Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon

Every single member of my family owes their life to the NHS. I take this for granted, and only at moments like this when I pause to consider what might have been do I feel a heady mix of vertigo and gratitude. Most of those stories are not mine to tell, so let me tell just two of them.

In 2019, I had an unexpected and, in my opinion, somewhat undeserved triple heart bypass at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. A long vein from my left leg is now doing a slightly different job inside my chest and I can still feel the bumps of the six wires used to hold my sternum together after it was sawn in half from top to bottom, but I can run happily for hours up and down hills of all sizes. I feel as if I have been given a large second helping of life.

The fact that the human heart can be replumbed is astonishing. Even more astonishing is the way human beings have organised themselves to make such miracles possible. I owe my life not just to my GP who sent me for a CT scan and to the surgeon and his team, but to a long human chain of people who looked after me before, during and after the operation – nurses, porters, cleaners, doctors, technicians, care assistants …

My wife, Sos, would doubtless say the same about her own experience of the NHS when, in the summer of 2003, she had a near-fatal bike accident in the Black Mountains, though her list would include some glamorous paramedics in red jumpsuits and a helicopter pilot. She was six months pregnant when she hit the bonnet of a 4x4 on a tiny country road and I really did think I was kneeling in the road watching the person I love most in the world dying in front of me.

She’d broken her pelvis in two places, fractured her cheek in three and one side of her face was composed entirely of bruises, swelling and road rash. The baby was alive but not moving. She spent only seven days in Bristol Royal infirmary because she is a very tough woman indeed, and she walked without crutches for the first time after having an epidural in the birthing suite.

Our son is now sixteen and appears completely unaffected by his in-utero adventure and the large servings of morphine afterwards.

I’ve told both these stories a number of times over the years and I get a little choked up every time. I get choked up talking about the overworked and underpaid staff who nearly always provide an amazing service with dedication, kindness and patience. I get choked up describing how the NHS is one of the most principled, humane, generous and efficient institutions in the world, and one of the few remaining reasons I feel proud to be British, despite the drip, drip, drip of privatisation by politicians and businesspeople wanting to push it gradually closer to the hellscape of an American medical system where people go bankrupt because they have cancer.

But there’s a coda I always add to both stories, and it is this which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

I love the NHS most of all because we pay for it with our taxes, and because the care we receive is the same whether we’ve paid a million pounds or nothing. We don’t talk enough about this. We all need healthcare; it’s expensive and we have to pay for it one way or another. Serendipitously, the fairest way of doing this is also the most efficient. If we want to support the NHS we need to celebrate tax, to think of it not as money the government steals from us but as our contribution to a safe, just and healthy society. We need to think of tax evasion and tax avoidance as stealing from hospitals and schools, and we need those who are well off to pay more. And I include myself in that category.

The true worth of the NHS is not that they saved the lives of every member of my family. It is that they make the same effort for all families, even if those families are destitute. The true worth of the NHS is that those of us who are lucky enough to pay tax can go to sleep at night knowing that we have helped make that radical kindness possible.

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