I’ve spent a bizarre three days in hospital, trapped in the system.

It’s Monday morning at 9.15am and it’s busy. I’m sharing a ward room with surgical heart patients. They’re all lovely. Recovering, brave, beautiful, women. There are four consultant types and three nurses in the room. Two trolleys. Lots of talk. Too many cooks. None of the doctors are here to see me.

The weekend was a completely different story. There were no doctors – for hours, literally. I was promised an ultrasound scan on Friday night. It is yet to come and my abdomen pain has, of course, now gone.

I’m young, 30, fit and healthy. I cycle regularly, as fast as I can. I eat a balanced diet and grow my own veggies. I swim, but only when my neighbour is going too and can give me a lift. I walk and bus everywhere. I have a normal temperature, healthy lungs and a healthy blood pressure. I’m up, showered and dressed. No help needed. I’ve had rice crispies for breakfast and a cup of tea.

Why am I here? I woke with severe pains in my abdomen during the early hours of Friday morning. I’ve also had a chesty cough and some diarrhoea. I’ll spare you the details. By Friday evening I was in CDU at the shiny, new, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, just to be cautious. I started my visit in the Clinical Decision Unit hoping for a blood test, something to ease the pain and a suggestion of what it might be. I wasn’t planning on an overnight stay.

I’ve just returned from a work trip to Uganda and this mere fact means without a diagnosis yet, I have to sleep in a hospital bed for a night; ‘Sorry Mrs Baker, we can’t let you go home tonight’. Each day that I ask to be discharged, they say the same. They’re worried about tropical diseases.

I’ve have been waited on hand and foot all weekend by dedicated, friendly nursing staff. Hospital meals, cups of tea, new bed linen, fresh water. It has felt like being in a hotel at times, except that they check your temperature, blood pressure and breathing regularly.

But blink and you’ll miss the doctors.

10.45am Monday morning. At last I have four of my very own doctors in front of me all at once. Now all eyes are on me. So many eyes. I tell them I no longer have any symptoms and please can I go home. They prod and poke me, then conclude I have a clean bill of health. They say I no longer need a scan. Finally, over sixty hours later, the powers that be say that I can go home.

It’s wonderful that our healthcare is free in the UK. I don’t begrudge that at all, especially as millions of people die in developing countries through a terrible lack of medical care or money to pay for treatment. I know we are very privileged to have the NHS. I think the staff work very hard. The new hospital building here is certainly impressive. But from my short observations the NHS needs more doctors throughout the week, better rotas and better communication between departments and shifts to handover patient records and manage decision making and administration more efficiently. Otherwise patients like me get lost in the system for a whole weekend, or longer in some cases.

Another patient could have had my bed instead of me this weekend. The money better spent to help somebody much more ill than I have been.

Now I just need to wait for my discharge letter. I think I’ll be staying for lunch.

Macaroni cheese.

I leave hospital at 2.42pm.