Britain’s National Health Service has become a focus of debate in the U.S. where it has been dubbed ‘evil’ by those who oppose Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms.
While I’m not particularly well informed about the new U.S. proposals, I certainly have an inside knowledge of the good work the NHS has done and continues to do. In fact, it has changed my life in many ways.
I come from a working-class background; not particularly poor, but not rich either – enough money to enjoy a holiday somewhere in the UK once a year, and enough to provide a home, food on the table and a few luxuries. If there had ever been a requirement to meet expensive medical bills, then they certainly wouldn’t have been met. And so treatment would not have been possible.
So how did the NHS change my life?
Well, in the late 1970s, when I was just 7, my grandad on my mum’s side underwent heart bypass surgery following a heart attack. Even today, heart surgery is the most serious kind of operation, but back then it was still being pioneered. My grandad’s health was bad before the operation – he had acute angina and could hardly walk upstairs. I remember him being out of breath doing the simplest of tasks. His life was in serious danger.
To gauge the impact of the operation on the family, you have to know a bit about the man himself. I adored him. Of course I did – he was my grandad, but the thing is, everyone adored my grandad. And everyone knew him, or so it seemed. In the small market town of Stamford, he had been a bus-driver and an ambulance driver before working in the bar for the Stamford Hospital social club in his final years. Everyone knew “good old George”.
He was a kind, gentle man who loved to laugh, and loved his family. Into his 60s, and through his ill-health, he took me on day-trips to the seaside, adventure playgrounds, walks in woods, along rivers and meadows, and best of all, around the arcades at the fair. It was my grandad who ignited my interest in audio technology; he had some great audio equipment including a Sharp reel-to-reel tape recorder and would use it to put on discos and dances for the hospital social club. I still have the recorder, and tapes of many of the reels he prepared to give himself a break from the live DJ-ing. If only he had lived to see podcasting…
When he died, in 1984, it left the family rudderless. A final heart attack, caused – of all things – by his insistence on laying a small piece of carpet himself, meant that as a 12-year-old, I experienced my first cruel lesson in life. The day mum came to pick me up early from school, tears in her eyes, was the day my childhood ended. She didn’t even have to say what had happened. I just knew.
The phrase to note in that last paragraph is ‘12-year-old’. This was five years after the heart surgery that my grandad received free on the NHS. Five years of day-trips. Five years of birthdays and Christmases. Five years of watching Saturday night TV together. Of watching films like ‘Star Trek’ at the cinema. Of eating chips on the seafront. Of sitting out in the garden. Of life.
The NHS has cared well for my family. It gave my grandad five extra years of life. And it gave me a life-time of happy memories that otherwise would have been missing.
