Struck both by his clinical condition and the fact that this poor man had spent an entire year crawling through the Kafka-esque obstacle course required to get to the top of an NHS waiting list, I asked our redoubtable scheduling team to list him for surgery the following week, something which would inevitably result in other patients’ operations being rescheduled. Mr X first came to see me in early June, needing triple heart-valve surgery, major surgery by anyone’s definition and, before the cynics give their two-pennies’ worth, not a self-inflicted illness, just rotten bad luck. It is one of the gallows-humour aphorisms of my profession that it is the patients we have served least well who are the most grateful and, while I am delighted that this gentleman’s surgery has gone well and that he is now well on the way to recovery, he is someone who has most definitely not been well-served by our NHS. This one touched me to the quick, and not just because it was accompanied by a gigantic box of diabetes-inducing doughnuts. I receive dozens of such messages every year, it is one of the joys of my job.
We all know that “claps don’t pay the bills” but, in common with all my colleagues, I am always touched by the generosity of our patients and the ways in which they express their gratitude for what we do. Yesterday, we (the surgical team in the hospital in which I work) received a “thank you” card from the family of a 44-year-old man on whom we had operated the previous day.
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