Just take it.

I don't have any horses. Not one. Therefore, for me to pay for a stable, hay, oats and a stable lad would be a ridiculous waste of money. Thus I do not pay for these.

I am thankful that my health has always been good, however the time may come when I need to make use of the National Insurance contributions that are taken from me, without so much as a by your leave, every month. I'd be very annoyed if I needed the service having paid all this money, only to be told that I was prohibited from using it.

Dick Puddlecote has highlighted the following:

It's been coming for a while, but NHS West Kent have become the first health authority to actively pursue a comprehensive policy of restricting treatment based on social criteria.

The policy document states that:

From this month, patients who smoke and need planned surgery will have to complete a NHS Stop Smoking course before their operation.
  
Patients who are clinically obese or with a BMI (body mass index) of more than 30 will also have their surgery delayed and will have to carry out a weight loss programme. Health bosses said that losing the weight would reduce the length of hospital stay and lessen the risk of complication.

It's a good job I don't live in Kent. . .

Oh, bugger.

That's alright, though, there's no way that anyone else in the county would do the same. It isn't as if savings have to be made to accommodate the legions of non-surgical management and outreach diversity equality community bollock juggling officers is there?

Oh, bugger.


I would raise merry hell if he were denied treatment. Leave aside the anti-smoking dog whistle for a moment. I pay my NI contributions because I am forced to. If I were not forced to, I would take out a cheaper, better, private healthcare package. I would pay a premium for this as I would declare my smoking.

As a smoker I also pay a premium on top of the NI contributions to cover my NHS treatment in the form of the duty on the tobacco I buy.

So I pay for a service, and am then told that even though I pay for it, I am to be denied treatment? There's a word for that, it'll come to me in a moment. . .

Ah yes. Fraud. That's it.

Oh don't worry, I am but a filthy smoker, I deserve everything I get, I am untermensch. If you drink alcohol, or eat food that does not fit the dictated standard, they'll do the same to you, too.

Yeah, OK, snort with derision. Don't believe me, I really couldn't care less. When they go after the drinkers, they don't mean you, you who sit there with your glass of Chianti classico riserva with your dinner, they mean the chavs who get dosed up on slut petrol before hitting the vertical drinking establishments on a Friday night. When they go after the fatty food eaters, they don't mean you, you who eat your filet mignon with duck fat chips, they mean the pram faced single mums who serve up fat and salt ridden microwave meals to their multi-coloured offspring in the estate on the other side of town seven nights a week.

Sail on, it has nothing to do with you, you're a good boy or girl, you do what you're told. I am evil, I deserve to be turned away. I should probably be chained to the hospital gates to act as a warning to the others like me.

Scum, scum, scum. I'm scum.

Fine. Well, Leg-Iron has hit a nerve with me, and I'll act like fucking scum. You'll not like it, but then I couldn't give a toss.

Don't take my money, eject me from the game and still expect to play nicely. It ain't gonna happen, chum.

The One That Is Amazed. . .

Occasionally, something happens which gives you a renewed sense of faith in humanity. Sometimes people do things that show you despite all the misery, intolerance and interference that the human race specialise in, there is also evidence that we are the most amazing, determined and quite brilliant animals out there.

What am I blithering on about?

I have a friend, the same age as me, and about three years ago her mother suffered a very serious stroke. Just to show the Righteous how wrong they can be, she was a non-smoking, almost teetotal woman of 51 who cycled 4 miles a day in her journey to and from work. She was the very epitome of the health nazi's model citizen. Fit as a fiddle. It just goes to show you that when life decides to pitch you a curve ball, there's bugger all you can do about it.

The result of this stroke was that she was immobile, with significantly reduced vision and looking at spending the rest of her life in a care home. She could still communicate, perfectly capable of speech, but was easily confused, tired and without much hope of having even a fraction of the life she had before the event.

After what can only have been a very hard conversation with her kids, she decided to sign the no resus chit in the event of a repeat performance.

On Wednesday morning I received a phone call from my friend who was beside herself. It transpired that her mother had suffered another stroke. She'd been rushed the short distance from her care home to the hospital but there was nothing that could be done. She was breathing for herself, but that was it. Her kidneys had failed, there was absolutely no response to any stimulii or tests and the opinion of the quacks was that given the gap in time between the stroke occuring and her being discovered that the brain was effectively dead and it was just a matter of hours until the other systems shut down.

Because of the no-resus chit, no mechanical or medical assistance was afforded to my friend's mother beyond some suction to remove the fluid from her airways (nasal and oral discharge had turned from clear to dark red, a sure sign of the fat lady filling her lungs before bursting into song) so her death wasn't caused by choking/drowning.

The whole family rushed to the bedside, a good deal from hundreds of miles away, to say their goodbyes, and had returned home on Friday evening, secure in the knowledge that the embrace of death was a formality.

At 3am on Saturday, some three days since the stroke and without even a saline drip, my friend's mother woke up. Although incapable of speech, she could focus on people in the room, squeeze hands and nod or shake her head in response to questions.

At 5pm on Saturday, with my friend's uncle in the room (having hot-footed it back from up-country with the rest of the clan), my friend's mother stared at her brother and proclaimed 'I'm baaaaack! Now go and get me a pint of bloody Stella.'

This woman was written off, had been left to expire with no assistance, at her own request, in a hospital bed with no fluids for at least three days. The family members had said goodbye, her room at the care home had been surrendered. This was, dear reader, curtains.

What point am I making? Well, none really. Beyond that fact is stranger than fiction, if you were to write it as a novel/stage or screenplay it would be spurned for being too fantastical. One further point, never, ever underestimate the human capacity for survival and to prove people wrong. I am not a religious man, but events like this can only be described in terms of miracle.

She'll never run the London Marathon, but this determination to live and also not to do as one is told is a lesson for us all. Isn't it also just like a bloody woman to ask for one thing, and then to go and do the exact bloody opposite?

OK one final point, we pay through the nose for our NHS. The nursing staff at the hospital have been magnificent, but, it was fully eight hours between the woman in question waking up and her seeing a doctor. There were simply none on site, in a large hospital on a Saturday morning.

There is no way she can get an assessment of the damage and a prognosis until Monday, because no-one with more than a nursing qualification seems to work on a Sunday. In a fucking hospital.

Don't worry though, there was a pencil neck wankstain with a clipboard on duty who came out to berate the greiving relatives (this was before the Lazarusesque awakening) for smoking in the open air, fifteen metres away from the nearest person, who tried to take personal details in preparation for prosecution for an offence which doesn't exist, (vis. smoking in a hospital grounds, or one suspects, in a position where a hospital can be seen, even if you have to use binoculars) and over which he would have no powers of prosecution. They gave him the option of collecting the details, or leaving with his teeth. He chose the latter.

The One That Gave A Little Chuckle. . .

This is doing the rounds on the email at the moment.

It supposedly shows a group of workmen clearing up after installing bollards at a Belfast hospital to prevent people parking at the front of the building.

I wonder if they've made a mistake, or if their van is part of one of these extravagant modern art installations hospitals seem so keen in putting up instead of cleaning wards or treating patients?