Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson

Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson

Dear NHS,

Thank you! Without you I would be dead and I wouldn’t have had the chance to have the life that I now have. I wouldn’t have had an education, become an athlete or be a mother. If I had survived, my life wouldn’t be the one that I have now. Many of my happy memories of you are wonderfully kind and funny comments that have been made in some quite serious circumstances.

I was born with spina bifida and didn’t need a lot of care at first, but then I had operations at seven to have a good look at what a mess my spine was in; at thirteen to attach metals rods to my spine to stop it collapsing further and then at nineteen when they snapped when I fell off a rope in a training session. Sorry, that last one was my fault, but you didn’t judge me and one medic jokingly said (when I was in a reasonable amount of pain), ‘Well, you probably shouldn’t do that again!’ A sensible piece of advice and matched the thoughts, if not the tone, of my mum’s response to finding out what I had done.

There are so many people in the NHS I should thank. To those who, when I was a child, spoke to me and not my parents (they strongly supported this), and to my surgeon who, when I was twelve, told me: ‘You need to understand this because it is you who will be going through the operation.’ That set an important tone for the rest of my life.

To the lovely team at the University Hospital of Wales, who delivered my beautiful (she will hate me for this) now eighteen-year-old daughter by C-section and didn’t think I was crazy when I said I had to be back in training really quickly to represent Wales at the Commonwealth Games. Thank you to the team who didn’t laugh at my Hull-born husband who wanted me to go into theatre with a small sticking plaster on my shoulder with some earth from Yorkshire on it (yes he did bring it down, so she was born on ‘Yorkshire soil’); it has given me a fine story to tell.

To the doctor who, when I burnt my knee on a radiator and treated it myself for a couple of days before finally going to hospital (I had done it before, and I wasn’t near home), looked at my felt-tipped knee with its various colours and lines to show different points of the burn, and just said, ‘You’ve done this before.’

I have been privileged to travel the world and I have seen that lots of other people don’t have the medical support we do. I am lucky that I don’t have to worry about not being treated because I don’t have the right insurance, or based on the ability of my family to pay.

To all those who, day in and day out, are on the front line, dealing with things that most people can’t imagine: thank you for being there. We have always valued what you do – the weekly clapping just shows it – and ‘when we are on the other side of this’ (if I had a pound every time I heard that I would be rich) I hope we can show you in other ways how much you mean to us.

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