This weekend I am giving thanks.
Fourteen years ago whilst I was in hospital getting over a second heart attack and waiting for a double By Pass, I was stable enough for them to give me a weekend at home in order to celebrate my 54th birthday. Funnily enough the weather was beautiful that year as it is now.
I never imagined for an instant that I’d still be alive for my 68th.
To celebrate we’re going on a picnic tomorrow [one day early] in Windsor Great Park, and I’ve cooked/am cooking all the food because it’s good to be alive and because I’m here and fit enough to do it. :)
So thank you NHS. And I mourn your passing….
Di, if your birthday is this weekend, then snap. My hope is that Cameron has made himself so deeply unpopular that he will be swept out in time for Labour to reverse the damage he has done to the NHS. Or that once people really start to feel it, they will then sweep him out of office.
And that we will all still be hearing about it from you fourteen years from now!
Happy Birthday!
Di, & bluth, if it both your birthdays this weekend, then snap too!
My mother is a kidney transplant patient, and I was a very premature, very sickly baby. We both owe either our lives, or at least the financial stability my parents have had to the provision of the NHS.
No single thing about my country makes me prouder, no other politicians come close to the degree of respect I have for the Liberal and Labour folk who prepared the ground for and implemented the first NHS bill, nothing is guaranteed to get me as fulminatingly angry as contemplating what the current bill is likely to do to it. I can only hope as you do, Bluth.
And a happy birthday to you both!
Oh goody, a threefer.
Happy Birthday all.
I’m a fan of picnics, Di, so that sounds like the perfect plan to me. Just perfect.
Yes. I owe my life to the NHS too. I was once seriously ill, and for two weeks they flew in an experimental antibiotic from Sweden every night; and every night it was transported by ambulance with a police escort from the airport 60 miles away. I didn’t know — I was unconscious most of the time — until I’d recovered weeks later that every night the ambulance crew and the cops that brought it had come to my bed and taken it in turns to hold my hand for a while hoping I would.
Even the Swedish pilot — it was flown over by private jet — asked how I was doing every night, they said afterwards. (I think the cost of each injection — they had to do two within 12 hours of it leaving the lab in Sweden, hence the plane, it left at midnight every night — was £200; I never did work out what the cost was, but it must have been horrendous. More than I’d ever earned in a year up to then I suspect.)
(I was very amused later, because the surgeon who was trying to fix it — it was a very rare disease of the liver — told me he’d had to call in a pediatrician to do the surgery necessary because he suddenly realised when he opened me up on the operating table I was too small and his hands were too big! I think I might be one of a very few 30-year-olds to have been operated on by a children’s surgeon . . .Who said later he was a bit worried, because he’d never had to do that kind of surgery before. But I did leave with quite a neat tidy scar, even though it didn’t turn out to be quite as unnoticeable as the pediatrician had hoped. His colleague really admired his minute stitching. So did I, actually, when I was recovered enough to look at it. Squirrel’s embroidery as a nurse was definitely not in the same league. . . But Squirrel turned out [literallly!] to be thin-skinned, so it still shows . . .)
Please the gods it stays that way, despite the LibTory bastards. Now I’m a crippled squirrel the NHS is still keeping me going: already longer than I would have expected just two or three years ago. It’s hard to explain, but the confidence they give you that they’ll do their damnedest whatever your circumstances or whoever you are, or whatever it costs, is worth a hell of a lot.
The point is, I think, it gives you just an extra bit of courage and determination to keep going when otherwise life would become insupportable, mentally, physically, or financially.
Thanks for all the good wishes.
Fancy three of us all having birthdays about now:) Congrats Bluthner, and Sibusisidan.
We are having the most fantastic weather and this year my birthday on the 28th, would have been on Whit Monday itself which is a national day off. Great I thought, this will be the first time in years the weather’s been nice enough to want to sit outside. Then my son informed me they’ve cancelled our day off on Monday and are carrying it over to next weekend which is the Queens Jubilee! No way was I going to wait until next week. It’s sure to rain!
Lacking a flagpole, I have hung a Union Jack out of the window just to show willing.
Squirrel: Yes, we do have much to be thankful for. I worry that the NHS has so been taken for granted that many people simply don’t appreciate just how important peace of mind is when there is a medical emergency.
My mother who was born in 1921, had some horror stories about what it was like if you were ill and poor before the NHS was introduced.
Those hot, dozy days in late August are a pretty popular time to make a baby, I guess
All the best, Di.
I enjoy life too. In fact, I am more content than ever.
I am a cancer survivor but was treated in the US. Still terrific. I am so grateful to my wonderful oncologist Bonnie. And to the great immune system I inherited.
Di:
Meant to ask, didn’t quite know where, though. Hope you enjoyed your birthday picnic?