Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry

Unextraordinary

Yes, like any other Briton I have my share of NHS stories. Emergencies, tragi-comedies, disasters and deep trauma feature amongst them. Many will have more dramatic, more eye-watering, more heart-rending, more eye-popping stories to tell than I have. Mine reflect the particular chronic conditions to which I have been subject in mind and body. Nothing too extraordinary. But they are extraordinary if you transplant them. I’ll come to that.

Story one is ugly and unhappy, but I’ll tell it. Aged seventeen, or maybe sixteen and a half, I wake up in a ward in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. My stomach has been pumped. I have taken a wild cocktail of pills in a despairing effort to end my life. A psychiatrist comes and holds my hand and talks to me. I am smiled at, comforted and given time to come to myself. There are lots of other details but I won’t embarrass myself, my family or you by dredging them up. It’s enough to say I was helped and here I still am.

Story two will be familiar to those who, like me, have been laid low by sudden acute episodes of asthma during the course of their lives. They will know that the devil can lash out when you least expect it. For almost all of the year 1988, I house-sat in Islington for the writer Douglas Adams. He was thousands of miles away in the company of the zoologist Mark Carwardine, collecting information on disappearing animal species for their book, Last Chance to See.

One evening I invited my friend Ben Elton round for a bite of supper. Sometime after midnight, he reckoned it was time he was going. I picked up the phone and called for a taxi. While we waited for it to arrive, I went to the kitchen to forage for one last drink. I found two bottles of beer. Chimay, the brand was called, brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium. Very fancy. I poured out two glasses. Cloudy. As soon as the fluid touched my throat I recognised the signs. By the time I had put the glass down I could barely breathe. That’s how quick the reaction can be. My lungs just seemed to completely close down.

In shock, Ben tried to call 999. He didn’t realise that Douglas’s up-to-the-minute house telephone system required the input of an initial 9 for an outside line. So Ben needed to dial 9-999. I didn’t have the breath to tell him. Or to do the dialling myself. Fortunately, just at that moment, Ben’s cab pulled up outside. I dimly remember being dragged along to the front door and pushed into the taxi and the sound of Ben’s urgent voice, rising in panic: ‘The nearest hospital! It’s an emergency!’

The next thing I recall was waking up in a recovery room, oxygen mask on my face, concerned eyes peering down. It had been a close-run thing, it seems. Not much oxygen had been getting through to my brain by the time the taxi had arrived with a squeal of brakes at the main entrance of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Ben had got me onto a wheelchair and run in, yelling for assistance. By the middle of the afternoon of the following day, I was all better and was released with a brand new EpiPen and a snazzy portable nebuliser in case it should happen again. Follow-ups included visits to all kinds of specialists, right up to Professor Malcolm Green, now retired but then head of the National Heart and Lung Institute.

I have, as you probably do, a good many stories like that. Broken ribs, arms, strange eruptions of one kind or another. Spots in front of the eyes, a drop in hearing, a lump here, a limp there. Nothing, as I say, extraordinary, but certainly extraordinary when you transplant them.

When you transplant them, for example, to the USA. I live part of the year in California. Tell American friends how you can arrive at a surgery or hospital in need of attention and walk out having received kindly and professional care without at any point being asked for a credit card number. Explain that at no point are you handed a bill. That at no point do you frantically have to get in touch with an insurance company. Even if, as I always manage to do, you forget your national insurance or NHS number, you are calmly assured that the paperwork will catch up.

On one occasion in America, I was so incensed by the die-hard bloviated twaddle being talked on right-wing radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh’s programme that I called it up. He and his loyal listeners had been railing against the threat of Obama’s ‘socialised medicine’. How ineffective and iniquitous and foolish it was. What an affront to the honest taxpayer. How in Britain people were always complaining about it. The waiting lists. The sick lying on gurneys in corridors. How it made no sense to put your life in the hands of the government.

I phoned in and told Limbaugh that I reckoned if you stopped Britons on the street it would take you a long time to find one who didn’t love, honour, venerate and feel deep pride in our National Health Service. ‘In America you have a “socialised” military after all,’ I said. ‘Taxpayer funded and defending America against the threats of enemies foreign and domestic. Well, we have a medical army defending us against the threat of sickness and disease. Why is one acceptable and the other not?’ Limbaugh said something like, ‘You’re very confused, my friend, very confused indeed …’ before I was cut off. The ‘my friend’ rankled especially.

Well, how other countries choose to look after their sick (or not to) is none of my business. But we in Britain need to remind ourselves from time to time how our individually unextraordinary stories add up to something so highly extraordinary after all. Did we need a pandemic to be reminded?

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