

A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood

But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one

I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x

One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency

Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home

He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E

He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor

As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit

If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't

I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system

This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal

My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption

A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus

It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad

Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention

Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do

https://t.co/RMi7L44fUy

[🇺🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺Nik Rik nurse 💙 @YearsNurse]

@KathrynPorter26 @jj2210 Unfortunately the push & funding for digital improvements means many trusts want this option. Most staff on the ground see e-triage is fraught with issues, unlike ops managers who see it as a solution & just want the funding. I’d rather the £ went to more staff to assess & treat

[🇺🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺Nik Rik nurse 💙 @YearsNurse]

@PaulieBelfast @McAuleyDeclan 😂🤣👏

[Jamie-Lukas Campbell @JamieLukasC]

@yupya12 @PaulGosling1 I am a legal migrant from NY. I was advised to leave my office early last night, to avoid walking home in Belfast alone, and today I was advised not to leave my home + all mtgs cancelled.

Why? Because I am Black. It was never about legal/unlawful immigration (which is falling!).

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

This needs posting everywhere

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

The call for public ownership of the water industry is growing louder everyday.

Why are govt refusing a referendum, why are govt refusing to allow the public to decide?

https://t.co/RIWSwgPl7u

[Tony Diver @Tony_Diver]

New: Steve Reed has just overruled Slough Council to approve the UK's largest data centre site near Heathrow.

The council had initially blocked it because of concerns about the Green Belt, so MHCLG called it in. The site has been designated as critical national infrastructure.

https://t.co/v3reJouyNf

[Danica Priest🦇🦎🦇🦎🍃💚🍃 @DanicaPriest]

This is sick. Remember when Steve Reed campaigned on a platform to save nature and the countryside? Now he is bulldozing local democracy for data centres no one asked for. No one voted for this. We should be protesting in the streets like Albania is.

[🇺🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺Nik Rik nurse 💙 @YearsNurse]

@Paul__Browning_ Gorgeous ♥️

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Reform don’t do the job.

Rob Kenyon, #Makerfield Reform UK candidate was elected a Wigan councillor a month ago. He’s not attended a single meeting or done a single piece of work on it.

Nigel Farage was elected MP for Clacton. He’s spent 2 years anywhere but Clacton.

[Ashley Dalton MP @AshleyDalton_MP]

I spoke at a petition debate brought in the wake of the Assisted Dying Bill debates in the last parliamentary session.

I'm pleased that the state of palliative care is now at the heart of the political agenda. End of life care MUST be better and more accessible for all.

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Reform UK’s #Makerfield candidate Rob Kenyon is being paid £14,822 per year now he’s a Wigan Councillor.

He’s not even turned up to sign in, not attended a council meeting and hasn’t even bothered to post a single thing advocating for his ward.

Voted for Rob Kenyon as councillor? He conned you.

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

You voted against scrapping zero hour contracts.

You voted against banning fire and rehire.

You voted against day one sick pay for workers.

You said the minimum wage was too high for young people.

Reform politicians openly say they don't like trade unions.

You will always put the interests of your offshore crypto billionaire donors ahead of workers.

[Cameron Riecker @riecker]

One soldier came back alive from a suicide mission at Verdun.

He swore St. Thérèse of Lisieux — the Little Flower — stopped the German guns with her hand.

She had been dead for nineteen years.

This is a true story. It comes from a real letter, written by a real soldier, preserved for over a century. The source is at the bottom of this post.

And stay with me to the end. Because the last thing you'll read is a promise Thérèse made on her deathbed — and the men in the trenches watched her keep it.

World War One. The Battle of Verdun.

One of the bloodiest battles in human history. Hundreds of thousands of men fed into the meat grinder.

A French soldier gets an order that sounds like a death sentence.

Ride into the city. Alone. At night. Bring back food for the unit.

The only route ran straight across open road.
Fully exposed. In full view of the German guns.
He got on the bike anyway.

Pedaling around the craters. Weaving through the rubble.

Then the road lit up.
Bullets. Shells. Smoke.

He had one way to describe it later: an ocean of iron and fire.

Men did not survive that road. He knew it. Every soldier at Verdun knew it.

So he screamed four words into the dark.

"Over here, Sister Thérèse!"

Think about who he was calling.

Not a warrior saint. Not St. Michael with his sword.
A young French nun who never left her convent walls.
The gentle "Little Flower" on the holy cards.

Dead since 1897 — before this war was even imaginable.

And then he saw her.
Standing in the middle of the gunfire. Bright. Wrapped in a halo. Bullets tearing the air around her.

He says she lifted her hand.

And every German gun went silent.

Not one more shell. Not one more bullet. Not until he rolled safely into Verdun.

He survived the deadliest stretch of road at Verdun.
And he did what soldiers all over that war were about to do.

He wrote it down. And he mailed it to her convent in Lisieux.

Now here's the part I promised you.
He wasn't the only one.

When the war ended, the Carmel of Lisieux was buried under an avalanche of letters from the trenches.

Hardened men. Officers. Machine gunners. Decorated heroes mailing their medals to a convent.

All swearing the same impossible things.
Thérèse appeared in the sky over the lines.

She took their hand in no man's land.
She knelt beside them under fire.
She stopped the bullets.

The soldiers gave her a battlefield name.

The saint of the Poilus. The patron saint of soldiers.
The world calls her mild. Sweet. A "Little Flower."

The men of World War One knew better.

Because before she died — 24 years old, coughing blood in a convent bed — Thérèse made one promise:

"I will spend my heaven doing good on earth."

She wasn't comforting herself.
She was making a promise.

And nineteen years later, on the worst battlefield in human history, she showed up to carry them out.
The saints are not soft.

And the war didn't end in 1918. You're standing in one right now — for your soul, your marriage, your children.
We're building a brotherhood of Catholic men who train for that fight.

Come stand in the line with us. Link in the first comment.
—
Source: The soldier's letter, dated September 10, 1916, was mailed to the Carmel of Lisieux and is published in "Stronger than Steel: Soldiers of the Great War Write to Thérèse of Lisieux" (Angelico Press, 2021) — real letters from WWI soldiers, preserved by her convent.

[Campaign Against Antisemitism @antisemitism]

“Contaminated with apartheid and Zionism.”

The anti-Israel mob have officially stopped pretending this isn’t about targeting Jews.

Stickers calling to boycott Israeli goods were placed on a box of matzah in Sainsbury’s in Clifton, Bristol. However, the manufacturer – Rakusen’s – is based in Yorkshire.

This is not a product from Israel. This is a British kosher manufacturer, based in the north of England. Any pretence of this being about Israel has dropped.

They simply saw kosher products in a supermarket and decided that it was fair game to vandalise.

In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda used analogies which compared Jews to parasites, in an effort to dehumanise them and to justify the cleansing of German society from what was perceived to be an unhygienic, contaminating threat. Boycotts of Jewish goods and businesses were also an attempt to rid society of Jews. These stickers echo those disturbing ideas.

We understand that the store manager was alerted and that a police investigation is currently underway.

The targeting of Jewish goods, which bear no connection to Israel, in the name of activism only does one thing: it targets Jews.

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Truth for racists

[Obianuju Ekeocha @obianuju]

Heartbreaking news from Mozambique.

Catholic Bishop Osório Citora Afonso has been killed at his residence.

We pray for the repose of his soul, and also pray for the many Christians around the world who continue to face persecution,violence & even death.
https://t.co/Y7xNNiZVYw

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Trump said something outside a press gaggle that I don’t think enough people caught.

A reporter called him out on the corruption. He gave three responses.

1. I have the right to do it.
2. He’s not stealing that much. A billion or two billion dollars. Not that much money. Classic Trump.
3. People don’t care.

That’s the permission structure. Our collective apathy is what they’re using to justify everything happening in Washington right now.

Please stand up and prove him wrong.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Today I raised an urgent question in parliament about the systemic failures in the water sector.

The constants disasters of privatised water are not the symptoms of market failure. This is the market working as designed: profits out, sewage in, cost of living up, security of supply, decimated. You can no more regulate privatised water companies than you can the tide.

So I asked the Minister for Water: how many more failures, how many more inquiries, how many more deaths - before the Government accepts these problems are systemic – and gives the public the option of taking their water back?