Martin Freeman. Greg Wise

Martin Freeman

My contact with the NHS started early. As a young child, I was diagnosed with asthma, so trips to the doctor’s surgery and hospital were not infrequent, but they were scary. More for my folks than me, I think.

Then there was the dodgy hip. Great Ormond Street and the London Children’s Hospital. Then the Rowley Bristow Hospital in Surrey. Good times.

Then the appendectomy – Kingston Hospital – only a few months after another op at the same place which was too embarrassing to inform my schoolmates about, so it went under the heading ‘bad hip again’.

Also the close family members who have spent their last days in the care of the NHS.

And the emergencies with our kids when we can’t exhale as we worry about what’s coming next. Nothing at all unique in that. We’ve all been there, in one version or other.

Which is what makes the NHS the thing that most of us would fight tooth and nail to save. The NHS is what makes us truly proud, along with a few other things, to be British.

‘Cradle to grave’ was the idea, wasn’t it, and my God, ain’t that the truth.

Greg Wise

Safety Third

I have a large, blood-red lettered sign hanging in my workshop at our cottage. It reads ‘SAFETY THIRD’. These two words pretty much sum me up as a person. Throwing myself headlong into most things with a great amount of energy, but with less self-care than really ought to be present, leads to regular blood loss. Which, any rational person would have thought, would then involve a health service undertaking the various bits of stitching and resetting of bones required by my lack of personal care. However, combined with my SAFETY THIRD policy, I am also a Northern Man – unwilling to seek professional medical help. In my view, most things can be dealt with by a pile of loo roll taped around whichever limb is leaking, or for bones a good brisk walk will sort it out.

Maybe I have a genetic predisposition to the avoidance of hospitals. My dad was an architect and one of the projects he undertook was a new wing on an infirmary in Newcastle. It was quite a difficult gig for him as he had a tendency to drop into a dead faint whenever he walked into a hospital. I think it had to do with the smell. Or the pervading sense of mortality. It was not a good look for the professor to keel over on a site visit.

The moment I knew that my wife was ‘the One Able to Live with Me’ came as a result of a wound: I wandered up the garden, shortly after we had started living together, with a very large hole in my leg – a blood-dripping, bone-showing sort of hole – having just fallen out of an elder tree, where I’d been collecting flowers to make elderflower cordial. She calmly went to the medicine cabinet to see what was on offer, unfazed that her thirty-year-old feller was still climbing – and still falling out of – trees. It was suggested that a trip to A&E would be a rather good idea, but Northern Man looked at the total lack of skin around the hole and came to the conclusion that, as there was nothing left to stitch together, it would be a waste of everybody’s time. A bandage wrapped around it would suffice. A few years later, during a hot shorts-wearing summer, a doctor mate looked at the impressive collection of scars on my shin and asked how long I had been in hospital for my pre-tibial laceration. Allegedly I really ought to have got septicaemia; could have had my foot/leg amputated. Could have died.

I sliced through to the bone of a finger while my daughter was reading The Beano, waiting for Dad’s Famous Schnitzel. She was quite young and my wife was away working, so, once again, Northern Man, hand held high above his head, blood running down his arm, wandered up the street to the local pharmacy. I was told to go and get it stitched at the hospital. I didn’t go, but bought a large collection of bandages. I have had no feeling in the end of my finger since then.

I also pushed a chisel right through another finger. Same story.

There’s a bit of a recurring theme here: Northern Man doesn’t like fuss. Doesn’t want to burden our stretched health service needlessly. And maybe, somewhere deep down, there’s a slight sense of shame that I’m just so bloody accident-prone. That by turning up to a hospital with an idiotic self-inflicted injury, I’d be viewed by the stressed medics rather like a dog whose head is stuck in the park railings: an object of pathos, humour, but mainly just a right royal pain to have to sort out. And Northern Man has his pride.

All this changed totally when my sister got ill. Northern Man was humbled and now prostrates himself at the feet of the most extraordinary people he has ever had the privilege to meet.

I smashed the knuckle on my left-hand index finger in a cricket accident. Just as I was about to cycle to my dentist’s surgery to get it x-rayed (avoid hospitals at all costs, and my dentist’s has a perfectly adequate x-ray machine, doesn’t it?) my sister Clare called. She told me she had been diagnosed with bone cancer.

For the next number of months our lives were pretty much spent in hospitals – notably the Fracture Unit at University College Hospital, London, where Clare was subjected to a large number of x-rays, CT scans, MRIs and surgical procedures. At the start of every consultation, I asked whether the attending physician could take a look at my finger. No chance. Not without a ‘blue slip’, only available from the referring doctor or via a four-hour wait at A&E. Could I not come in with my sister to this next scan and place my finger next to her fractured humerus? No chance.

Finally, eight months after my accident, I succeeded in wearing one of them down and they filled me out a blue slip and sent me down to the Cancer Centre Imaging Department.

‘What type of cancer do you have?’

‘I don’t have cancer.’

‘What are you doing here, then?’

‘Um, cricket accident, but I do have a blue slip …’

I had an operation the next month. A long, jagged cut on the palm-side of my finger and a pin put into the joint to keep it stable. It went septic. A week later, lying on the couch in agony in the doctor’s room, him trying to dig out the pin that had been swallowed up by the swollen, septic flesh, I had to ask the nurse to please stop grimacing and I really didn’t need to know that this had put her off her lunch.

My finger looked like a fat German sausage. I couldn’t bend it more than a few degrees. I was told to be very careful with it.

Instead I built a shed and painted it. At almost the last brush-stroke, balanced at the top of a wobbly stepladder, I fell, hit the flagstones and then carried on falling down a flight of brick steps until brought to rest by crashing against the garden gate. My finger was fine. But I’d fractured the thumb next to it.

My sister bandaged and arm in sling; her carer brother with two digits in splints. Often, when checking in at the hospital, the receptionist wouldn’t know which of us was the patient.

There then followed three months of being my sister’s live-in, 24/7 carer. And for the first time, I fully understood what an incredible gift we have been given in our country – the NHS. The Gift That Keeps Giving. From the receptionists to the nurses, oncologists, radiographers, therapists – everyone we came into contact with met us with kindness, compassion, humour, expertise and, above all, a profound sense of humanity.

Our local hospice was fundamental in helping my sister stay, and eventually die, in her own home. All the kit they arranged; sitting down with Clare and gracefully and kindly explaining where she was in the progress of her disease, and in supporting me. I would turn up at the hospice every Friday over the last months – a sweaty mess, having just cycled up the hills – to collect Clare’s medication for the next week. I would be pulled into one of the doctors’ consulting rooms, sat down and asked how I was faring. I was terrible Northern Man to begin with – embarrassed that I was the one being focused on when they should be directing all their attention to my sister – but found myself profoundly grateful to be asked. Because, as we see only too clearly now in this pandemic, we need to attend to the caregivers as much as those they care for. The wheels fall off when the caregivers get sick.

Over the months of caring for my sister, I lived pretty much in isolation. She would be asleep for most of the day, so I was alone, unable to leave, with a constant bubbling anxiety. But this time allowed thoughts to form, gestate and be expressed – thoughts that I would not normally have had the time to explore in the mad rush of normal life. And we, as a nation, as a World Family, now find ourselves in a similar isolation – unable to leave our homes and with a bubbling anxiety. And at an odd moment, when we have to be as self-reliant as possible, but also when some of us will require more help than we’ve ever needed. From our health service. From the people I have always tried my hardest to avoid.

It took the dying of my sister to fully appreciate the wonder of our NHS. In this time of pandemic, we are, as a nation, joining together to applaud these incredible people. And I (for the moment at least) have altered my habits and now try to operate on a SAFETY FIRST basis – doing my bit for the NHS by not turning up with bits of me hanging off.

But I think it’s OK for us all in this time of lockdown to be a little bit Northern Man. Stay home. Stay safe. Wrap a pile of loo roll around whichever limb is leaking, or for bones, a good brisk walk will sort it out. So, as I type now with my two sensationless fingers, one pointing in a very strange direction, I ask all of you: please protect our incredible NHS. And let us never forget how we feel about them, now, when we need them. Let our support grow and grow. Treasure, nurture and applaud forever.

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