I’m limping along, but the NHS is down on its knees

ON Monday morning I woke up and discovered that I could not walk. This was a disappointment but not a total surprise. Crawling (almost literally) off to bed on Sunday, I had hoped a night’s sleep would be ample recovery time for a calf muscle shredded on a squash court that evening. It was merely ample to put my left leg completely out of the game.

Luckily I could still reach my phone. But who to call? My family and loved ones were all many miles away. My friends would be on their way to work or looking after babies who, in fairness, cannot walk either. My neighbours? We haven’t met.

There was, soberingly, no easy phone call to anyone to say ‘Please come and get me. I can’t walk. I need to go to hospital ’.

My options were three. One – make a difficult phone call instead. Beg, cajole, emit agonised wails until I prevailed. Two – ring NHS Patient Transport Services, explain the situation and ask if they would consider fetching me. Three – the martyr option. You want something done? Do it yourself. Crawl outside on all threes, hail a cab from the gutter, have the world assume you were knee-capped by your drug dealer.

Option two appealed. I am not a regular drain on NHS resources. My last visit to Accident and Emergency was in 2001 and I have put not inconsiderable sums their way in income tax. Now, in my hour of need, they would be happy to assist a diligent contributor, no?

‘No, it’s not something we’d do,’ said the man on the phone. It was gratifying to learn, however, that I did have the right to submit an appeal. He also suggested that, if I called A&E and laid it on thick enough, A&E might order them to rescue me.

Martyrdom

That sounded somewhat mercenary. Unhappy as my predicament was, I had little reason for confidence that my case for free transport to Glasgow Royal Infirmary was the strongest on their books that morning.

Perhaps I was being selfish, allowing temporary incapacity to obscure the desperate circumstances of those in permanent pain who may genuinely have no one in their lives to take them to hospital.

Martyrdom it was, then. I hopped outside and set a course for a cash machine about 100 yards away. Someone leaving in a car from Stirling would have been in with a reasonable chance of beating me to the keypad.

Fistful of tenners finally withdrawn, I called a cab to the hospital, telling them they couldn’t miss me. I was the one propped up against a bin outside Tesco Express.

‘Please drop me as near to the door as you possibly can,’ I said to the driver when I fell into his vehicle. ‘No problem, pal. I’ll help you to the desk if you like.’

Nice chap, but I didn’t think that would be necessary. One look at the wretched soul at the A&E entrance and medics would appear from everywhere, rushing up with wheelchairs and crutches and trolley beds with those bags of fluid they hold above you to denote that it’s serious.

Just make it to the door, soldier, I figured, and the NHS would sweep me into its arms, clasp me to its bosom and make me well.

Such were the fevered fantasies of a romantic with calf pain. The reality was no one batted an eyelid as I made my tortuous progress to the back of the queue – least of all those behind the toughened glass dealing with the people at the front.

‘You think you have problems?’ the entire A&E waiting room seemed to say. ‘Look around.’ I did. For almost two hours. I watched a woman faint as she rose from her seat after she was called through to a medical room. A wheelchair did arrive – eventually.

I saw elderly patients whose mobility was even worse than mine and would be for much longer. They had come by taxi too.

There were faces ravaged by alcoholism, bodies enfeebled by substance abuse – and, I guessed, domestic abuse as well.

And there was something in the uninvolved tone of staff members that suggested this was a quiet day, that they had seen it far, far worse but that, nevertheless, their defences were up. Staring out all day at a room full of misadventure, I suppose, makes you that way.

This is not an attack on the NHS. The nurse who saw me was excellent – goodhumoured, reassuring and knowledgeable – and, as I thanked her, I felt guilty for casting a journalist’s eye over the service’s shortcomings.

People are trying their best in often the most trying circumstances.

Indulgence

But, then again, perhaps we should worry for the wellbeing of a service whose infrequent users are left reproaching themselves for expecting too much.

Can it be healthy that we wind up wondering whether our hour of need was, in the scheme of things, really something of an indulgence?

At the root of the guilt, after all, is the fact that our free at the point of delivery service is already at breaking point and we have just added to its problems.

I hobbled out and hailed a taxi, only for a spry old gent with a dirty white beard to grab the door before me.

It was a very Glasgow moment. He wasn’t stealing it. He was helping me in.