Jack Whitehall

Jack Whitehall

I’d never been to a children’s ward before, let alone a children’s cancer ward, so didn’t really know what to expect when I embarked on my first visit to the Oak Centre for Children and Young People at The Royal Marsden Hospital. It was Christmas week 2017 and I was visiting to meet the patients and bring some seasonal cheer.

One of them was a young boy called George, who had just finished his twelve months of treatment (fourteen rounds of chemo, thirty rounds of proton therapy, surgery to remove part of his spine, three muscles and his L3 nerve from his back) for a very rare form of cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. I was fully prepared to be faced with a child at death’s door, bed-ridden, semi-conscious and haunted, with doctors talking in hushed whispers and maybe his parents weeping in the corner. So I was shocked to arrive at his ward and find an empty bed. I feared the worst; maybe he’d been rushed in for more emergency surgery, or worse still …

‘Where’s George?’ I asked the nurse, bracing myself.

‘He’s playing football in the corridor with his brother,’ she replied very casually. ‘I think they need a goalie.’

I went out to find them both charging around the corridor, dodging nurses as they showed off their skills with the football.

‘You’re late, get in goal please!’ yelled George at me, not wanting some grip and grin with a random comedian he’d never heard of to get in the way of his football match.

Well, you can’t say no to a child recovering from cancer. His little bald head, the NG feeding tube coming out of his nose and his sallow complexion belied the bundle of energy bouncing in front of me. I took my position between the posts – well, when I say the posts, I mean the door frame that had been repurposed as their goal. A small crowd of parents, nurses and assorted hospital personnel had now gathered.

George stood over the ball and sized up his options. I mentally weighed up mine. I remember thinking, whatever you do, DON’T save this penalty. If you don’t let him score, you are going straight to hell.

He’d barely started his run-up when I fully committed to the dive, lying prostrate on the floor, waving my limbs around in the air for a good five seconds, ushering him to roll the ball into the gaping space I’d left for him. Unfortunately, George shanked his kick directly into one of my flailing legs. An awkward moment ensued, as the onlookers tried to comprehend what had just happened. Did he really just save a five-year-old cancer patient’s penalty?

‘Encroachment!’ I announced authoritatively, pointing at a random doctor who was walking through the ward just at that moment. ‘The defender was in the box before the penalty was taken. You’ll have to take it again, George.’

His older brother whispered words of encouragement into his ear as he positioned for the retake. The second time I stayed rooted to the spot and George creamed it into the top left corner. The crowd erupted into joyous whoops and applause, relief for everyone. Other than the poor sod who’d have to fix the cracked glass in the door.

One year later, I was back to visit The Royal Marsden and see George again. Thanks to the amazing doctors and nurses he’d made incredible progress, but was still very much in the teeth of his recovery journey. That said, the change in him was amazing, both mentally and physically. A year ago, during the penalty shoot-out, he’d looked like a mini Zinedine Zidane. Now he had a full mop of hair. What hadn’t changed was his inability to stay still for a minute. Upon my arrival this time, his mum Vicki – a fundraising colossus who, together with dad Woody and big brother Alex, was in the process of raising £1,000,000 through their George and the Giant Pledge Campaign to help beat childhood cancer – handed me a Nerf gun.

‘They’re waiting for you in the courtyard. Good luck,’ she said, as I headed out to meet my fate. I felt like a young private being sent over the top of the trenches. I walked into the empty courtyard.

‘George?’ I called. No response. ‘Alex?’ Silence. They must have got bored of waiting.

I turned around, to be faced with them springing out from behind a bin where they had been lying in wait. It was an ambush! They unleashed a vicious battery of foam bullets, straight at me. I tried to retaliate, only to discover my gun wasn’t loaded. I’d been stitched up, I never stood a chance! I got a right royal pasting as their laughter rang out around the battle scene.

These two experiences and several others that I have shared with some of the extraordinary patients whose paths I have crossed on my visits there have helped shape my understanding of The Royal Marsden and probably all NHS children’s cancer wards like it. Places which, on paper, should be the most depressing places to visit on earth, but are actually full of not just bravery, courage and tales of extraordinary resilience in the face of terrifying adversity, but also of hope, compassion, love, care, positivity and – most unexpectedly of all – laughter. That’s down to both the attitude of the patients and the phenomenal and dedicated NHS staff, who are committed to not only giving those kids the best chance of beating their illnesses, but doing so in an environment where they can still be children. Where they can play, laugh and not let cancer take over their entire lives and define who they are.

Personally, I have been very lucky to swerve any hospital activity, apart from one minor event that meant I wound up in the A&E department of Kingston Hospital, and I have a scar on my knee to prove it. It’s one of those scars that over the years I’ve attached all manner of fictitious stories to.

‘How did you get that scar, Jack?’ people ask. And my response varies between, ‘It was in a street fight,’ or ‘Skiing down a black run too fast.’

The truth is far less impressive. The reality is that I went to pet a dog, which barked at me, whereupon I ran away shrieking with fear, attempted to jump up onto a wall, tripped and cut open my knee on the sharp edge of the coping stone on the top. When I recount this story I like to elucidate that the dog was a massive bloodhound with an enormous jaw, razor-sharp fangs and a demonic, terrifying bark. My mother, however, will always point out that actually it was a small, cute but yappy, terrier puppy. But I think the gin must have corroded her memory; I’m sticking with my version that this mutt looked like the Hound of Hades. What we can agree on with certainty, is the fact that I was sliced open right down to bone, sinew and tendons and needed prompt hospital attention. And also the date, 1 July 1998.

I remember this date so specifically as it just so happened that my first ever trip to A&E coincided with England playing Argentina in the knock-out stages of World Cup ’98. I recall sitting, blood still oozing from my knee, thinking, please don’t call my name out, as I sat watching the television that was playing the match, albeit muted, bolted high up on the wall in the corner of the waiting room. I had to be one of the only people in A&E that day, or come to think of it, any other day, desperate for MORE waiting time.

As the game plunged into extra time I was called through to the waiting doctor in the treatment cubicle. After a quick discussion and some hasty rearrangement of the furniture, the doctor manoeuvred me into a position where he was able to do his work, returning the contents of my knee to their rightful positions and stitching me up, and I was able to do mine, gazing over his shoulder and watching the denouement of this epic encounter play out on the waiting-room television. So intent on the game was I, the doctor observed when he had finished, that he needn’t have bothered with any local anaesthetic. To be honest, I was so engrossed that I reckon he could have whipped out one of my kidneys and I wouldn’t have noticed!

At half-time of extra time, as he put the finishing touches to my dressing, I remember remarking to my mum how unlucky all the poor doctors and nurses were that they had to work during the game. To a ten-year-old boy there could be no greater example of the sacrifices that NHS staff on the front line have to make on a daily basis.

‘You’ve certainly drawn the short straw today,’ said my mum to him jovially.

‘Trust me, nothing I could see on an A&E ward could be more traumatic than watching England at a World Cup,’ he replied. Oh, how pessimistic adults can be, I remember thinking.

Twenty minutes later, I understood what he meant. For a young boy with a pretty messy injury, I’d entered A&E in a relatively calm state. Several hours later, I left balling my eyes out, having just seen David Batty hit a penalty that was on a par with George’s first attempt in the corridor of The Royal Marsden. Thinking about it now, maybe I’d taught him a valuable lesson that day? That, as an Englishman, penalty shoot-outs would only bring him pain and suffering. I had probably done him a great service.

As the doctor had pointed out to us as we were discharged: ‘The pain in your knee will get better, the pain of supporting England will not.’

Unfortunately, however amazing and awesome our NHS health professionals are, there is literally nothing that they can prescribe that can help with that!

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