Something from the weekend: a paean of praise for the NHS

Eight recent nights in hospital are nobody's idea of fun but I've emerged with my faith in humanity, and the NHS, bolstered yet again. And there's even a footballer in the tale

This time last week I’d just spent a fifth night in hospital having been admitted on Wednesday 9 July following a seizure. To be more accurate, it was probably a couple of seizures, the first of which - fortuitously? - happened in my GP’s surgery.

I bit a chunk out of my tongue in the process, not that I have any recollection of it. The first I knew was being in an ambulance, one of my favourite t-shirts (‘Barlet for America 98’) drenched in blood.

I don’t know what happened to it. I spent some time on a trolley in a corridor when I got to the hospital but my memory is sketchy. I’m assuming it was incinerated along the way.

Recent events will, I’m sure, come out in the wash, even if the t-shirt won’t. Following an earlier seizure (on 1 May, my first ever to my knowledge), it seemed that one was down to crashed sodium levels, almost certainly due to medication clashes.

Probably last week’s was related, and with tinkering of medication will get resolved.

I’m not unduly worried. I’m going to be giving myself a lifestyle review. I'll make decisions about which work needs to be eased off: something has to give after 18 months of non-stop deadlines.

I’ll burn my candles at both ends less often. And I need to sort out my dodgy back: query herniated disc at L3 if any of you have sage advice having suffered similar.

I really need to get back to walking 50-60 miles a week, every week, as I’ve done for the past decade, and which has been so essential to my physical and mental health.

If you’re waiting for some sport in this piece, then you will get some, albeit a fleeting and heart-warming appearance by a footballer. Mainly though, today’s random ramble is in praise of the NHS after I spent a total of eight largely surreal nights at the RAH Paisley (below), eventually getting discharged on Thursday evening.

Why was I there so long? I think the answer to that probably comes under the heading “an abundance of caution.”

The seizure stuff in and of itself might perhaps have kept me there a night or two but then for reasons that still remain not wholly clear, my bloods went haywire in the first 24 hours and the doctors in charge of my care wanted to try to find out why.

Spoiler: they didn’t really find out, and with no treatment, everything resolved itself.

Nine days and eight nights in hospital gives you a lot of thinking time, and not for the first time I pondered long and hard about the NHS, and its mind-boggling scale. It employs 1.7m people, or the equivalent of 1.5m people full-time, and is by far the biggest employer in the UK, and one of the biggest in the world.

Fill your boots on the stats here. According to the Nuffield Trust, there are only four larger employers in the world: the Indian Ministry of Defence (3m people); the US Dept of Defence (2.9m people); the People’s Liberation Army of China (2.6m people) and Walmart (2.3m people).

For those who like their Sporting Intelligence pieces to have at least sporadic sports references, one of the major Walmart heiresses is Ann Walton Kroenke, whose father, Bud, was the brother of Walmart founder Sam Walton. Ann’s net worth is about $10bn, and she owns the Denver Nuggets of the NBA and Colorado Avalanche of the NHL. Her husband, Stan Kroenke, owns Arsenal of the Premier League and the LA Rams of the NFL among other sports teams and venues. “Silent Stan” was a key figure in a feature about sports tycoons back on SI in 2010.

Anyway, the scale of the NHS fascinates me and the enormity of the task needing to be undertaken to reform it and restructure it is bewildering. As for the people-watching in a hospital … I’m not going to go as far as saying I had an enjoyable time, because it was immensely frustrating feeling well, and being well, and being kept in. But all of human life is in there.

The specific thing that kept me in for more than a week was my blood. First, my CRP went from normal to sky high. CRP measures inflammation which, in turn, in effect, signifies infection, and that could be of many kinds, or none.

The doctors wanted to “grow” some of my blood cultures (multiple, over days each) to make sure there was nothing incubating, like the endocarditis that nearly killed me and destroyed by aortic valve in summer 2022. (It seems I probably had a harmless “contaminant” this time instead, or, to grossly simplify matters, an extremely minor hospital-acquired infection that cleared up by itself).

The other blood problem was my INR, or again to grossly simplify, the thickness of my blood. I have an artificial aortic heart valve, since 2022, which is why I tick like a clock, but that’s another story. My INR needs to be between 2 and 3, ideally 2.5, which means my blood needs to be not too thick (low score, clot risk), or too thin (high score, hemorrhage risk). It’s been absolutely rock steady in range for more than a year but soon after admission this time it went to 5, which was higher than it’s ever been. That needed to be cut down but possibly my blood-thinner (warfarin) was reduced too much so that took time to get right too.

Such are the complexities of health: medicine is a far from exact science, as any doctor will tell you.

One thing among many for which I feel hugely grateful with the NHS is the staff: there wasn’t a single person among the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, catering staff, auxiliaries, cleaners and volunteers who weren’t doing an amazing job. And yes, of course this is just my opinion, but it’s the only one I have.

I have probably interacted with the NHS more than lots of people. Aged four, the NHS saved my life with what was still relatively pioneering heart surgery to patch up a congenital hole in my heart with teflon.

When my late wife was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2016, the standard of care was extraordinary for four and a half years as she massively outlived expectations. If you’ve not heard that story before and prefer to mainline your emotional hit then my daughter Isabel’s video from the time will do the job.

Three years ago, in what was already one of the weirdest summers in memory (Boris Johnson’s demise, the death of the Queen, Liz Truss’s trippy Prime Ministerial reign), the NHS saved my life again.

My late dad was a GP, an old school GP; and I have lots of friends working in medicine, from GPs and nurses to oncologists, cardiologists and anaesthetists. I have a niece who is a doctor working in palliative care, and school friends working in clinical psychology and clinical science in Nottingham. All of them without exception tell me that the NHS infrastructure is creaking.

The pandemic showed that we’re not much more than one major crisis from potential collapse. Social care, with its intimate relationship to the NHS and the way hospitals function, or don’t, is utterly broken.

For most of my time during this recent hospital stay, I was the only patient in my six-bed room in a 28-patient ward who had mobility, ie could actually get out of bed. Half of the battle of getting some people home is whether they have appropriate care at home that won’t mean them coming back in again almost immediately. And yet the show goes on.

Last Tuesday morning I saw something that lifted my spirits significantly, and you can probably gather they weren’t particularly low in any case.

A volunteer came to our ward with “the trolley” - a trolley full of Lucozade, lemonade, water and other drinks, Maltesers and crisps and Starbursts, and newspapers and magazines and … all the things that break the tedium of the day and the terrible food. (Terrible hospital food is a different article altogether. Maybe I should switch my life plan and try to do something about that).

Anyway, this volunteer looked familiar, and it was Steven Thompson, who played 529 league games as a striker for Dundee United, Rangers, Cardiff, Burnley (in the Premier League) and St Mirren, as well as 16 times for Scotland between 2002 and 2004.

Thompson (below) is now a familiar face on BBC Sportscene as a pundit, and, aged 46, is as fit as a butcher’s dog and routinely the butt of jokes about how he can still rock his skinny jeans.

Steven is a Paisley boy and made a good living from football and still coaches the kids at St Mirren but he feels he should give something back to his home town. Which is why, every Tuesday, you can find him pushing his trolley around the corridors of the RAH.

He stopped for a long banter with one of my room-mates, Gus, a former Glasgow cop and biker who is a lifelong St Mirren fan and they chewed the fat about football and life.

And then the trolley rolled on.