Naturally, the first thing I did when I coughed up blood that strange Monday morning two months ago was to tell everyone about it on Twitter.
“Just coughed up blood. Think I might go back to bed,” I tweeted. And it’s lucky I did, really, because that was when people started tweeting me back stuff like, “Doesn’t sound good, mate”, and, “Go and see a doctor”. This may well have been a lifesaver — as was my correspondence with a Twitter user who happened to be a surgeon. “It would be wise to get it checked out,” he advised.
So I did, and to cut a long story short, it turned out that I had a life-threatening condition called a pulmonary embolism. PE (as it’s known) kills thousands of people in Britain each year. It’s a blood clot that usually starts in one of your limbs and then works its way into your lungs, at which point if you’re not treated fairly promptly you die.
Sometimes the symptoms are obvious (shortness of breath; anxiety; racing pulse; coughed-up blood; back or chest pain) and sometimes not at all. Luckily, I experienced the last of them only when I was being examined late that afternoon in hospital — a stitch-like pain of quite biblical intensity in my lower back.
“If 0 is no pain and 10 is passing out, what number are you?” medics often ask. I was on 9½. Women who’ve had PE tell me that the agony makes giving birth feel like a picnic.
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Luckily — as long as they catch you in time — there’s morphine. As much as you like. Until my PE I’d always fancied the idea of trying heroin, so I thought this would be fun. But it wasn’t particularly.
What’s great about morphine is that it takes you to a semi-delirious parallel world where you can tell that the pain is still there but it’s as if it’s happening to someone else. It’s not purely enjoyable, though, in the way, say, ecstasy is. Also it makes you feel fearfully nauseous and bungs you up something rotten. By the end of my four-day stay in hospital I would say the horrors of constipation weren’t far short of the misery caused by my PE, my broken collar bone and my cracked ribs.
Oh yes, those too. You see, the reason for my PE is that a week earlier I had fallen off a horse and busted myself so badly that I needed surgery to pin together my shattered clavicle. My PE — which kicked in about four days later — was a rare consequence of the surgery. (How rare, it’s hard to establish. What I have learnt is that in France, Spain and even Bulgaria hospitals routinely give post-op anti-clotting injections to prevent what happened to me.)
At least one useful thing came from all this pain and misery. It afforded me an opportunity that no journalist would take by choice: to experience at first hand what it’s like to spend several days on an acute ward of an NHS hospital — quite different from what you see on Casualty or Holby City.
My conclusion is that everything you have heard about the NHS, good and bad, is true.
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First the good. The nurses — though it’s a sentimental myth that this is true in every hospital — were an absolute joy. They were a rainbow mix including a Ghanaian, a Pole, a southern Indian and a Zimbabwean, all of whom were caring, friendly and cheerful and gave me my morphine fixes and jabs on time.
I also had huge respect for the equally delightful healthcare assistants (mostly British; a notch down the qualification scale from nurses), who do all the really dirty, thankless work, such as cleaning up the explosive diarrhoea that one of my ward-mates had in the middle of the night.
The consultants were a bit aloof, but you felt you were in very capable hands; the senior house officers could be tetchy, but then they were probably overworked. If you pretend you’re getting all this free (which, of course, you’re not if you pay any tax), then you could count it as excellent value.
Now the bad. It’s all pretty spartan and rudimentary and grim, like going back in time to my days at a 1970s English prep school that we used to call Colditz. Nothing wrong with that: if you’re ill enough to be there, you frankly don’t care, because what matters is that you’re being looked after. But if you were actually paying for this treatment — see tax, above — you’d be appalled.
The near-constant noise and light, the lack of privacy and the — ahem — interesting variety of ward-mates all make a compelling argument for going private. People don’t talk about this for fear of sounding snobbish, but would you want your neighbour to be a Yardie who’d been stabbed in the stomach with a bottle, or an Alzheimer’s patient who spent the whole night chuntering loudly and making escape attempts from his bed, drip still attached? It doesn’t make for a restful recovery.
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The fact is, the NHS is no longer the envy of the world; only, perhaps, of Third World health tourists. In some hospitals — mine was a university teaching hospital, so I was lucky — it’s close to breaking point; in others it’s well past it.
We need to be more honest about this. The system, I now realise, is so frayed and patchy that it’s pot luck whether you make it out in one piece. Be mealy-mouthed and politically correct if you wish. You’ll feel differently when it’s your life or that of a relative on the line.