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Back to hospital today and I am beginning to suspect that this whole thing is a ruse by the NHS to rinse me for money for parking. I know there was rightful outrage about NHS staff being charged to park at work, but it's also a pretty shitty state of affairs that people have to pay if they are ill or visiting someone who is ill. If the hospital was in the centre of town and easy to access or there was a risk of people using the free parking so they could go shopping, then sure, maybe the charge would be justified. But it's not an easy location to access and there's nothing else around and it just feels like a tax on frailty.
If the money all went to the NHS then it might have some justification, but I suspect it does not. I'm all for making car ownership expensive and taxable and encouraging people to use public transport, but again, you don't really have time to wait for a bus if you have a hospital appointment (and there is no bus from where I live even to the town that the hospital is in - and even were I to take several buses to get there, the one that goes through my village doesn't arrive here til basically the time of my appointment.
I can afford the six pounds or so that it cost me to wait in various lines for various tests, but many people can't. If there weren't cars in it, it would feel Dickensian. We've got other things to worry about if we're at the hospital. When did this become normal? And could we have stopped it happening?
There was quite a lot to get through today and I would like to thank the NHS staff for their almost unrelenting cheeriness through what is the worst 12 month period they've had to endure. It's a bad time to be potentially unwell, of course, but although the waiting for appointments and to find out what's going on has been stressful enough to make me unwell if I wasn't unwell, the service has been considerate, kind and funny.
One nurse told me that the queue for blood tests was very long and advised that I go there, get myself in the queue and then go off to do my other tests in a different part of the hospital. It was a sweet little life hack and worked well. I got back from having my heart and stuff checked out just in time to find myself next in the queue for blood. The nurses were using the tiny cubicles for two patients at a time and yet remained cheerful and kept the badinage going (if they'd been bandaging at the same time I could do an ace joke here).
I have managed to get to 53 without ever having a serious health problem or spending a night in hospital (apart from when my kids were born, but the focus really wasn't on me there). I've never had an operation (except a removal of a smelly cyst), never broken a bone (and when I cracked my rib there was nothing medicine could do for me). When I fill in the health forms I tick "no" to practically everything. I have had extraordinary luck and have been happy to pay into the NHS via taxes even though I haven't had my money's worth, because who would want their money's worth. It's fucking excellent to know it is here when I might need it though.
Whatever might be coming up, I feel in safe hands. I can't understand why anyone wouldn't want the NHS or would argue about funding it enthusiastically above pretty much anything else. A pandemic shows that you can't just pay money for your own health insurance and not have to worry about anything else. If a virus hits like this then you really need everyone to be getting the best possible health care for your own safety. I am surprised selfish people can't see that in the end paying out a small amount of their money in tax will actually benefit them. But some people are incapable of seeing the bigger picture it seems. Amazing that Scrooges are winning the argument. I guess there comes a point where there are too many Scrooges and not enough ghosts.
And you only have to look at America to see the moral danger of people trying to make a profit from health care.
I was glad, at least, to personally thank a handful of NHS staff for the amazing work they've been doing for us.
I was in the hospital for over three hours, so nice bit of parking money for whoever gets that. I suppose it's in their interests that the NHS is as slow as possible, but hard to see why it's in the interests of many more people than them.
