MY EARLY TRAINING FOR MEDICAL CRISES

 

As for me, I've always believed in positive thinking, and it has served me well, even from a very young age. As I would later discover, this optimistic outlook would prove essential when facing medical crises that would test every ounce of mental resilience I possessed. Looking back, it seems almost as if my childhood was designed as a training programme for dealing with medical emergencies - primarily because it appeared speci!cally engineered to create them. The irony, of course, is that all this philosophical musing about death and survival was taking place years before I had any fundamental understanding of how fragile life could be. I was like someone pontificating about warfare who'd never heard a shot fired in anger. The real education was yet to come - delivered not in lecture halls or books, but in hospital wards and operating theatres, where the difference between life and death often came down to the competence of the person holding the scalpel.

 

My early experiences with the NHS would be rather like a series of practice runs for the main event. Each encounter taught me something about the system - its strengths, its weaknesses, and most importantly, the vital importance of having someone who cares about you enough to fight the system when it fails you.

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What I didn't realise at the time was that I was developing a crucial survival skill: the ability to maintain my sense of humour and humanity even when faced with medical professionals who seemed to have misplaced both. This would prove invaluable when I later encountered doctors who treated me like a piece of meat, nurses who couldn't be bothered to hide their indifference, and a system that seemed designed to crush the spirit of anyone unfortunate enough to require its services.

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However, before we delve into those dramatic confrontations with mortality and medical negligence, we must first understand the man who would face them. And that story begins, as all good stories do, with childhood disasters that, in retrospect, seem like training exercises for the real challenges that lie ahead.

 

The NHS had been preparing for my arrival since before I was born. What nobody could have predicted was that I would spend so much of my later life testing its limits - and discovering just how close to breaking point both it and I could be pushed before something gave way entirely. The universe has a sense of humour. Unfortunately, it's the kind of humour that involves hospital gowns, surgical instruments, and medical bills that would make a lottery winner weep. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

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First, we need to go back to the beginning to understand how a supposedly indestructible child became a man who would one day find himself fighting for his life against the very system meant to save him.​

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This is an excerpt from Mr Smiley Face: Adventures in the NHS and Elsewhere