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@BobbinBird
I am extremely grateful for the NHS. Here's why....
I was born with a severe spinal curvature. I was seen at once by a top consultant in the best orthopaedic hospital in the country, and I remained under his care until he retired when I was 24. In the winter months as a kid I had to go into hospital every two months to have plaster bodycasts applied, and would stay in for 3 days; in the summer months I wore a custom-made metal brace, which was horrible but was a work of engineering art and held my spine in place whilst I grew a bit. When I was 10 I had two operations to fuse the whole of my thoracic spine, 6 weeks in hospital with 2 weeks in halo-tibial traction (pins in skull and ankles, tightened daily with a spanner, ouch). I had more surgery when I was 18 (two more surgeries to fuse my lumbar spine and break my ribcage and reset it into a more normal looking shape), 25 (another ribcage surgery, as they decided they could make it look even better) and finally a surgery in May this year to extend my fusion to L4.
I'm on loads of expensive painkillers but I pay just over a hundred quid a year for a pre-payment card which covers everything. I've had tons of physio, I've had three weeks on a fabulous pain-management holiday, I get free use of my hospital's tropical hydrotherapy pool.
All of my treatment has been free.
I have friends who were also born with spinal curvatures, in countries where the treatment wasn't freely available. They're massively deformed now and have to use oxygen to help them breathe because their lungs are being crushed. It's sobering, they actually started out with curves much smaller than mine.
My spine is fused from T1-L4, I have just one vertebra left to move with. Despite this I am incredibly active, I climb mountains and love to hike for miles. Bluequinn bought me a bike and taught me to cycle last year (it wasn't possible for me to have learned as a kid, due to the braces and plaster casts) and now I absolutely love it - I doubt I'll ever manage a road bike due to not being able to bend forward enough comfortably, so I ride a Dutch bike and a Moulton F Frame instead. My point is that without the NHS I probably wouldn't be anywhere near as fit as I am now, and my quality of life would be in the shitter.
I've had plenty of crap from the NHS and can moan about individual incidents and the odd shite doctor, but on the whole I cannot praise it enough.