Sali Hughes

Sali Hughes

In 2016, I spent the best part of a month in a hospital, having been terrified of them my whole life. There was a childhood incident when a dermatologist scooped out a lump of my arse cheek and popped it in a screw-top tube. I got dizzy, fainted, and when I woke up, my mother was screaming needlessly and mortifyingly at staff. I barely went back for the next thirty years. Instead of visiting sick friends, I sent lovely treats, thinking they were as valuable. I gave birth to my babies on my living-room floor (for many reasons, but chiefly because hospitals made me extremely anxious), I performed minor home surgery wherever possible, avoided A&E unless it felt life or death and consequently managed to swerve even a single night in a mechanical bed. Hospitals were where you died or saw people dying and I wasn’t going near them. Of course, as phobias go, this is something of a non-starter. Everyone ends up there in the end. And so it was, a few years ago, when my youngest son was unexpectedly taken very ill and admitted to hospital and, by extension, so was I. Time to woman up and be with my child.

It was to be a defining month in my life. The NHS doesn’t just change the lives of patients, it also, I was to discover, changes those of their families. It causes a wholly unique sensation of dread and longing, in that you visit as a result of danger or jeopardy and would very much rather not be there at all. And yet everyone is there to help you, to reassure, heal and comfort. They’re not anonymous uniformed beings and you’re never just an NHS number. The service is made up of ordinary, yet extraordinary, humans who walk among us but operate on a much higher plane. The male nurse who always tells your kid how chuffed he is to see him, however many hours he’s worked on the trot. The female nurse who kneels alongside you, cheerfully scrubbing poo off the floor while congratulating the whole family on the unblocked bowel. The junior doctor who stands his ground when no one above him agrees it’s appendicitis; the anaesthetist who touches your hand as it leaves your unconscious child’s leg and tells you to ‘go and anaesthetise yourself in the pub’. The surgeon who decides to prescribe the super-duper antibiotics ring-fenced for cases of life and death – the drugs that saved you from the hell of more surgery. The porter who brings an extra blanket to your chair while you’re sleepily reading your Jilly Cooper, one eye on the heart monitor. Even the permanently furious woman who takes the lunch orders while appearing to hate adults, children, food and life so much that it provides your whole family with their first laugh in days. These are dutiful, kind, clever and immensely caring people you grow to sort of love, despite hoping that, soon, you’ll never have to see them again.

But on it goes, and you sit helplessly in awe. After almost three weeks, my son became the ward’s longest-standing resident, but was nowhere near the child in most dire need. There were caterwauling babies on drips being walked up and down corridors by nurses pushing prams with one hand and IV drips with the other, softly shushing into ears the size of pasta shells. There was a child with no limbs, several toddlers restrained from toddling by a host of tubes and pipes, teenagers in waiting rooms who must have no sooner got their GCSE results than had to embark on chemotherapy. The noises – children coughing, alarms beeping – that once made you wake in a panic quickly became white noise, just another malfunction of tired equipment limping stoically through another year.

Hospital soon becomes life. Your new world is tiny and insular – because little else matters when your child is ill, but also because the phone signal is pants and hospital WiFi is wonky. Events which history will classify as incidental are, in any case, rendered trivial by circumstance. I remember hearing about the Brangelina split some five hours after the internet and having no thoughts beyond ‘poor them’ – and even that had already passed before the next doctor’s round. I missed the futile challenge of Owen Smith for the Labour leadership and – despite being a party member and sitting in an NHS hospital ravaged by Tory government cuts – I struggled to care. A sweaty, tube-tangled cuddle and the barely-there plot of Blades of Glory played out on a TV screen bought with public donations seemed a better use of my time. In hospital, your usual interests vanish. Anything but getting your family well seems like extra baggage on the run.

And then one day you’re told you can go, that the hallowed drugs have worked miracles. You’ll no longer sleep fitfully in your pull-down single bed, your child will be relieved of his nasal tube and three separate cannulas and released from his prison to go home to his Xbox and dog. And so you pack your suitcase of Get Well cards, books and free disposable thermometers, you say your thank yous and deliver your hugs and you just walk out – better, happier, healthier, no longer terrified nor even a penny worse off, despite the fact that, just a week ago, you’d have gladly handed over your house deeds to anyone who could stop the foreign, blood-curdling wail coming from your own child. They don’t care who you are, what you earn. There are no bills; they’re already settled for an average of two grand per person, per year – roughly the same as we splash annually on takeaways and around £4,500 less than the average insured American spends on their private healthcare (not the other 70-odd million who just go broke or bankrupt, avoid going to the doctors when ill or, in 45,000 cases, die needlessly). Your ingrained routine built around doctor’s rounds and drug administration is simply adapted for the next person; your grey, wipe-clean room is given to another story, another family to save.

And as you’re catching your breath, enjoying feeling real outside air on your face and thinking that to be British is the luckiest imaginable fate, the hospital staff have already gone back to doing their thing – taking broken children and adults, opening them up, putting them back together, shrinking the aggressor, dressing the wounds, cleaning the sores, stroking the faces and breaking the news, like any of it is normal. And all while wading through the treacle of brutal cuts, unfathomable reorganisation, debilitating admin and a whopping broken Brexit promise that is already considered dreary and whiney to bring up. I’ll never fear NHS hospitals again. Only feel tearfully proud of their heroism.

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