Dermot O’Leary

Dermot O’Leary

My earliest experience of the NHS and the care it provides was as a small, slightly confused boy of nine.

My dad, who had cancer of the tongue, was in hospital in Colchester for what, at the time, seemed like days; it could have been weeks. All I remember is not being able to visit him but seeing the room on the first floor from the street below and waving to an empty window as we walked by. Then, him tired and unshaven at home on the sofa, groggy but happy. My dad was never unshaven; he had, and still has, the energy of a twenty-year-old and so to have a nap halfway through the day then was unthinkable. Hence the slight confusion on my part. But that, thank God, and the NHS, was that. He recovered and life went on.

Or so we thought. As so many who have had the big C find, it tends to return with interest.

Five years later, the cancer came back and this time an operation was needed. After a gloomy, life-altering prognosis from a local doctor, Dad demanded a second opinion and – indicative of the people my parents are – they went quietly and diligently about finding someone who could, just might, offer an alternative.

My parents have never shielded my sister and I from anything much. Being the youngest, I might have been cushioned from the worst of news but they’ve always treated us with the ability to rationalise and think through problems. That said (and now being an adolescent who could process slightly more … slightly), as much as I knew was that it was serious. My main memory from the time as a bleak winter set in were windswept and rainy walks on beautiful but desolate beaches in Essex, as they walked ahead, having the ‘What if’ chat.

We were a Catholic family – still are – but faith has always been used as a compass, a guide to plot your path, rather than a vessel of easy certainty and swift judgement. So when that prognosis came, yes, there were prayers involved and faith was leant on, but to equate one’s level of faith and devotion to whether someone deserves to live or die has always seemed fruitless and unhelpful, and a bit mean. So, prayers, yes, but also a second opinion.

The sought-after second opinion was found and, before we knew it, my father was in that great Victorian outpost of hope in the fight against cancer, The Royal Marsden. We’d be in London over Christmas, staying with our ever-supportive Irish family.

The treatment was a hemiglossectomy with repair, a very new treatment. In essence, removal of half the tongue and a rebuild, utilising the wrist pulse to provide a blood supply. Drastic, yes, but also brilliantly innovative and meaning, if successful, that my dad wouldn’t lose the power of speech. A date was set and the procedure went ahead.

The tubes and the beeping, that’s what hits you first – well, second, after the clean smell, that smell that is at once both foreign and familiar. But it was the tubes going in and out of my dad – my Everest, my redwood, my lighthouse – I hadn’t expected. I don’t know what I had expected; maybe a fourteen-year-old boy (or this fourteen-year-old boy) didn’t think enough about what to expect. But it hit me, punch-on-the-nose hard.

Dazed and with my legs giving way I’m led out onto the street by my uncle Frank, my quiet, wise old uncle Frank, who gives me enough time to compose myself, whilst (with obligatory Superking screwed into his mouth and lit … what does the brilliant Editors’ song say? ‘The saddest thing that I’d ever seen / Were smokers outside the hospital doors’) he tells me my dad will be OK. Early days, certainly, but the operation was a success.

And it was. An operation which, after speech therapy and excellent care by the NHS team at The Royal Marsden, led to a full recovery – thanks to a second opinion and the forethought, skill and compassion of NHS doctors willing to take a shot and not to settle, instead to look forward and to innovate, all with the patient’s best interest at heart.

My dad ended up becoming a very unlikely poster boy for that kind of surgery, the procedure being pioneering at the time, and he’s still here now and, touch wood, cancer-free. So, thank you NHS, for the gift of my father.

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