All week I’ve been afflicted by a pernicious bug, which our one remaining resident son brought home at the start of half term from the school where he teaches Spanish.
I won’t describe the symptoms of my condition, because they are far too disgusting. Enough to say that after one near-disastrous venture into town, I’m playing it safe today by writing this from home, within easy dashing distance of the plumbing.
Though our health-fanatic son was over his bout of illness after only a couple of days, I seem at last to have reached the age (I’ll be 71 next month) at which these things are much harder to shake off. It could be that my half-century of enthusiastic smoking and drinking may be starting to catch up with me.
Indeed, after six days of this misery, I’m beginning to fear that if it drags on for much longer, I’ll have to bite the bullet and face the ghastly ordeal of seeking help from the sclerotic NHS (or ‘RNHS’, as politicians of every hue insist on calling it).
We can all guess what that will mean: endless queues, referrals to join other endless queues, pious pep talks about my bad habits and generally being made to feel like a massive inconvenience, rather than the paying customer every taxpayer is.
As for the chances of seeing a doctor I’ve met before – well, I won’t hold my breath.
Young people may not believe me, but there was once a time when contacting the family doctor wasn’t a prospect to fill anyone with dread.
In my childhood and youth, patients could telephone in the morning and make an appointment at the surgery for that very same day, with a GP we actually knew. If we were bed-bound, he or she would make the effort to come round to our homes, at any hour of the day or night.
But for most of us, this is a just fantasy today. In this age of NHS 111 and online consultations, surgeries shut up shop outside office hours, many GPs retire in their 50s and, shockingly, only one in five works full-time – down from an already pretty unimpressive one in three in 2017.
Meanwhile, more than seven million patients languish on waiting lists for hospital treatment, and queues in A&E stretch from here to Timbuktu.
Before I go any further, I must acknowledge that there are a great many shining exceptions to all my gripes about the service. There are still a few hospitals that work efficiently, while many dedicated medics still uphold the finest traditions in every branch of their profession.
I know that readers will have their own NHS heroes but, at the risk of embarrassing him, I’d like to single out Dr Richard Hull, the specialist who took charge of my kidneys at King’s College Hospital, London (I believe he has since moved on).
He was the man my GP sent me to see when I last went to the doctor six or seven years ago, at my wife’s insistence, about a strange rash on my leg.
When I told Dr Hull that his regular Thursday afternoon surgeries clashed with my duties at work, he volunteered to come in early on Thursday mornings, specially to see me. I call that a kindness far beyond the call of duty.
I should also offer an accolade to Dr Carley Hennah, a GP at my local surgery, who correctly identified my strange, kidney-related rash as something called HSP: a rare disorder in adults but one which is, humiliatingly, far more common in children. No self-respecting grown-up wants to be told he has a kiddies’ disease!
The downside was that, inevitably, tests for my kidney trouble brought other problems to light, and I am now made to undergo annual blood tests as a condition of continuing to receive medication.
This year I escaped lightly, having had to give up only two precious afternoons to visit the testing centre (the first sample showed some abnormality and so they asked for another, which was, thankfully, OK).
But the previous year, as I recounted in this space, I was instructed to report immediately to A&E – my first visit since I broke my leg when I was five. Apparently, my blood test revealed a life-threatening level of potassium.
The upshot was that I had to spend seven wretched hours in three separate waiting rooms at King’s, queuing for one test after another – feeling like a complete fraud since, as far as I could tell, nothing whatsoever was wrong with me – before I was finally allowed home with a clean bill of health.
Perhaps you’ll understand, then, why so many men of my generation – and, yes, we tend to be the worst offenders – try to avoid any dealings with the NHS for as long as we possibly can.
Ignoring all invitations to optional routine tests, we just hope that time and a couple of aspirin will work their ancient magic on whatever may happen to be wrong with us. Either that or we wait until our womenfolk can bear our moans of self-pity no longer, marching us to the surgery at the point of a rolling-pin.
As for the answer to how to make the NHS more efficient and less forbidding, you might think that after 14 years to mull over the question in opposition, Labour would have devised some sort of coherent strategy.
Indeed, I had high hopes for our new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who before the election spelt out some uncomfortable truths to the unions about the need for radical reform, unhampered by old-fashioned dogma.
But what has he come up with since he took office? Apart from a couple of gimmicks – such as dishing out free weight-loss jabs and Fitbit-style smart watches – nothing but a ruddy ‘conversation’!
That’s if we don’t count surrendering to striking doctors’ pay demands, for zilch in return, or indulging in tiresome nanny-statery through various plans to make us give up our every last little vice. All for the questionable pleasure of living into extreme old age in puritanical self-denial.
Oh, how much longer can we go on like this, allowing the NHS to keep bankrupting our economy, while politicians cling to the myth that there’s something sacred about funding British healthcare entirely through general taxation?
Doctors are forever telling us that unless more public money is shovelled into the NHS, more and more of them will emigrate to Australia – where medicine is less stressful and more rewarding, since the pay and the health outcomes are both so much better than here in Britain.
Here’s an idea for them: instead of exporting our doctors to Australia, how about campaigning to import something like Australia’s mixed-funding model to Britain?
But I must stop now, before I get on to a few other wizard ideas for making the NHS experience less grim – I happen to have an urgent appointment with the plumbing.