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The National Health Service (1948-2012)

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How the NHS saved my life (in aid of #saveourNHS)

Seven years ago I had a chunk of my brain the size of a strawberry removed from my head. The medical term for what I had is “arteriovenous malformation” or AVM, and it’s basically a clump of veins and arteries which for some reason are missing the right bits of plumbing to join them together properly - namely, some capillaries. In all likelihood I’d been born with it, and could quite easily have fumbled my way through life completely oblivious to this minor physical defect lodged away inside my head. Most people who have them do. Unfortunately though, despite there apparently being an annual 1 in 100 chance of this happening, without any warning whatsoever, one day the AVM that I didn’t know that I had, sprang a major leak (it haemorrhaged), and it nearly killed me. Needless to say, this was not an entirely pleasant experience.

At first my GP misdiagnosed me and sent me home to bed. But when I returned an hour or so later in absolute agony, with kaleidoscope vision, barely able to stand upright, and vomiting with every other step, he sent me to our local hospital where my condition progressively deteriorated. From here on in things are all a bit hazy, but from what I’m told the doctors had two options: a) wade in with the scalpel and try to plug the leak straight away (risky with it in full flow and given its location – I picture loose fire hoses with the water turned on full blast); or b) pump me full of drugs and wait for the bleed to clot and stop of its own accord.

My surgeon went with option B, and although things were touch-and-go for a good while, he was eventually proved right. The bleeding stopped, and I recovered. Three months later, having been advised that with only twenty-odd years under my belt and (hopefully) a long life ahead of me, it’d be worth the risk of surgery, I had the offending bird’s nest of malformed veins and arteries removed. And now I’m completely fine. If ever you have cause to hit me, I’m vulnerable to a left hook (I now have slightly reduced peripheral vision in my right eye), I come with a titanium plate accessory on the inside of my head, and a large upside-down ‘L’-shaped scar on the back of it. But other than that I’m fighting fit and as compos mentis as ever I was before. This is entirely due to the incredible, life-saving treatment and care I received from wonderful people who work for the National Health Service.

Now, what I’ve done there is use my own - far from unique – almost entirely positive experience of using the National Health Service as an emotionally charged hook on which to snag your interest, but also on which to hang the rest of what I want to say which is with regard to David Cameron and his government’s reforms to the NHS.

Lord Owen, the former leader of the Social Democrats, came in for a lot of stick recently for, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, “dragging” a similarly emotionally charged ¬subject (David Cameron’s late son, Ivan) into the protracted debate over the government’s Health and Social Care bill. This was what he said: "David Cameron should remember the words he spoke about the NHS during the election. Most of those who work in the health service were aware of his own late son's illness and felt that when he spoke about the NHS not having any more top down reorganisations, he carried the conviction of someone who had real experience of what the NHS represented in British life." Downing Street called the intervention “tasteless”, the Telegraph went with “gruesome”, while Benedict Brogan branded it “an epic low”.

But if we’re working on a sliding scale of tastefulness, what would you consider worse? A) Repeatedly referencing the care your late son received while standing for elected office on the promise of “no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS”, failing to win a majority at that election, and then introducing the biggest reorganisation of the NHS since its inception; or B) simply pointing that out? Surely if any of those adjectives apply at all (and I can think of others), it is to David Cameron’s conduct in all of this?

Just as I have shoe-horned my experience into this to lend it an emotional weight it would otherwise be lacking (which, given the amount of strange looks imparting this information normally provokes, believe me, I do not do lightly), Cameron has repeatedly alluded to – what, just last week in the House of Commons he described as - the “amazing service” his family has received from the NHS as a means of a) getting elected; and b) now crowbarring this pig’s ear of a bill onto the statute book.

Cameron described the NHS as a "fantastic and precious fact of British life" and made a specific commitment to have "no more costly top-down re-organisations".  This is a FACT.  Last year an OECD thinktank presented an evidence-based report which described the NHS as "one of the best performing healthcare systems in the world" and claimed that these reforms would undermine it.  This is also a FACT.  Just look at the list of professional organisations that are against the reforms: the British Medical Association, the Faculty of Public Health, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, Society and College of Radiographers, the British Dietetic Association, the British and Opthoptic Society, British Association of Prosthetists and Orthotists, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors Association, the British Geriatrics Society, the The Society of Chiroprodists and Podiatrists, the The College of Paramedics, the The British Association of Dramatherapists, the The British Association of Music Therapists, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Radiologists, the The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the British Association of Occupational Therapists, the Institute of Health Care Management... These organisations are full of people who actually work in the NHS - so presumably they know a thing or two about how it works.

Yes, I had my suspicions about Cameron from the start. How he was ever able to square being against “big government” and yet supposedly wholeheartedly for the “enormous, fourth-biggest-employer-in-the-world-behind-the-Chinese-People’s-Liberation-Army-Wal-Mart-and-the-Indian-Railways Government”-National Health Service, is beyond me. But what really grates is the duplicitous and underhand way in which this bill is being forced through, and by politicians who don’t have the mandate to be changing a GP’s paperclip supplier, let alone to be introducing anything anywhere near as radical as this. As Lord Owen remarked at the Save Our NHS rally I attended last Thursday evening, “it is a constitutional outrage that this bill has even been presented.” He's right.

If you find me making reference to David Cameron’s son offensive, that’s up to you, but I find it nothing short of despicable that a politician, who by his own admission has received “amazing service” from the NHS, would then set about dismantling the very same organisation that provided that care. And just as Cameron seems to think his experience renders him bulletproof from criticism, remember - in the most literal of senses - “I’m not all there”, I’ve had part of my brain taken out. But also remember that I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for the National Health Service*.

* If you've stuck with me through that then please consider clicking here and following the instructions to lobby Liberal Democrat MPs and Peers to vote against the Health and Social Care Bill.