by Peter Cook

I turned on the telly last Friday night fully expecting to be bored stiff by all the Olympic ballyhoo.

Instead I was completely blown away by the opening ceremony. Weren’t we all? It was a truly magnificent spectacle.

Greater minds than mine, if any such there be, have analysed the show. But too much analysis destroys the magic. It’s best to be swept along on a tide of Danny Boyle wonder.

Reaction from overseas has been mostly positive, although parts of the extravaganza must have been baffling to alien minds.

For example, a Los Angeles Times correspondent could not understand the National Health Service sequence, claiming it was equivalent to eulogising some well-known American healthcare company.

This, more than anything else I have read, demonstrated the gulf between our attitude to healthcare and that of right wing Americans, or even right wing British.

OK, the NHS frequently lets us down. We can all quote stories of when it has not lived up to expectations.

Most of the time, however, it works well. And who has not been glad and grateful for its existence in times of emergency?

But it’s Bevin’s central principle of providing free healthcare for everyone that is so important. Just think how much worry that removes from those of us who would otherwise be plunged into poverty.

OK, you can buy health insurance. But if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation, it means the well-off pay that little bit more, helping out those on smaller incomes. You would need to be utterly selfish not to see that as a reasonable ideal.

Since 1947, we in this country have taken free-at-the-point-of-access healthcare pretty much for granted. We often forget that in many countries if you can’t pay you die.

The NHS has become a sort of quasi-religion in Britain. It goes to the very roots of our belief in fairness and equality.

What Danny Boyle achieved with his NHS sequence was to demonstrate just how deeply felt is our love and affection for the healthcare system in this country, despite its many imperfections.

Politicians who monkey about with it will do so at their peril.

What we need to do now is to build a social care system that works as well as the NHS.

by David Jones

Nearly a month has passed since the decision was announced to charge disabled drivers for parking at Medway Maritime Hospital and I’m still trying to work out the perverse logic behind it.

The idea, according to the Medway NHS Foundation Trust, is to “create fairness around concessions”.

That sounds like the logic of the madhouse to me.

Which brings me this question: What have Barclays Bank and the Medway NHS Foundation Trust got in common?

Answer: Not a lot, I hear you say.

But here’s a point worth pondering, even if you do think I’m being far-fetched.

A small group of traders at Barclays Bank made a decision, which resulted in horrendously bad publicity for the bank.

At the Medway NHS Foundation Trust a small group of people made a decision, which resulted in horrendously bad publicity for the Trust.

By comparison, the rumpus over parking charges is just a minor spat and I’m not suggesting anything else.

What we do have is two sets of circumstances totally unrelated and at opposite ends of the spectrum, but both achieving in their own way an unwelcome outcome – damaging headlines day after day.

The bankers are guilty of outrageous greed. The people at the Trust were motivated by the best of intentions, albeit misguided. Both were typical of decisions made in a goldfish bowl without consideration of the wider impact.

In reality, as has already been pointed out, the estimated £180,000 a year the disabled parking charges will bring in extra revenue is just peanuts in terms of the overall Medway NHS budget.

Decisions by public bodies such as the NHS should sometimes be more than just about the bottom line. By forcing blue badge holders to pay, Medway’s health bosses have created a widespread perception that they are callous and money-grabbing? Was it worth it for an extra £180,000 a year?

What the spin doctors call “negative coverage” of the disabled parking row will have caused reverberations at the highest level at the Trust, especially as Medway Council’s controlling Conservative group has joined in the criticism.

I wonder if anyone at the Trust has been wondering how good it would be if the clock could be turned back and a different decision arrived at.

If I were to be really mischievous, I could suggest ways in which the Trust could raise even more money - £120 a night for a bed, all drugs and meals to be paid for by the patient, a scale of charges depending on your illness and, oh, labour costs for the doctors and nurses’ hours, rather like your bill from the garage.

Or have I just described a private hospital?

"You've got smaller than massive pulmonary embolism [blood clots] on both lungs; the left is worse than the right" he said.  "They're as a result of a deep vein thrombosis.  At this time, we need to give you a large amount of a very strong drug to dissolve the blood clots which may cause internal bleeding including a stroke".  "Oh I'm not dead then, that's good news because I haven't allowed for it in the diary" she said.  "When can I go back to work?"

So this was what I was faced with on Friday 1st October.  No warning apart from a sudden lack of breath after walking 6ft which prompted me to call NHS Direct and then my neighbour Lorna, who basically saved my life through her stubborness.  Well actually, it was my stubborness.

So the nickname for this DVT/PE thing is 'Economy Class Syndrome'.  What a load of marketing tosh that is.  Fair enough it's highlighting it as a health danger but the association with air travel might make people think it only happens when you're in the air - it doesn't.  So my conspiracy theory is this; it must be a psychological ploy to encourage the less knowing travellers to buy a business class ticket - surely?

Someone referred to it as the "Couch Potato Disease" which apparently brews heart disease.  As a result of the extensive tests I had done at Maidstone Hospital, I'm relieved to know I have a good heart in more ways than one.  In any case, like my family and friends, my couch hasn't seen my gluteus mahoosiveness for quite a while because I've been working hard trying to be successful.

So where's it come from then?  Congenital or lifestyle?  Why am I writing about it on a driving blog?  I haven't had the results of the congenital yet, so let's have a butcher's at my lifestyle:

1. I've commuted on a coach to and from London for 20 years (averaging about 4 hours travel a day with that one).  Being a big bird, I've always had my knees pushing the seat in front so plenty of opportunity for a clot to gather in my lower leg there.
2. Then for the past 3 years, driving and working every hour Elvis sends, to pay my bills (123,000 miles is a lot of driving).  Minimal leg movement, minimal exercise, minimal help for my blood cells to be pumped up from my ankles.
3. Living off chicken and stuffing sandwiches and coffee at odd times, from Shell petrol stations, which hasn't provided a sufficient enough environment for my blood to do it's job properly.
4. Having a fag puff or ten at rest, in the aftermath of Polish and Irish lorry side swipes at high speed, has possibly given me furry tubes and sticky blood thus restricting the flow round my body Autobahn.
5. I am overweight for my height but always have been, so nothing new there.  If I was the medical weight for my height, I'd be a bean-pole and I don't want that.  So I'll stick with the in-proportion/voluptuousness that is 'W-O-M-A-N', thanks very much.
6. I had recently had a night cramp in my left calf - you know the ones that make you jump out of bed in agony and take ages to stop feeling sore.
7. I have also banged my shin a couple of times with an heavy metal Give Way sign (that's another story) which was excrutiatingly painful, producing a mark but no surface bruising.

All that and I'm 43 and never been kissed - a Jeremy Kyle nightmare.

So looking at some of the causes of DVT/PE, I unknowingly ticked most of the boxes for sudden onset.  There's me thinking it was a persistent chest infection due to a bit of coughing and wheezing for the couple of months previous to Doomsday.

In efforts to highlight what I've been through and perhaps nudge other stubborn driving gîtes into having a little look at their lifestyle habits or get checked out, I tried to find a website that advised on general driver health (pre-emergency); anything that affected any driver (ie, male/female, young/old, long/short haul driving).  I AOL'd and Googled  the following simple searches:

'Driver's disease', the only thing that came up was Legionnaire's disease caused by dirty windscreen wash-water.

'Illnesses caused by driving' highlighted accidents caused by sudden illness.

'Driver illnesses' highlighted older drivers; illness and medication

'Healthy driver' highlighted truck drivers

'Healthy driving' highlighted Men's health and Taxi driving

And, as you can see, came up with a big, fat clotty nothing, zilch, nil point, for general driver health.

I dare say, some clever ar.. person will come up with something but how are you going to find something hidden on page 10 of a web search if you're like me (if it's not on the first page, it's not important enough etc).  I mention the web a lot, that's because there's nothing in the helpful leaflet boxes in Doctor's waiting rooms other than "How to die quietly", "Living with haemarroids", "Hairy lady chins; how to cope", that kind of thing.

I've only been prompted to look up DVT/PE post-event which appears to be a case of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted - it's something drivers of any type wouldn't even consider.  A prime example of "it'll never happen to me syndrome" - didn't even give it a first thought, let alone a second. Perhaps because I wasn't aware.

90% of us drive (don't quote me but it's a lot, let's face it).  There should be more freely available collective information.  We have health for sport, health for pregnancy, health for work, health for holidays but no health for driving (from day 1 of passing the driving test) - it's something most of us do everyday.

Yeah, I think I have a point Houston.

http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/travelhealth/Pages/DVTMarkPownall.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_vein_thrombosis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_embolism

http://www.thrombosis-charity.org.uk/cms/index.php

A BIG THANK YOU
The NHS care I received at Maidstone Hospital was second to none.  Thank you to everyone there; A&E, Resus, CCU, Culpepper Ward, the Phlebs and the Pharmas.  Not to mention the porters who had to lug my carcass around.

ALSO TO:
Lorna and Jackie and family and friends who will have to put up with me for a bit longer.  Not to mention my pupils for being patient (no pun intended).  I'll be back soon, I promise.