I watched NewThe National Theatre's hit play about Aneurin Bevan, the former Labor MP for Ebbw Vale, and his fight to create the National Health Service, twice. Both times I felt slightly nauseous. Bevan is a powerful working class hero. Probably no other minister, even in that heroic government of 1945, would have had the vision, the muscle or the sheer energy to create a National Health Service at all in those dark post-war years, let alone that no new government would have been able to abolish it.
National Health Service is at the center of politics, and for most of my journalistic career, charting crises, figures, arguments, opportunities and costs has been a staple of my work. You can write about all this, you can read about all this, but it may feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when you, like me, are positioning yourself as an emergency responder with a condition that may require major surgery and at least a week of post-op hospital care – or may simply go away on its own.
I suppose there are other places in the world where you walk into an emergency room wanting to die and are greeted with warmth and compassion by competent professionals in a more or less functional environment. It's not just the security that comes with not having to worry about bills, because there are other ways to finance healthcare that are free at the time of use. I won't pretend that my experience is unique or that all experiences are similar to mine, but intimacy is important: having had time to observe the workings of the chamber, I feel like there is alchemy at work here, and after six days of nothing to do except lie relatively flat and reflect, I think I may have identified that.
At its core is a sense of common purpose. It's like getting on a bus, maybe not the smoothest model and certainly overloaded, but we all hit the road together. Anyone who is seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Every. You don't lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star amenities you could enjoy if you had more money, because chances are, in the event of an emergency, that person is also right behind the curtain, hanging limply to your right.
So we all have a common goal and we all want to get to the other end. You don't really want to die, at least not without pain relief first, and they don't want you to die either and are doing everything they can to help. Somehow you know that even as you wait, frozen in shock and excruciating pain, you are being seen. And he counted.
But there's something else going on, too. The entire time I was there, my roommates were two elderly women who did not quite understand where they were, and one of whom really did not want to be where she was. They both had chronic illnesses. They were incontinent. They refused to cooperate. But every hour of every day there was one or two nurses, assistants or caregivers who took the time to answer their calls, keep them safe, clean and warm, and sometimes even make them smile.
If you haven't experienced it, it's hard to explain the effect of witnessing this level of not only professionalism and patience, but also love. There is research that shows that despite all the criticism and criticism of the NHS, those who use it the most are most positive about it. When you're there and you look, you understand.
As I began to recover (cheap dates, no surgery) and was able to walk around my shabby old hospital, opened by Princess Anne sometime in the 1980s (around the time Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson first started complaining about the NHS being a national religion), the sense of common purpose that I recognized even in the fog of misery became even clearer. People here are kind to each other. The Friends store is hung with hand-knitted matinee jackets that exude good-heartedness, and the WH Smith manager offers assistance rather than gesticulating dismissively at the self-service checkouts.
Strangers reach across the space between them to introduce themselves to each other. It's not intrusive, it's not necessary, but it's not to be missed: that heightened awareness and empathy that makes three people turn at the sound of a dropped crutch, that generosity of spirit that makes people spend drafty afternoons showing bewildered visitors to distant chambers.
If we are here, then we are in the same boat. We are hurt in some way, or we support someone who is hurt, or maybe we take advantage of an earlier kindness. It's not magic. Everyone is still on their own, but softer. Warmer. Maybe even happier. Where else in our angry and atomized country does this happen?
Behind the scenes, nurses struggle with inflatable beds that melt the room's electrical equipment, and radiologists have to coax the X-ray machine into working usefully. But somehow this seemingly bumbling, unruly old behemoth produces people to work within it who are capable of contagious resilience and love.
Bevan was driven by his own experiences of poverty and avoidable tragedy. There are a lot of things wrong with his creation. But whatever happens next in this most costly of long-running dramas, let us recognize the extraordinary value of what we already have. It's beyond price.
