As a patient close to death, this is what I learned about the junior doctors' strike from the people treating me

"I had a Consultant need to go and sit in a room on his own after a patient died the other week," said a nurse. "Was it avoidable?" I asked. She shrugged

Junior doctors and medical students demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London as part of a nationwide one day strike in a dispute with the government over new contracts

Three months ago I couldn’t talk or breathe. I was coughing up blood and I was trying to stay calm. The NHS saved my life - and now I want to tell you a little about what I learned whilst I was in their care. You see, the junior doctors are the tip of an iceberg that we all know is there but would frankly rather not see.

Because I couldn’t talk in hospital (I had a quinsy, also known as peritonsillar abscess, and my GP said it was the worst case she’d ever seen), I decided to write a note on my phone and show it to everyone who came to treat me. It read I want to write about what I’ve seen on the front line in the NHS. I won’t use your name or that of the hospital. What do you think the biggest issues are that you face? Almost everyone I spoke to took a deep in-breath, drew the curtain and started to talk.

Reprisals, I learned, for speaking out are commonplace in a system where hitting targets is imperative. Paramedics, nurses, junior doctors and consultants all made that clear. Yes, they all talked. A hugely political game is being played and those on the front line who voice their concerns are isolated and punished - that was made clear by everyone. Those who are paid to manage the strangulations of funds clearly rule with an iron fist.

“There just aren’t enough staff,” a junior doctor we will call Mike told me. Mike had just stuck a huge needle into my tonsils to aspirate the pus from them and enable me to breathe. “And this is when mistakes happen,” said Mike, “when people are tired and overstretched.”

Mike has been in the NHS for the last 6 years. Mike looks around for help and gets a nurse on the end of a 12-hour shift to help. Let’s call her June. I ask him later how many people should be helping him with this procedure. Mike looks at me through jaded, bloodshot eyes; “Two,” he admits, “this is happening all the time now.”

This Mike, this hero who saved my life, who’s legally liable for my welfare and charged by the state to provide me with healthcare free at the point of need, knows he needs more help. And none is coming. In fact it’s getting worse.

“Social hours” - what a funny term for people working from dawn to dusk and then dusk until dawn with little if any repose. “You’d take the hours over the weekend,” Mike continues, “it made sense. But I’m 33 and don’t have any kids.”

Mike tells me about colleagues older and more beleaguered by the changes that will see them working over the weekend without any distinction made between that and the usual working week, when spouses are traditionally at work or kids at school. Mike talks of genuine fear in his colleagues at marriages ending and children getting even less time to kick a ball around with their dads and mums.

“It’s tired doctors that I worry about.” A nurse - call her Sally - is taking my blood pressure and changing my antibiotic drip. It is 6am. “We are taking about quite brilliant people, people I admire and respect. But how good is anyone’s decision-making after working over 12 hours?”

Sally looks around, concerned that she will be overheard. “They just don’t have the support they need. I had a Consultant need to go and sit in a room on his own after a patient died the other week.”

“Was it avoidable?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders.

What strikes one first is the mentality of these undervalued saints who work in our hospitals. These badly paid angels who day-to-day do nothing but save our lives. Much maligned and rarely praised, they are in a desperate state. Underfunding is reaching chronic levels and there is a really negative mindset becoming ingrained. We don’t care about them. They have been subject to a sustained campaign of abuse and neglect.

These people get little thanks for what they do. They are rarely told that they have thousands of patients’ eternal gratitude for using their expertise to snatch us back from the jaws of darkness and nurse us back to health. And that, I think, is terribly sad.

When it’s you in the ambulance, going through A&E and then on the ward, you see that the NHS is the crowning achievement of our nation. Words like austerity, targets and PPIs seem so utterly meaningless when you have a doctor trying to keep your airway clear by aspirating the pus out of your abscessed tonsil.

The relief, the palpable joy when they have changed the course of your downward trajectory is only matched by your utter certainty that you have to do the very little you can to remind everyone what our NHS does. Our NHS saves our lives - and the people who work there need our help.