Every time I get into any kind of discussion with Brits and Euros (no longer a single entity, of course) about the relative state of our nations, I get hit with the “at least we have free health care” jibe.
Well, sometimes “free” is better than nothing; and sometimes, it’s a lot, lot worse:
Our 15 hours of hospital hell after my mother’s stroke. We saw patients urinating in the corridor, nurses being slapped and ambulances queuing for hours… the NHS is truly broken.
I had called my mother for a quick catch-up when it became clear that there was a serious problem.
It was about 10.30am, an average Wednesday two and a bit weeks ago, when my usually sparky, chatty, bright and switched-on mum answered the phone in a way that suggested something was terribly wrong.
With a befuddled voice, she told me she wasn’t feeling well. She was confused and couldn’t work out how to open the back door to let the dog out. ‘I’m supposed to be at work,’ she told me, ‘they keep calling. But I can’t understand how to do anything.’
Because I’m paranoid, and because her mother – my grandmother – had died of one 20 years ago, I immediately suspected she was having a stroke.
I remembered the famous F.A.S.T test to recognise the signs – F for facial drooping, A for arm weakness, S for speech problems, T for time being of the essence if you recognise any of these symptoms.
My mum couldn’t tell me about her face, or her arms, but her speech was confused in a way I hadn’t encountered in all my 45 years on the planet, so I immediately told her to stay where she was while I called 999.
The emergency operator told me the call was marked as high priority and that an ambulance would arrive as a matter of urgency. I would soon discover that my definition of terms such as ‘urgency’ and ‘high priority’ were very different to the definitions used by the NHS in 2025.
Read the whole thing, for the full horror.
