The NHS and Me

When my older brother was very young he had to go into hospital to have his tonsils out. It was all the rage back then, as was falling over in the playground and ‘splitting your skull open’. He had done that as well, as it happens, falling off our front wall when he was tiny, and had received two stitches for his trouble. But the tonsils came later. It’s not a procedure you hear much about these days, but back in the early sixties, first sign of any kind of throat infection, your tonsils were the first things to go.

I suppose he didn’t spend more than two or three nights away, but I remember my parents drove out to Ham Green to see him in the old Ford Popular (or whatever that big black behemoth was with the crinkly tan leather seats and the wire-spoked wheels that my dad used to drive, before he traded it up for a gloriously suave sky blue Consul Cortina), and I have a vision of them bending solicitously over his bed in the kind of garish yellow-green mustard-gas light one associated with children’s wards at that time – though I suspect this is more an imagined image than anything I would have actually witnessed because they were always careful to reduce any potential trauma I may have suffered by leaving me in the car, in the carpark, with a new comic and a bottle of Coke.

Luckily I myself have had few serious dealings with the sharp end of the medical profession, but on the few occasions I have, every individual I came into contact with, from receptionists to doctors, cleaners to surgeons, all have been unfailingly kind, supportive, patient and professional. So basically, if anyone has anything bad to say about the NHS they had better make sure they are not in my hearing when they say it, because they would instantly have need of its services, to wit, A&E.

First up was the leg sliced open with the razor blade. Self-inflicted, of course, I didn’t get into that many knife fights as a youngster. Was I five or eight? Something like that. I was sitting in the bathroom one afternoon with my dad’s razor, shaving my legs. So I must have been old enough to have some kind of fluff down there. And I must have been in shorts, so that suggests it was the summer months. I knew Dad used the razor broad-ways on to clear his stubble, but that didn’t seem to be working for me. Maybe I wasn’t pushing hard enough? So at some point I must have taken the blade out of the handle and used it sideways. And I know it sounds stupid now, and counter-intuitive at the very least, but all I can tell you is the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the bathroom door howling, clutching my left leg with both hands just above the knee.

My parents arrived simultaneously, my mother rushing down from upstairs where she had been doing the bedrooms, my father rushing up from the garden where he had been tending the veg, so that means it must have been the weekend since they were both home. The neighbour from two doors down was recruited to drive us into town where I could get stitches (Mum staying behind with my brother, my father obviously not keen on going all that way through traffic with me screaming the place down in the passenger seat), and I still remember I never stopped wailing all the time they were sewing me up. When my brother split his skull open he got two stitches; I got four in this leg. And the two-inch scar is still as livid today as it ever was. The knee itself has obviously grown around it since, so it makes me wonder how big it can have been to start with – logic suggests a lot smaller, though it seemed a pretty big deal at the time. When I applied for my first passport some years later I insisted my father write in the ‘Any distinguishing marks’ section, ‘Two-inch scar, outside, left knee’, but I don’t think he did. Even after all that time, maybe the thought of the incident was not something he wanted to be reminded of.

Then there was my ingrown toenail. This was a bugger and half because it robbed me of my last chance to play football on a Thursday afternoon up at Monks Park playing fields, with all the other duffers. I’d been looking forward to it too; I wasn’t good enough for either the first or second school teams, so there was no danger I’d have my Saturdays hijacked by having to go and risk injury playing against some other school’s bunch of thugs, so I was able to relax and simply enjoy a good kickabout with my mates. Or so I’d hoped. It was the last time I was every going to be really fit, and even now I can still recall that raw scrape in the back of the throat from the cold air rasping in and out after a mazy run down the wing on a cold February afternoon, the wind whistling round my naked calves (I always played with my socks rolled down), and the roar of the Concorde’s engines tuning up as they tested them on Filton airfield just a mile or two up the road from the pitch.

But all that went south the moment this damn big toe started twingeing. Some of the other lads had had ingrown toenails but they’d always been on the wussy side, so you can imagine my outrage at suddenly finding myself among their nerdy number. But the discomfort could not be denied, and while it got me out of the last few weeks of rugby, it certainly wasn’t going to clear itself up in time for the football season after Christmas. The old family doc kept dousing it with powders and stuff but in the end even he admitted defeat and referred me to the specialist at the BRI (Bristol Royal Infirmary) for the snip.

I had this done one afternoon under general anaesthetic, as an out-patient (I think that’s the term; you’re ‘knocked out’ while they operate on you), so didn’t know much about it. But my daughter has since had to undergo the same procedure under local anaesthetic only, so I was able to watch what went on, having gone along to give her moral support. I can only say I’m glad I wasn’t awake when they did that to me.

It takes a while to recover completely, with lots of bathing the affected part in bowls of salty water, but if there was a silver lining, it was that at least I was able to spend those football-less afternoons in the art room or writing short stories instead. It wasn’t a complete quid quo pro, as I could do all the writing and drawing I wanted to do at home, and I would much rather have been running around in the mud and the fresh air. Plus it was during this period that my eyesight started to deteriorate and who’s to say that wouldn’t have happened – or at least maybe not quite so quickly – if I’d spent this period, instead of concentrating on close work, regularly shifting my focus to the far end of the pitch or gauging the speed of an incoming header? (Opticians, by the way – every bit as laudable as the health workers.)

Then in my mid-thirties I got this back thing which meant I had to spend a lot of time in doctors’ rooms taking my shirt off and showing them how far – or more to the point, how little – I could stretch my slowly stiffening spine. There wasn’t much they could do, they told me, just give me anti-inflammatories to stop it hurting, though in time I was even able to discontinue those as the condition seemed to stabilise, or at least not become significantly worse. In fact, I was such a model patient that they asked me once if I would come in and bend over topless for a bunch of students, and answer any questions they might have about my condition. Happy to do it, of course, though this was only a one-off – the lady who recruited me told me my usefulness in that regard was limited because I wasn’t really afflicted enough. I was just as limber (or not) as anyone else my age who took no exercise. So that was all right then, I thought. Or was it? Still trying to work that one out.

The biggie for me came towards the end of the nineties when I suddenly developed this pain in my bowel. Like an idiot, I ignored it for a week, telling myself and my loved ones that it would pass, completely clueless as to what it might be, and not even considering, as far as I can recall, the potential worst case scenario. I knew, for instance, it couldn’t be appendix, it wasn’t in the right area – assuming the appendix was in the area I imagined it to be – while the possibility it might be anything more catastrophic never even crossed my mind. Not even I could be that unlucky, I thought. But eventually, after a week of not eating, when my wife noticed the skin around my eyes was actually starting to turn grey, she insisted we get a second opinion. The doc was on the ball like Pele, I was admitted that night (BRI again) and operated on the next morning. Turned out it was an abscess on the colon and they removed forty centimetres’ worth to make sure they caught it all. I don’t know about you, but I’m absolutely fascinated by anything and everything that comes out of my body. I still have my wisdom teeth, rattling around in an old film capsule in the back of a drawer somewhere, and in the case of my ruined colon I wanted to take it home in a jar, so I could put it on a shelf and sneer at it, the way it had taunted me for a week. But unfortunately they must have thrown it away because I never got to see hide nor hair of it…

At the time I thought an abscess wasn’t so bad. I’d had an abscess on a tooth once, that had been painful but it hadn’t killed me. Denial again, I suppose. But as time goes by, I’ve come to appreciate that that marvellous man at the local surgery had probably saved my life by acting as promptly as he did. He hadn’t spelled out his suspicions, though the surgeon, when he examined me on admittance, did warn me that the worst case scenario would be that I’d end up with a colostomy bag. I do remember the feeling of overwhelming relief when I woke up after the operation and immediately peeked down under the covers to find, thank God, no bag but simply a neat bright strip of crisp white gauze down the centre of my belly.

I was also hooked up to various lines and drips, and the tube they’d inserted down my throat to drain my stomach was to remain in place for the best part of a week. But of course this was a small price to pay if it meant I was still alive and going to get better.

I’d prepared for my period of recuperation with a stock of good books – I had plenty of time to reread, for instance, my favourite John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy – not every afficionado’s favourite by any means, but I like the scale and his command of detail, and what a shame they weren’t able to make that the sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy instead of the stupefyingly dull Smiley’s People with the original Jerry Westerby, Joss Ackland… though I suspect it would have cost a fortune even then, and in any case Mr Ackland might have been busy with Evita in the West End.

But even despite Mr le Carré’s best efforts, it wasn’t all great. I remember being a bit woozy with drugs that first night after the op, and someone in the ward was having a nightmare or a bad reaction or something, so there seemed to be a lot of screaming, and in my semi-conscious state I somehow became convinced we were on the front line in the First World War during a gas attack. Maybe it was the combination of the noise and the subdued lighting and the ghostlike figures of the nurses moving about. Then once I’d got past that, I hated the way my ankles swelled up in the bed socks, which was something to do with my enforced immobility I suppose, but it was alarming at the time and I was glad to see the back of that symptom once I was up and about again.

But that took a while, and at one point I felt I could really do with freshening up a bit. So I asked one of the nurses if she could help me wash my hair, and immediately this wonderful young woman helped me hobble to the washroom and held my tubes out the way as I bent over as best I could to give the old barnet a sluice. I’m as convinced now as I was at the time that that single, simple act of compassion speeded my recovery. I returned to my sick bed feeling revitalised, refreshed, more my old self, ready to face the world again, and I regret to this day not asking that lovely lady’s name. I would probably have put her in a song, or written her into a book.

After that I had a good decade and a half of rude-ish health until the next go. Want to guess? Kidney stones. I found out subsequently that kidney stones are meant to produce some of the worst pain a man can experience, but again, my luck held and I never had a twinge from them. In fact, I’d gone to the doc (different doc this time, we’d moved house) with a different but potentially related complaint, and it was only subsequent tests that indicated I had developed kidney stones as well as the bladder stones that were giving me the actual gyp. The symptoms were miserable – you constantly feel you want to pee but emptying the bladder gives you no relief. It’s as if your internal thermostat or gauge or whatever it is has bust, and as far as it’s concerned, the bladder it controls is always on the point of needing to be emptied. Intellectually, in your mind, you know that cannot be the case, but try telling your bladder that.

I can no longer remember how long it all took or the precise sequence of tests I underwent, but I remember one afternoon being summoned to the Royal United Hospital in Bath to carry out what they called a ‘flow test’, ie, timing how long it took to empty myself. I actually failed that one. Turns out it took me a minute and a half to accomplish what a less afflicted man would have been able to achieve in about twenty seconds. (You know what I’m talking about, ladies. At the time, I thought, surely that’s just the ageing process, but no one was prepared to reassure me.) But at least it wasn’t quite as embarrassing as the poor old chap who was attending the same day as me. His wife was with him in the wating room, and together they were going through this questionnaire he had to fill in. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact he was a bit hard of hearing. “On a scale of one to ten,” she announced in the firm and penetrating voice she’d presumably developed to read him the letters page of the newspaper every morning, “how confident are you of achieving and maintaining an erection? Ten is very confident, and one, no chance whatsoever.” “Maintaining a what?” “An erection, dear. Remember?”

There was a while to wait before the operation that would sort me out for good – not the fault of the NHS, but rather years of Tory underfunding, and then there was Brexit, but don’t even get me started on that – and the effects became embarrassingly apparent to me. Not visually, I don’t mean I was wetting myself or anything, but people in the office must have wondered why I kept going to the lav every ten minutes. Slacking, obviously, or nipping off for a quick fag. (Home working came in just a few years too late to save me from that particular kind of public scrutiny.)

Eventually my lovely surgeon with a Mediterranean name was able to put me right, front and back, in the same operation. Some kind of laser bombardment, I understand, litho-something-that-means-smashing-in-Latin. On the day, I was completely calm, knowing I was in safe hands, and looking forward more than anything to finally being rid of that continual urge to pee which had been with me for what seemed a couple of years by now.

There was the usual prep beforehand, that strange period of nothing between when the needle goes in and you wake up afterwards, all better. (And look what confidence we show in these marvellous wizards, willingly offering ourselves up to them to do with us what they will while we’re unconscious.) “Start counting down from ten,” they say, and you’re so wide awake and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed you think surely ten seconds isn’t going to be long enough, and I can clearly remember reaching at least seven before the next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and looking blearily around for a cup of tea.

The recovery period this time was slightly shorter than the previous one, though I did have to spend a week with a catheter connected to a plastic bag strapped to my lower leg, like Peter O’Toole in Venus (2006). I could have gone in to work, I suppose, but I frankly couldn’t bear the thought of this thing coming loose on the train, or overflowing in the office, so I chickened out and stayed home instead, the better to rejoin the fray fully recovered and unencumbered the following Monday.

I had the catheter removed on the morning of my 60th birthday, as it happens, with my wife by my side (not physically by my side while they were removing it, obviously, that was a strictly private procedure carried out by a trained professional who had been considerate enough to warm her delicate fingers beforehand), and we celebrated with a bun and a coffee in the canteen afterwards (not me and the nurse, of course, me and my wife). And it was only at this point that the truth finally struck me. If the NHS is anything, at its best it is like the best kind of spouse, which is precisely the kind of spouse I was lucky enough to have found – empathetic, supportive, understanding, and offering you always nothing but the gentlest of care and wishing you the best of all outcomes. I owe them much, and daily count my blessings that both of them have always been there when I needed them.