READER’S DIGESTgenerously given and gallows
humour shared.
To begin with, Segal feels almost
beside the point as the doctors go
about their business. “To flag down a
medic here,” she says early on, “is like
trying to hail a Formula One racing
car as a taxi.” But the more she sees of
how well her daughters are looked
after, the more she comes to respect
the NHS (see sidebar)—and the
incredible job its staff do.
In this passage, it’s the day after the
birth, and she’s about to see her
daughters for the first time:At this hospital the Neonatal
Intensive Care Unit has wards of
four beds, and a minimum of two
nurses present on each ward at all
times. The soundtrack is a
combination of control tower,
computer-server room and busy
canteen, as orders are called out,
and a thousand toaster ovens ping,
over and over. It is dark but for the
banks of monitors, displaying
incomprehensible data. It could be
the cockpit of a space ship.
Each small astronaut has a
temperature monitor, an oxygen
saturation probe, a series of heart
monitors, and most have TPN, Total
Parenteral Nutrition, a mix of glucose,
protein and lipids provided by an
intravenous pump. Any and all of
these machines can beep, either to
alert the nurses to a problem or
sometimes simply just to say a quick‘‘
“I have read of American families [in
our position] selling homes, forced to
weigh and value every scan, every test
and medication against the financial
ruin to follow.
Gabe and I have been exceptionally
lucky: until last week, neither of us had
spent a night in hospital since our own
births. But the NHS has been here for
us all along nonetheless, invisible in its
familiarity, too old, too lumbering to
win the songs of gratitude and
romance it deserves. In good times it
goes all but unnoticed, like the hard
invisible work of a loving parent,
mentioned only in articles decrying
understaffed departments, long waiting
lists. And of course the NHS is, like all
human constructions, imperfect. But its
sheer moral courage as an endeavour
makes it an institution of which we
should be inordinately proud. It is a
monument to means-blind, universal
compassion, and to goodness.”“The egalitarian
compassion of the NHS”:
more from Mother ShipJULY 2019 • 125