My Heartfelt Defence of the Wonderful NHS, Exactly Six Years After My Major Illness

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Exactly six years ago, my life changed drastically when I was hospitalised, for 12 days, as doctors with the NHS tried — and eventually succeeded — in working out how to save a number of my toes, which, over the preceding months, had gone black and were causing me truly extraordinary pain. It is also important because, as I prepared to admit myself to hospital, at noon on March 18, 2011, I smoked the last cigarette in 29 years of enthusiastic addiction, a move that counts as one of the single most important things I have ever done on my life. As a chain-smoker of roll-ups, I was, very genuinely, killing myself by the time of my illness, and I am thankful that I not only carried on living, but also recovered my lung capacity, and began singing again (I come from a long line of singers, stretching back as far as my family’s memory reaches).

As for my illness, at the start of the year, I had first noticed what appeared to be a painful bruise on the big toe of my right foot, although I had no recollection of hitting it on anything to cause such a bruise. I then made a visit to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo (for the first time on the anniversary of the prison’s opening), where I was in pain but still able to function, and, at the end of the month, I visited Poland for a week, to show a Polish-subtitled version of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the film I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash, where the pain grew much more severe.

On my return to the UK, my big toe was turning back, and was soon joined by my middle toe, and yet I was failed by both GPs and doctors at my local hospital, who didn’t understand the severity of what was happening to me. For the entire month before I was finally hospitalised, at my wife’s instance, when I was finally given morphine, the only effective painkiller for truly severe pain, I suffered the most horrible sleep deprivation, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, as every time I managed to fall asleep the pain would wake me up just minutes later. Just once, I managed to get locum doctors to give me two painkillers stronger than over the counter medications, and on the first occasion I actually got one good night’s sleep, but by the time I took the second its strength was insufficient to combat the ever-growing pain.

Throughout this time, when I continued working (you can find my obsessive writing here), it was also not lost on me how ironic it was for someone who had spent five years researching and writing about prisoners of the “war on terror” being subjected to sleep deprivation, amongst other forms of torture, to end up suffering sleep deprivation because of what turned out to be a rare blood disease — Essential thrombocythaemia (ET), if that’s of interest.

This was not immediately apparent when I was first hospitalised, on March 18, 2011, although doctors had ascertained that what had turned my toes black was a blood clot. After a few days, however, my wife worked out that the hospital didn’t seem to be capable of addressing my needs, and insisted that I be moved to St. Thomas’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament, where I spent the next ten days, and where doctors successfully worked out how to save my toes, eventually pumping me full of what felt like cement, for five hours a day for five days. That last session was extraordinarily painful, despite the ever-present morphine, but the treatment, designed to open up my arteries to allow the flow of blood to resume unimpeded, was ultimately successful. I have since been treated by wonderful doctors at St. Thomas’s partner hospital, St. Guy’s, by London Bridge, and also have my blood monitored on a regular basis at Lewisham Hospital.

Throughout the period I was hospitalised, I also continued writing, as the staff allowed me to find a corner of an office with wi-fi reception, where I hammered away day and night, on the articles you can find in the list I linked to previously, numbered from 102 to 109. They include my reflections on my illness, Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom, and my report about the huge anti-austerity march that I watched from my hospital room, entitled, On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State, the first great protest against the particularly true and inept Tory governments that we’ve been plagued by since May 2010.

It may be something of an exaggeration to say that I owe the NHS my life, rather than just my toes, but it doesn’t feel like it — and I can categorically say that both my wife and my son would not be alive without the swift Caesarian and acute post-natal care offered by the NHS at the time of his birth (in 1999, at King’s College Hospital, in Camberwell, in a department that, unfortunately, was later given the PFI treatment).

As with all serious treatment performed by the NHS, I — and my wife in 1999 — benefited from a system paid for by general taxation, rather than being burdened for years, decades, or for life with repaying the costs of a private medical system, or being mired in the profiteering that seems to be the hallmark of insurance-based systems (when they’re not, one way or another, signing death warrants for those who can’t pay).

Essentially, with the exception of the old and the poor, the NHS is funded by taxpayers, and works as the first and purest insurance systems always did, with everyone chipping in to ensure that, whoever gets ill, everyone is covered. It is a huge, huge relief to know that, when you’re extremely ill, no one will ask you for money either on arrival or departure from a hospital, and no one will be hunting you down afterwards, and there is, quite simply, no excuse for not maintaining this system and funding it adequately.

Since my illness, however, the Tories, with the unacceptable connivance of senior NHS managers, have been strangling the NHS, insisting on cuts that threaten the NHS’s very survival, secure in the knowledge that their 2011 reforms have already paved the way for ever-increasing privatisation. I have no doubt whatsoever that their ultimate aim, if they can get away with it, is to replace the NHS with a bloated insurance-based system like the US, in which senior medical professionals and the insurance companies make insane amounts of money, but the financial burden on individuals is much higher, and those who are not well-off live in constant fear of getting ill, and the costs that entails, particularly those who simply cannot afford insurance.

The answer is to get rid of this vile government, audit the NHS properly and ask the British people to pay more in taxes to fund it. That is clearly required, as this LSE report from January 2016 demonstrated (and see the graph above), revealing that, “For most of the period between 1980 and 2013, the UK spent a lower proportion of its GDP on health care than any other country.”

This is not to say that the NHS was failing, however. Despite shock stories about failing hospitals and the cost of health tourism, and despite unprincipled attacks on doctors by the wretched health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, detailed comparison and analysis of all the west’s health systems, conducted in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a US-based foundation, found that, as the Independent described it, British healthcare was “rated top out of 11 western countries, with [the] US coming last” (and also see the graph to the left), although the current crisis, inflicted by the government, must surely mean that position is at risk.

So today, as I celebrate being alive — and my 2,192 days without smoking! — I leave you with just one message: please, please, please do all you can to support the NHS! If the Tories destroy it, you will miss it more than you could ever know, unless, like me and my family, you have ever experienced its care first-hand at times of great need.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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