The NHS saved my life – and I have a message for Steve Barclay

Without doctors and nurses I would be dead. Several times over, in fact

Hey, Steve Barclay. That’s right, you there. The secretary of state for making a mess of health and social care. Screw you. Ah, that feels better.

I apologise (to my readers, not Barclay). But I’m afraid that little outburst was necessary, for my continued mental health. You may recall that the execrable Barclay said striking ambulance staff had “taken a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients”.

This was very personal to me – not because I know or am related to any of them, but because without the NHS I would be dead. Several times over, in fact.

Regular readers will be aware that I have type 1 autoimmune diabetes. When I was (much) younger my immune system went bananas and ate my insulin-producing cells. T1s are a minority among diabetics, and I’m a minority among T1s because it happened when I was aged just two (it’s very rare in under-fives). I’ve been a human pin-cushion ever since, injecting myself with artificial insulin and pricking my fingers to test my blood sugar.

Nearly 50 years post-diagnosis, I’m still here. I even managed to survive having a cement truck run me over in a cycling accident, through the efforts of paramedics, nurses, and doctors who worked what felt like actual magic.

Now, every T1 experiences the condition slightly differently, but there is one thing we’re all familiar with: it is apt to throw you a curve ball every now and again. I’m one of the lucky ones, in that I always get a warning when my blood sugar is ditching, known as hypoglycaemia. An alarm call from my body that says, “eat something, now”.

Earlier this week I experienced one of those at midnight, before I went to bed. It was the worst I’ve had in some time. Fortunately, I always have glucose close by and I know what to do. I’ve never passed out like some of my friends. But it got me thinking: what if it had done that on the day of the strikes and my wife hadn’t been able to bring me around with a glucagon shot?

We have a car, but she wouldn’t have been able to get me strapped into it without assistance, even with my having lost roughly 10 kilos. This is where your mind can take you when you have a health condition and you’re left on your own, thanks to the mismanagement of the NHS by Barclay and his wretched, morally bankrupt party.

It’s not the strikers I blame for this frightening speculation. Au contraire: you can make the case that they’re doing us a favour. If they secure a decent settlement, the NHS might be able to attract the people it needs to boost service levels and improve call-out times.

NHS England currently has more than 100,000 vacancies, and Barclay doesn’t appear to have the faintest idea how to fill them. So I blame him for the strikes. He and his predecessors, one of whom, Jeremy Hunt, is now chancellor. Hunt keeps banging on about the “tough decisions” he’s having to make, poor lamb, because of the difficult economic situation Britain is in. What he doesn’t say is that while, yes, the world is in midst of a crisis, Britain’s problems have been greatly exacerbated by his party’s spectacular economic mismanagement.

I suspect my weight loss regime is part of the reason for my current low sugar levels. It has made things complicated. I’m eating less, requiring less insulin. I use a wheelchair to exercise, hard, which burns a lot of energy. I’ve had three successive appointments cancelled by Whipps Cross Hospital, and don’t have a date for a new one.

Thing is, getting regular health checks is what helps people like me to stay healthy in the first place. The complications are quite nasty and very expensive to treat. Some healthcare professionals like to remind you of them, when you’re lucky enough to secure an appointment with them, which is deeply irritating. I’m well aware, and dealing with the condition is stressful enough.

But you know what’s more irritating? Having a man like Steve Barclay in charge of the health service. Trying to live with a health condition against a backdrop of its deteriorating performance, thanks to him and Jeremy Hunt.

So I’ll say it again: screw you Steve Barclay. And screw you Jeremy Hunt. You can settle these strikes. And you should. It doesn’t have to be like this. The fact that it is down to those two and they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.