Backwards In High Heels

Sunday Night Laugh 23 October 2011

Go forth into the week knowing nothing is impossible as demonstrated here by the Mighty Boosh boys and a four, yes four, way crimp

Sunday Night Laugh 16 October 2011

Strive forth into next week with joy in your heart - tonight provided by the late, great Dave Allen

You, Me and The NHS

I decided I wouldn't write about serious stuff on this blog but oh dear, I started a little Twitter kerfuffle today. Some people were upset that in my 140 characters, perhaps not the best place to try and condense a thought (learn Rebecca, learn) tI said that one of the greatest drains on the NHS today is us - you, me, our society which has developed an often unhealthy lifestyle, greedy and we then expect someone to make everything better....for free. Perhaps I should try and explain or as it is also known 'dig myself in deeper' so you can agree, disagree, think I am a tit or post a comment asking for more cat related posts.

Now the NHS is big tweeting today because of the House of Lords debate on the Health and Social Care bill. Now to make it blatantly clear my thoughts here have nothing to do with that debate. The running of the NHS is a separate debate which I am not touching with a barge pole or a surgical scalpel. Don't even raise it. My point was more about our relationship with the NHS and our affect on it, rather than the funding/running debate

It is perhaps unsurprising that given my last 18 months when the NHS saved my life after serious illness that I adore it. I strongly believe in a free and robust health service (how that is achieved again is a different debate I am not touching on, I will not warn you again).

As I look around us I can't help but feel the NHS is often over stretched and often taken for granted. For many of us it has been there all our lives. We have come to expect it, it is a given in our lives. When we have a chest infection, break our limbs after pretending to be Superman at age 36 or are struck by some cruel illness ,we have the blessing of a health service at our disposal. We moan, sometimes rightly, that the service does not run smoothly, that we have to wait but at  basically we are a bloody lucky lot.

I remember speaking to a friend who is a doctor and worked for some time in Africa in substandard conditions were people would walk for over a day to get treatment and then thank her profusely. This is why I lost my rag in one of my many waiting room days last year when someone moaned for all to hear that her appointment was 15 minutes ago and she paid her taxes blah blah blah. I could pay my taxes from now till 3011 and probably wouldn't pay in what was spent on me!

But, I can't help but think we do have to sit up and realise what we are asking of this great institution. No-one asks to be ill. No-one deserves to be ill. There is no illness top trumps. I don't want to send people on a guilt trip or chastise those who, like myself, need that health care at this moment for WHATEVER reason but ,I do think we need to accept that as a society with our lifestyles, our knowledge and our ambition for health care we ask a lot of the NHS.

We need to realise that aspects of our lifestyle come with consequences which may lead us to needing help in the future - again not a chastisement, and I appreciate that may be hard to believe if you feel it is picking at you or a loved one. It is not personal. In fact, I am pretty damn sure I will be in that boat one day myself at this rate. Perhaps this post is as much a message to myself as anything.

We are a society at the moment with significant rises for certain types of lifestyle related illnesses. Proper, real links not just the crap the Daily Mail spouts to scare you about coffee. It would be wonderful if we could all have the willpower/support/knowledge to deal with that ourselves, some will and some won't. A side effect of my treatment is a not too light extra 6 stone of weight - well better to be fat and alive than skinny and dead I think! But as I write this post, consuming my xth (I dare not admit the number) biscuit of the day, I know full well I am doing myself no favours and I either buck up or find myself trotting to the doctors with a form of diabetes 

Oh but bucking up is so much easy said than done. So no I never feel disgruntled about a penny of my taxes going to the NHS, a true investment in my future.  An NHS which treats, prevents and educates. I have many a smoker friend who only half jest that all that fag tax will be going straight to their doctors! And they will deserve that treatment if and when needed, and I will support them with badly thought out jokes and not once go 'ha-ha you're a smoker' because I trust they won't go 'ha ha your a fat pig, it's 40 years later stop blaming that treatment in 2010'. I don't imagine they are sat puffing away thinking 'ah well, I'll get cancer but the NHS will sort me out' but they'll be bloody shocked if they do get to that point and it isn't there any more, or it's having to be selective. I cannot stress enough this isn't apportioning blame or guilt, just let's really know what we are up against, shore up the NHS (funding debate elsewhere people, elsewhere) and you know, perhaps make some personal changes on the way that would help. Oh come on, we aren't that thick, we know we are living a good life on the whole and what do good lives mean? Gallstones.

Channel 4's popular Medi-tainment show Embarrassing Bodies was keen to point out this year that 10% of the NHS budget is spent on treating diabetes and the majority of those cases are lifestyle related and can be reversed with lifestyle changes. That's a barrel I can stare down and it's something I can have a bloody good go at avoiding. And damn I am lucky it's something I maybe able to nip in the bud, other illnesses I have can't be and neither can those of friends and loved ones.

Also, we ask a lot of this service because of our own knowledge and ambition. Research, expectations and new medical advances often move faster than the services can keep up. But we want that. We want the advances, our lives are made richer by them. 60-70 years ago my illness would have killed me (and that may come as a great disappointment) but now it is curable - I say hurrah! Before children just didn't come along but now you may be able to have IVF. We are a wonderful, inventive, caring set of creatures when we put our mind to it and that is reflective in our health care service on the whole.

But we and I don't mean you personally, or your nan, I mean we as in terms of society are a little guilty of taking the NHS for granted, you know until some entertainer on Twitter says the government is going to burn down all the hospitals and replace them with gentlemen's clubs and everyone goes a bit loony and the name calling starts. You know, those days. Then it's a chorus of OUR NHS. But sadly it isn't a tune everyone sings. People miss appointments and some of them will just shrug their shoulders, missed appointment big deal. That costs the NHS over £600 million a year for a start. You have no idea how much this annoys me. I bet no-one who walks 24 hours to see a doctor ever missed their appointment because they forgot or didn't feel they needed it anymore and it doesn't matter if you don't let people know because ' it will be a nice break for the doctor'. You pop in to the doctors without thinking twice about it, it's another one of those services that you don't usually thank until you REALLY need it. Everytime you cross the threshold of an NHS service you should thank your lucky stars and think 'wow this is brilliant'.

I'm not saying if we all live perfect lives and jog each day the NHS will  be cured (sic) with money to spare to spend on sugar free lollipops. (And what have I told you about discussing funding and running it - not here!) But you know what? It wouldn't harm if we bucked ourselves up a bit.

The NHS. Be thankful for it. Respect it. Perhaps consider giving it a helping hand on the way. And how you want to fund and run it - piss off and debate that somewhere else, but not Twitter - it's all Dale Farm now