Stafford Hospital

Stafford Hospital in 1984

I celebrated my 81^st birthday on the 2^nd April two years ago on my daughter’s husky farm in Lapland, ending the day by sleeping in an igloo in the middle of the kennels, when the temperature was minus 22 degrees Celsius.

Twenty-five years earlier it looked extremely unlikely that I would see another birthday, having been diagnosed with advanced cancer of the colon. The surgeon, Mr Bridger, made no secret of the fact that at that stage the outlook was gloomy.  I went into Stafford Hospital, not expecting to come out again.

My daughter, Anna, was thirteen years old.  We had always been very close and completely dependent on one another.  Our separation devastated us but I was so ill that there was nothing either of us could do about it.

‘I shall never grow old.  Nor will my sight and hearing ever fade.  The aches and pains of old age will never trouble me.’ I comforted myself with these and similar words but I wept for Anna.

As I lay hovering between this world and the next after the operation, my body was worn out from pain, weakness, and sobbing.  At that stage, it would have been so easy to surrender to the inevitable.  An Israeli lady, working as an orderly on the ward, came and laid her hands on my forehead.  Through a haze the words, ‘Fight.  Don’t give up,’ reached me.  Her touch was cool on my fevered brow, and a strange power seemed to pass from her to me.  She told me that she had used this power to comfort dying soldiers in the Arab-Israeli War.  A prayer formed on my lips - ‘Please, God, spare me for as long as Anna needs me.’

In 1984 nurses had time to spend with patients who needed extra care.  One, in particular, became very close to me and she put her arms around me, holding me tight before bursting into tears, saying that she would be in trouble for becoming so emotionally involved with a patient.  Her tears suggested she knew I was dying.  The head nurse had been rather hard on me, making me walk about briskly as I cried out in pain, but she, too, showed compassion.  ‘I am doing it for your own good,’ she explained.  She spent time with me.  She was moving to a new job and one of her leaving gifts was an electric mixer. 

‘I want you to be the first to benefit,’ she declared, as she whipped up an egg, adding a glass of sherry and hot milk. ‘Here.  Drink this.  It’s delicious.’

Having eaten no solid food for several months, I was like a skeleton from Belsen.  That eggnog saved me.  It restored my appetite.

All night long my sobbing would keep me awake and the nurse on duty would come with a cup of freshly brewed tea and words of comfort.

When signs of an infection appeared on the wound, the nurse ran a bath to which she added fistfuls of salt and let me lie there soaking.  The care and attention to every little detail were really great.

After three weeks I left hospital, knowing that the cancer had already spread to the lymph glands before the surgeon removed them. ‘I have done all that I can,’ he announced.  ‘Your life now rests in God’s hands.’  You should see the ward each day as he made his rounds.  Every magazine had to be neatly in its place and not a speck of dust was to be seen.   On reading the recent devastating report on Stafford Hospital, I can’t help wondering if a patient in my situation would survive today.

   

An article in a newspaper at that time stated that 23,000 people in Britain fall victim to cancer of the colon every year and that 18,000 of these die.  The 5,000 who survive have caught it in its early stages when it is curable.  These statistics were terrifying and my situation seemed clear.  What lay before me was a journey I would have to face alone.

While adjusting to the frustrations of coping with this enormous burden, I read about a young research doctor in London, Vicky Clement-Jones, who was similarly facing the likelihood of losing her battle with advanced ovarian cancer.  Like me, she was upset by the secrecy surrounding the disease and people’s reluctance to say the word ‘cancer’.  She launched a support organisation - ‘BACUP’ - and I contacted her. 

Letters passed back and forth between us till her death in 1987.  In her final letter, written on her death-bed, she asked me to go on flying the flag when others lost the battle.  Vicky filled me with hope.  I knew what I had to do – go on fighting.  I was among those who were invited to her memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral, but by then a full-time teaching job kept me from attending.

It is hard when another person loses the battle, but Vicky had inspired me with the will to fight and think positively. On reading ‘Cancer Ward’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I concentrated on one thing he said - that those who gave in, died, but those who fought, survived.  Anna was my guiding star, my reason for living.

Every morning, in the months and years ahead, I would look up at the sky, and the beauty of the world would strike me afresh. It was good to be alive.  As the first snowdrops appear each spring, I still sing and dance for joy.

I remember helping with a street collection for the Samaritans on my 60^th birthday.  Calling out, ‘I’m sixty today.  Help the Samaritans,’ encouraged people to dig deep into their pockets.  It was wonderful to be sixty.  How could I have visualised then that I’d reach 81?  .  My life over the past 25 years has been full of adventures and challenges, undreamed of in my younger days.  Anna and eight of her wonderful explorer/adventurer friends came to stay with me for my 77^th birthday and they gave me a day to remember.  In the afternoon I went cycling over Cannock Chase with a top British cyclist

In September 2007 and again that December I travelled to Northern Lapland and enjoyed activities such as kayaking alone down a remote river and riding a skidoo across a frozen lake that I had previously canoed across.

All the insurance companies I contacted either refused me travel insurance or demanded an enormous premium while imposing restrictions. However, I travelled without insurance and I enjoyed every activity on offer. I drove a team of huskies across the frozen lake and through the woods and across frozen marshes and ventured out on snowshoes and rode a skidoo on the lake while breathing in the pure air of the Arctic wilderness and revelling in the silence and beauty.

We have three ages - how we see ourselves, how others see us, and, finally, our chronological age. Why should being over 80 make you dispensable and a liability?  At this point, I would like to express my gratitude and pay tribute to the consultants and doctors and nurses and all the staff in Cannock Hospital for their dedication and care in recent years. Never once have any of them made me feel that my age made any difference to the care offered.  On the contrary, it is obvious that they look on the well-being of their patients as their priority and I am glad that our hospital in Cannock has escaped serious criticism.  I would like to mention, in particular, Mr Travlos and his team, and Dr Spencer, and more recently, the Eye Centre.  We can but hope that those who have been obsessed with targets and the ticking of boxes have got the message and leave our doctors and nurses, teachers and police to do the jobs they have been trained for. What we expect in return for our taxes is not window-dressing and a load of jargon and a ‘feel-good’ factor for ‘managers’, but basic care and service. Our hard-earned money should be spent as we intend and not used to line the pockets of people who may care little about the problems of those who are in the front line, but are more interested in gaining accolades for their own so-called achievements.

I would like, finally, to express my admiration for Julie Bailey and all that she has done to highlight what has been happening in Stafford Hospital.  We need more people like her to stand up and speak up for a return to the standards of the past.