The National Health Service (NHS)

I wrote this a while ago.

On Friday I had my scans to see how my cancer was doing.

On Saturday I was called into the hospital because an eagle-eyed doctor had seen that my kidney stone had moved and was blocking the exit to my kidney.

On Sunday I had an ‘emergency’ procedure which was not successful (because of previous cancer operation damage).

On Monday I had a Nephrostomy.

On Tuesday I had a day of waiting.

On Wednesday morning I had an exploratory dye-scan and was discharged in the afternoon to come back another time for an operation.

That was 96 hours and four nights in hospital.

Four nights when I slept well.

96 hours when I didn’t have to think but had all the time in the world to think.

96 hours when the NHS looked after my every need.

96 hours when I observed hard-working dedicated staff at every skill level each doing their bit to provide a wonderful service.

96 hours when I had a lot of time to ponder on how darn lucky my generation has been with its free-at-point-of-delivery health service.

I do not have an extensive knowledge of the health services of other European countries and our press regularly says that the French and German services are superior to ours. They may be. We do not have a monopoly on being the best at everything.  

However one thing that my research has thrown up is that other countries which are held up as paragons to us have critics in their own countries just as we do.

I do know that in many countries I would have been dead in my teens because I had a disease that is often fatal today.  My parents could never have afforded the operation and treatment that I received.

So I, for one, have a great deal of praise for the NHS.

War Games

I looked out of my window one dismal morning recently just before a spell of really nasty weather hit us and lo and behold NATO was at it again. The Minch is obviously regarded as a good place to practice whatever it is they practice doing. I suspect that chasing submarines plays a big role. Apocryphally whenever these war games take place our cellphone and other communications all go haywire. It certainly happens but I'm sure it's just a coincidence! 

The Marine Traffic app gave a good indication of what was going on. It only identifies one vessel at a time unfortunately but if it is assumed that all the vessels the same colour as the identified NATO warship are also NATO warships then there were a lot of them around.

Hello! What's this? HNLMS Trump? Surely he's not had a warship named after him already.  No. Actually it's a Dutch frigate named after several Dutch 16th/17th century naval heroes.

Be What You Wanna Be

Back in the '60s (1962 to be precise) I made the journey from Liverpool to London's West End Adelphi Theatre see a Lionel Bart musical called Blitz. It was my first London musical. I may still have the LP I bought at the time (I don't think it went with the hundreds that went to Oxfam recently). Mind you I bought the CD years ago and I still play it. It was a very uplifting musical as well as being nostalgic. It included the song 'Be What You Wanna Be'.

I was thinking about something recently and the song came back to me. The 'something' I was thinking about was Blogland and social media and the use of cellphones and the like to keep in touch. I think it was triggered by a newspaper article which suggested that we should wean ourselves away from our general enslavement to the god of social media  and our cellphones.

Of course the term cellphone or mobile phone is a misnomer now because they are generally used less for telephone conversations than anything else. In fact several years ago a quarter of mobile phone users never made a phone call. Bucking the trend I have now got rid of my 'free' weekday and overseas calls with BT (the landline provider) saving myself about £20 a month and spending £3 of that on 'free' overseas calls on my cellphone bearing in mind all my other calls are included in my monthly fee (which is considerably less than £20) anyway.

I digressed.

What I wanna be is back in Blogland. It is, generally speaking, a far more comfortable environment than the Real World. Why? Because you can choose the environment in which you want to live. I've been so busy in the Real World (including travelling between Lewis and Glasgow - where I am at the moment) that I keep losing touch and catching up gets harder. So I'm reading as much as I can on Feedly (I can do that on my cellphone when I'm in the airport or in a hospital waiting room) but it's difficult commenting. So I'm still with you all and I'll comment as soon as I'm able.

Confidence

It's hard to have faith in weather forecasts when the Met Office weather app on my phone gives me two different forecasts at the same time for the same place. The top one is for where the phone is (it was at home) and the second is a pre-set choice of my home (for when I'm not at home).