Returned, Even If Not Yet Fully Restored

Last Thursday morning, I wandered in the University Hospital of North Durham, expecting to be there for an hour and a half, and then to be out of action for a long weekend. I emerged last night, drastic emergency surgery and several eye-watering aftercare measures later. Regular readers will be astonished to learn that, among other things, huge quantities of bile have been removed from me.

On its sixtieth birthday, I found the NHS in rude health. The ward was spotless, the staff were superb, the food was lovely. At times, I felt like Sid James, enjoying hospital so much that I didn’t want to go home. A week with no mobile, no email, and only my nearest and dearest having a phone number for me might well become an annual event.

But I am glad to be home. And I’m very glad indeed that the nasty condition that has blighted the last five and a half years of my life has finally gone, never to return. Even if they didn’t manage to diagnose it until the act of doing so was enough to make major surgery immediately necessary.

I am pleased to notice that even Radio Four now correctly calls the BMA “the doctors’ union”, and I am pleased that, as ever, it acts as such. It might considering asking if, sometime around 1997, Labour might have promised to abolish the NHS “internal market” (playing shops), and even mass produced little pledge cards saying so.

Going may be a bit slower than usual here for a while, and the tone may have shifted. But keep coming back, folks. I did.