A Valentine to the NHS

Sorry this is a day late, NHS, I hope you didn’t think I’d forgotten? You have always been there for me, supportive, kind, and with my best interests at heart. I would, quite simply, be lost without you.

A few years ago, my Glasgow neighbour, Doreen, came upstairs to show me the receipt her mum had kept, for the costs of giving birth to her in hospital, in the days before the NHS. We chuckled about whether her mother had had value for money in her little daughter, and quietly marvelled at the everyday, ongoing miracle that is a healthcare system where clinical need is your passport in, and the people you pass in the street every day, they pick up the tab. Willingly, gladly, and as a matter of course.

Like most fortunate and healthy people, I had years and years of never needing a doctor. The only time I saw the inside of a hospital was as a visitor.

Then I gave birth to my first baby, after a 5-hour labour. The midwife stayed beyond the end of her shift to watch Thea come into the world, and to hold my hand as the doctor said, urgently, “Wake up, baby! Come on, wake up!” She did, thank God.

For David, the midwife also stayed on. She became, in those fierce, short hours of pain and terror and excitement, a cross between a best friend, a mother, and a superhero.

In the years of infancy, like most anxious parents, I wanted the doctor, the nurses and every available midwife to actually come and live with us, so as to monitor every sneeze and gurgle for signs of danger.

Our local practice in Glasgow, a busy, busy city surgery, with patients ranging from the seriously affluent middle-classes, to recent immigrants with no English and precious little money, was there for us every time.

Even when I arrived with some health problem so minor it was almost off the scale, they took the time to see me. No matter what. One time I said, “I think I might be wasting your time here.” And the weary young doctor, run off his feet, stopped to say, “I hope so.”

The NHS were there for my Dad, who was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer at the age of 59, yet lived to be 73.

They talked him through all his options, they tried to give him all the treatment he asked for, they marvelled at his longevity.

Towards the end, the doctors at the Hospice took over, re-calibrating his medications, offering comfort. He wrote, in his diary, how the doctor held his hand cupped in hers. How that kindness clung to him for days, like the fragrance of wild, white roses.

The NHS were there when Malcolm broke his leg, when his bike skidded on a slick of diesel in the middle of Sauchiehall Street. When Thea split her chin, running in the playround. When David broke his wrist, falling off a chair. Then, a few years later, when a wheel came spinning at enormous speed off a crashing car on the Beauly Straight, and broke his leg.

The NHS were there when I walked in last year, with a squashy something expanding beneath my ribcage, which turned out to be blood cancer. And ever since. God, not half.

This week, I travelled down to London for blood tests, a chest X-ray and an ECG, at Kings College Hospital, in Denmark Hill.

If you believed the anti-NHS hysteria, you’d expect English hospitals to be like the one in Jacob’s Ladder, a nightmarish place of flickering lights and bloody bandages, peopled by the clinically insane. But no, it is a squeaky clean, busy, expert institution, with nurses and doctors whose to-do lists stretch from here to Neptune and back again, yet never drop a stitch, never mind a patient!

My consultant is German, young, learned, optimistic. She told me, laughing, that I am the only Scottish patient who will have the CAR-T drug Yescarta, as NHS Scotland has opted for the other one, Kymriah. They are equally good, I believe.

My nurse is Irish, and full of energy and knowledge. And joy, actually. She is on top of the whole CAR-T thing, which is gradually, in my head, coming in from the realms of fantasy to the cosy fireside of reality.

I met a patient who was having his CAR-T cells harvested, in the apheresis room. I almost felt like asking for his autograph!

I’ll be doing what he was doing, this time next week. It will, said the nurse, be boring. It will be good if it’s boring. Bring a book, your brother, snacks.

Walking home to Ken’s that afternoon, the sun was out, the daffodils and crocuses were fit to burst, and ambulances and staff came and went. An ancient man walked in, supported by a variety of fragile sticks. A young man walked out, his face split in a grin as wide as a watermelon, holding a tiny baby. Cradle to grave, mate.

Home again, I’m tired, and my tumours are bulking up again, without the cyclophosphamide to restrain them. That’s OK, I think. My treatment has come in time, though it was a bit of a close-run thing. My consultants in Raigmore knew this; that’s why they had me booked into KCH milliseconds after the NHS Scotland funding came through.

See what I mean about the NHS? One of the great loves of my life, all my life. 

Sorry I didn’t get you flowers.