Sir Michael Palin

Sir Michael Palin

My experiences of the NHS have the common theme of humanity and humour. At the tender age of twenty-four, I had my appendix removed at University College Hospital in London, which subsequently won a special place in our hearts as the birthplace of all our three children.

It was my first experience of life on a ward. I was writing comedy at the time but my three-day stay was a sitcom in itself. The patient next to me was a quiet and courteous man, but the nights were difficult for him. As soon as it was dark and silent he’d cry out in a querulous voice, ‘I’m dying!’ If there was no answer, and there never was first time, he’d repeat it more powerfully.

‘Nurse! I’m dying!’

‘No you’re not, Mr Lygoe,’ the nurse would reply patiently.

‘I am,’ Mr Lygoe insisted.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Yes, I am!’

This would go on until the whole ward was awake, including the man in a bed opposite, who had two very contradictory problems. One was a terrific sense of humour and the other was recently completed surgery on his haemorrhoids. One thing he shouldn’t be doing was laughing and the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else was to laugh. And not just a snigger or a giggle, these were big full-throated belly laughs, each one accompanied with the agonising cry. ‘Oww … Oh my God!’ which would make him laugh even more.

He found everything hilarious. One morning my friend Barry arrived with a plastic bag containing Playboy magazines going back three years.

‘Don’t open those, Michael,’ he called across the ward. ‘You’ll split your stitches!’ This set him off again. ‘Haa! Ha! Oww! Oh my God!’ I turned the pages, licking my lips as I did so, which was cruel.

A chaplain came to visit me. Nice and well-meaning but no match for the priest who bent low over his Catholic patients, offering copious words of comfort, never loud enough to completely mask the sound of Guinness bottles being stowed in the bedside cupboard.

At a table in the middle of the ward, a burly man in a white coat was using a hole-puncher to prepare papers for a file. He was appearing to make what seemed a simple process into an Herculean task, raising his arm high in the air and bringing it down with a force that shook the table.

I asked a passing nurse who he was.

‘Oh, him?’ she replied brightly. ‘He’s the surgeon who took your appendix out.’

My two other experiences both involved my good friend Terry Jones. He was preparing some oysters for one of the wonderful meals he used to turn out, when the knife slipped and dug deep into his hand. We wrapped it up as best we could and I drove him round to King’s College Hospital in my Mini, with Terry’s arm held up vertically through the sun roof.

A&E at King’s was a pretty grim place that day, with all sorts of people in various states of distress, but when they saw two Pythons coming in, one with a bloodied arm sticking straight up in the air, it was as if Christmas had come, and appreciative laughter rolled around the room.

It’s good to be able to raise others’ spirits. When I was in Bart’s recently, recovering from heart surgery, a regular stream of doctors kept coming in to check my stats. I couldn’t believe the attention I was getting. After an hour or so, the staff nurse came in and apologised profusely for the presence of so many doctors.

‘We’ve put a sign on the door now,’ he assured me. ‘You won’t get any more.’ But didn’t putting a sign up to keep doctors out seem a little counter-productive? ‘Oh, they’re not your doctors,’ he explained, ‘they’re just fans.’

A final tribute to the lengths NHS surgeons will go to to accommodate patients’ wishes was at a hospital that had better remain nameless. Terry Jones was having some of his bowel removed and expressed a wish that at some point during the procedure they might take a photo of his bowels. He showed me with enormous pleasure a picture of a little coil of bowel posed neatly on his tummy. Terry thought this was marvellous.

‘You so rarely see your own bowels.’

He showed it to everybody and even considered using it as his new fan photo.

The NHS is basically made up of people looking after other people. Though there is much skill and technical support required in treatment, the most important thing is to see patients not as numbers on a screen but as fellow humans with all the idiosyncrasies that make each one of us different and special.

In my experience, they do this brilliantly.

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