England calling France

fionamdenny

Dec 31

Dear Ella

Now that Christmas is over and the year is beginning to fade I find myself in reflective mood.

Yesterday my web-agent (WordPress) sent me an email celebrating the performance of my website in 2023.

According to their upbeat statistics: 25 October 2023 was my best day with 4% of all visits for the year. It seems, this was my 'day in the digital spotlight'.

It was also the day I was fined for copyright infringement. The only person scurrying around my website on 25 October, desperately trying to prevent further violations, was me. So not a day to celebrate!! There is clearly something of a rhetoric-reality gap here.

Speaking of rhetoric-reality gaps, have I shared my views on our glorious National Health Service or - as Jon refers to it – the No Hope Service?

Based on my personal experience in 2023, I would give the NHS a gold star for measuring things, a plastic ruler for reporting back results and a wooden spoon for actually dealing with pain.

I took on the involuntary role of mystery shopper on a number of separate occasions: for an ongoing and debilitating cough, a painful foot and a tiny amount of bleeding.

I was separately assessed for rheumatoid arthritis, lung and ovarian cancer. Thankfully, I have none of these nasty conditions but I still have a dry cough, I couldn't walk properly for months because of the pain in my foot; and I bled continuously for weeks with no aftercare following a small procedure to remove a benign polyp.

And at the moment I am suffering with an arm that feels as if it has been bashed with a baseball bat. This has been ongoing for 10 weeks – since my last COVID jab in fact.

These may not be life threatening injuries but they are painful and discomforting. None of them have been resolved – indeed some of them have been caused as a result of treatment received. All of this undermines my faith in the value of the NHS. If it can't get the little things right, how can it be trusted with the serious stuff?

The message seems to be stay away – reinforced by 19-hour ambulance waits and ridiculous primary care triaging systems.

I imagine Aneurin Bevan envisaged something very different when he set up the NHS in 1948. For all its successes, he must be turning in his grave right now.

I do hope the system is less broken in France. I'm seriously thinking of ordering a jar of leeches for future emergencies.