I had a really bad cold last year. It seemed to go on for weeks. I got what my doctor hesitated to call full-on pneumonia but she couldn’t think of anything else to call it. I had my ears syringed for the first time ever and I had ringing in my left ear afterwards. I went to Dorset trying to impress someone lovely with my hiking abilities which was slightly marred when she practically frog-marched me up a hill. And remained resolutely unimpressed, or at least she didn’t show it in a way I’d entertained.<\/p>\n

My left ear has kept on ringing, or more accurately making a high-pitched whining noise but I teach so I’m used to that anyway. Two weeks ago it got really loud so I went to the doctor again. I thought she’d do much the same as my friend in Dorset; recommend neck massage, decline to do it herself and just be very nice. She didn’t. Instead, she sent me for an MRI scan to see if I have a brain tumour.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday I still hadn’t heard when I was going to have this done after ten days so I rang the doctor. Odd, they said. It’s an urgent scan. I did the sharp intake of breath then. Phone the hospital. I did. They said it wasn’t urgent. At which point I had to put them right on some minor details. Like the fact I might have a disease which now that A Cabinet Minister has it will see attention and urgent something must be doning left right and centre. Given that Tessa Jowell’s government was quite keen on privatising the NHS and she seems keener on magical thinking and untrialled wonder drugs (wasn’t there an Austrian who did that too?) don’t expect anything much to change.<\/p>\n

I phoned the doc again. It is urgent. We’ll email them now. I phoned the hospital and said I’d stay on the line until the email came in. It duly did seconds later. Oh yes. It is urgent. How about Saturday?<\/p>\n

No four weeks, no rationed health service bullshit an American tried to tell me is normal in the UK on Facebook this week. Just the same as I’ve always experienced with the NHS: once something is flagged and it’s a dangerous thing they act fast and effectively. It’s always been the same with doctor’s appointments too in my not overly-funded rural area: if you need an appointment urgently then you get one. If you want an appointment that fits in with your lifestyle then you can obviously wait.<\/p>\n

So I might have a brain tumour. And I might die within the foreseeable future rather than as an inevitable indeterminate abstract. My friends’ reactions, those I’ve told, have been mixed.<\/p>\n

An ex is devastated and can hardly speak. My Dorset friend is taking her forthright view that there are lots of other things it could be. A friend in Spain is thinking of me. One in Portugal too, and making jokes to hide her shock. The biggest surprise was a very old friend who took the opportunity to launch into an attack on unspecified waste in the NHS, in her view substantiating this by recounting how she had to sit around Out-Patients with her son once.<\/p>\n

I think she missed the point. If you’re in Out-Patients then you self-evidently are not a medical priority. I remember sitting there once, years ago, with a painful burn all one Sunday afternoon after I soldered my wrist to a car battery by wearing a metal-strapped wristwatch, which at least taught me to never wear plebian fashion ever again.<\/p>\n

Today is Friday. A brilliant friend is driving me to the hospital tomorrow, in case it’s not great news, in which case she says I won’t feel like driving.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what the news will be; that’s why we’re checking. But I do know that I won’t be charged a single penny for this scan. Not one. And if you want treatment free at the point of use, or you want to be bankrupted, then you need to ask specific questions and think very carefully next time you vote. Because one thing I do know from this. One day it will happen to you. As surely as the sun rises your sun will set for the last time. It really does toll for thee, and not a toll of the kind Jeremy Hunt thinks is a brilliant idea. You are not going to get out of this alive. How much do you want to pay first?<\/p>\n

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