This is the first NHS strike that has left me feeling frightened and abandoned

After eight months of walk-outs, this week’s 72-hour doctors’ strike is set to cause some of the worst disruption yet, writes James Moore. Someone is going to pay a hideous price – and it could be me

Doctors strikes are creating a crisis in the NHS (Getty)

The NHS is getting frightening. Hairs on the back of the neck, The Exorcist (director’s cut) in a dark, empty cinema on your own with no one to hold on for comfort-level frightening.

Hospital bosses have warned to expect “severe disruption” from this week’s 72-hour doctor’s strike. Those of us with health conditions will be on the frontlines. Thousands of appointments will be cancelled; appointments where test results are scrutinised, checks are performed and early warning signs of trouble are picked up on.

It goes without saying that complications are a lot less complicated when they are dealt with early. Galling as it is to bring economics into this sort of this discussion, it is also much cheaper. The net result of the ensuing chaos is that someone, somewhere is going to pay a hideous price. In three, six or 12 months time when they finally get seen, something awful is going to turn up.

That someone with something awful might be me.

There is a long list of complications that can flow from Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder in which your body destroys your insulin-producing cells, mostly when you are young. Having had the condition since the age of two, I learned the routine early: look after yourself, turn up to your appointments and do what doctors tell you.

But even if you do your damnedest to stay healthy – as I do now – the condition messes with you. Mine did in the summer when, I confess, I started to panic. I sought advice from my clinic, only to be told that email was the wrong way to get in touch. I should have called and left a message. When I complained, a consultant gave me the brush-off: as a journalist, she said, I should have realised there was a strike on.

Dear consultant: I’m very, very sorry my condition decided to throw a wobbly in the midst of industrial action and I tried to email because I thought that’d make it easy for you to respond. How about I give my immune system a good telling-off? And if that doesn’t work, there’ll be someone at A&E to see me, won’t there? Won’t there?

On this occasion, I managed to fix things myself. The trouble is, you can’t always do that.

I recently spoke to Kathy, who also has type 1 and lives in the North of England. What she told me chilled my blood. Her GP would not fulfil a prescription for insulin because she was due for a medication review... except that she couldn’t book one before she ran out. She’s a busy working mum. Juggling that with a health condition is challenging, at the best of times.

“At the end of the day, you don’t live too long without insulin,” she told me. “I’m trying to get the stuff that keeps me alive but it seems like a lottery. A colleague of mine has been into their GP and said: ‘I will die if I don’t get this.’ I’ve spoken to other people with the same experience.”

Me too. There is a terrifying sense of things breaking down.

You may say, well, Kathy’s issue was with her GP and they’re not on strike. The problem, however, is with the system as a whole. When one part starts to fail, it impacts the others and if you’re like Kathy, well, where do you go?

I have considerable sympathy with horribly overworked, underpaid junior doctors. I find it harder to feel the same for consultants. They have every right to make their case. But it’s tough to shake off the bitter personal experience of brusque (verging on callous) treatment from people who are, when all is said and done, quite well paid.

I’m also troubled that the voice of the patient has been excised from the ongoing debate about the health service – perhaps because those of us with health conditions and/or disabilities are rare in the media.

This must change. We need to be heard. Even when – especially when – the NHS goes on strike.

Access to medication and check-ups matters to people like me as much as food and water do to everyone else. We are put at risk every time treatment is withheld. Make no mistake: a cancelled appointment is the withholding of treatment. Getting one should not require a bureaucratic bare-knuckle brawl.

I’m writing this through a fog of Covid. Mercifully, while it has sent my blood sugars haywire, Pirola isn’t a patch on Delta, or Omicron. I remember the raw fear when Covid-19 entered our home.

My immuno-suppressed wife, who was hit first, got up and tried to do things when I fell ill. Within a couple of hours, she sounded as if she was breathing with an elephant sitting on her chest. But your lips had to be going blue before an ambulance would come out. The GP did eventually call, but with both of us very sick, we still felt abandoned. Of course, we were at the dawn of a global pandemic, an extreme situation, a one-off.

Except that now, such abandonment is an everyday reality. And it’s getting worse.