Anne Fine. Shappi Khorsandi

Anne Fine

Times change, as do social expectations and NHS guidelines. So though I’ve had my share of broken arms and weird infections and family members who are still with us only because of medical and nursing skills, it’s something else, from over forty years ago, for which I’m most grateful.

I went to see Dr R with my grizzling toddler and chatted while he examined her. ‘I’m going to apply to medical school,’ I told him. ‘My degree is in politics, but that’s not very useful, is it? I’m going to train for something else.’

He nodded at my daughter. ‘Not thinking of having another, then?’

‘Not really, no.’

He said, ‘You realise that babies are like puppies? Better off with company. Take my advice. Pack in your plans and have another baby instead.’

No doctor would give you that advice these days. And if they did, they’d either find themselves on the floor, or struck off the register. But those were different times. I went home and got pregnant. I’ve never told anyone about this before now, but we all love the NHS for different reasons.

And my very, very precious second daughter is mine.

Shappi Khorsandi

‘Just to warn you, Shap,’ my brother stepped out to tell me before I went into the ward, ‘there’s a bucket of, well, blood by Dad’s bed.’ I strode in to give my father strength and support after his triple heart bypass operation. I saw the tubes coming off him and into the bucket. Luckily, his bed cushioned my fall as I fainted.

The NHS has mended my father’s heart several times, and attended to quite a few of my fainting spells. I am not usually the first to be despatched to the bedside of ailing parents. When my mum had three epileptic fits in one day, I happened to be the only one in our immediate family who was in London to take care of her. After the first fit, I took her to my house where she had another in my bathroom. She fell and cracked her head on the floor because I know nothing about epilepsy and had left her in there alone. The hospital was rammed; nurses were rushing about like Roadrunner. It was impossible to stop one even for a moment to ask them about my mum. When the doctor came to see her, he asked questions to check how lucid she was.

‘When did the Second World War end?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ my mother replied.

I said, ‘To be honest, Doctor, I’m not sure my mother would know the answer to that on a good day.’

He tried another. ‘Who do you live with?’

‘Alone,’ my mother answered immediately. I reassured myself, ‘That doesn’t mean anything, it’s easy to forget she has lived with my dad for forty years, he’s quite small after all.’

My mother turned her head. Haunted terror spread over her face as she looked at something invisible, petrified. Then her eyes rolled back, she let out a wail and began to fit. Those nurses who didn’t have a second to stop and talk to me were, in a blink, at her bedside, holding her as her body shook violently. I stood back, frantic, and could only watch as this little army took over. They’d heard the sound that came out of my mum and knew they were needed and absolutely knew what do to help her while I stood uselessly gawping as she jolted and convulsed. The fit seemed to go on and on. The nurses looked after the woman I cannot imagine life without.

Once she was home and recovering, my mum had no recollection of the doctor’s questions, so I told her. In my thank-you card to the staff, she made me write, ‘My mother would also like me to assure you that of course she knows when the Second World War ended, and she may as well live on her own for all the work he does about the house.’

My two children had a soft landing into the world, thanks to the NHS. My first, a son, was a natural birth. The pain was a shock. I couldn’t understand how I could be in that much pain but still be alive. I screamed at the midwife, Cynthia, ‘GET ME AN EPIDURAL OR A GUN.’ Happily, they were out of guns and Ahmed, a good-humoured anaesthetist, arrived, injected some manners into me and I apologised to Cynthia.

A few years later, my daughter came by Caesarean section. Like my son, she was greeted into the world by the United Nations of the NHS, with English, Welsh, Irish, Pakistani, Nigerian, Jamaican and Filipino staff all on hand to care for us. I had her by myself; obviously there was a man involved at some point, I am not a worm, but he did not turn up to see her. Very rude of him considering it happened to be MY birthday too. The midwives and the doctors were extra-attentive, knowing my personal soap opera, holding my hand as I sobbed, making a nest of feathers for me and my baby girl and letting me watch Pretty Woman.

No matter how baby-proof you make your home, they will miraculously find a piece of barbed wire or a chainsaw from somewhere and play with it. There were trips with both children to mend fingers and bandage heads, and once, when my daughter was four, an operation to remove a one-pound coin from her oesophagus. I have never had to be as strong as I was in that moment when I held my child’s hand and watched as she was put under general anaesthetic. The anaesthetist saw how frightened I was. He took me aside and looked me in the eyes and assured me my baby would be fine. Despite the hundreds, maybe thousands of times he’d done this, he didn’t dismiss my fears, he understood that my entire universe was in his hands. He explained the ‘sleepy milk’ to my daughter and put her at ease. To see her tiny body and expressive little face succumb to a drug and become unconscious sent my heart out to every parent who has had to see the same, again and again, for those for whom hospital stays are part of life.

As my sleeping child was taken away to theatre, I thought of these doctor and nurses who look after desperately poorly children, talking to parents who are frantic with worry or wild with grief. Now here they were, soothing my worries with the same compassion and professionalism over a routine procedure, taking the most exquisite care of my human money box until she bounced happily out of the doors just a few hours later, covered in stickers, high-fiving doctors, excited about the ice cream she’d been promised. Thank you, NHS.

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