The NHS does not live by bread alone
 
It thrives on thanks and gratitude like the rest of us.  Thank you for everything, people say, thank you for being there, whether they have complex cancers, twisted their ankles on ice, a child with a high temperature in the middle of the night.  ‘Thank you for everything’ and meaning it, the tough bits forgotten in the joy of recovery. 
 
But there is an unbeautiful side to this, a dirty underbelly.  Thank you for being there.  Nothing more is expected and the gratitude is the gratitude of the pauper to the workhouse for giving him a roof over his head.  Just keep your expectations low. Be grateful for what is given you and do not presume to ask for more.  Understand everyone is VERY VERY BUSY.  Understand cock-ups happen.  Do not complain. 
 
Do not expect a functioning bell.  Do not expect certain minimums because they probably don’t exist.
 
I think it ill understood by those who rale against private medicine that no, you are not paying, though I suppose in some select institutions you may be, for a maid in a frilly apron to serve you breakfast, you are paying for things which should be automatic, standard in the NHS but are not.  To be precise you are paying for certainty. 
 
To be precise you are paying for the right to complain, the right to be angry, the expectation those in charge will think it intolerable you have no reliable bell.
 
Which of course somewhere on Planet Real it is.
 
You are paying for what the NHS should automatically be and is not and all the politics in the world, careful enumeration of the rights and wrong of private medicine, do not change that what you the inveigher against BUPA ought to be doing is demanding change in the NHS, which instead you regard together with all its employees as the most sacred of sacred cows.
 
If you wanted to be nasty – me, vicious about matters medical, how can this be – you could call it self-satisfied twat syndrome which is not less acute for at least sometimes being wholly subconscious: how we do things is the right and proper way in which they should be done, no criticism conceivable.  This extends to all levels of staff
 
You are paying for control, for leverage over what happens to you, because very little else offers protection against self-satisfied twat syndrome, the absolute impenetrable conviction of the wrong that they are right. 
 
The most popular girl in the class will now compound her sins.  You are paying for standards being forced on the scrapings, the dregs who flock into the NHS.  This is not class, millions of working-class people would happily raise 50 different kinds of hell at evident failings.    Background is not class, however often the two are confused.  This as previously examined in forensic detail, mongs dead from the fucking neck up, deadheads in whom little or nothing moves between the ears.  Because the NHS is a haven for fucking boneheads, robots, run by and for them.
 
Thus we return to the quarter to criminal, vicious, spiteful, ignorant, ineducable, butchering murdering subhuman vermin of UCH:in Boden, Fenton, Rowley and Saunders.
 
Merit,  what does the criminal traitor animal such as Boden merit, the return of hanging and being taken to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until she is dead, or sent down for 30 years, an insolent and evil criminal completely unfit for authority. 
 
The sick twisted evil gloating monkey Saunders, what does it merit, a fucking strait jacket
 
And the doctors, see no evil, hear no evil, look no hands, shouldn’t dream of interfering while the criminal vermin of nurses do their dirty work for them.  No question of objecting to a woman being  crippled in front of their eyes, no question of objecting to the abolition of democracy, no question of demanding the basic standards of a free and democratic society be adhered to, demanding animals adhere to fact and reason, that they speak in the open where they can be challenged.  No question of calling out liars, demanding the facts are publicly established.  Doctors just couldn’t do that.

Just leave me to be butchered, destroyed by their filthy criminal vermin, that cunt Linch and his obscene filthy little pets, Plucinski and Ardeshna.  Yup, judge a man by the livestock he cherishes.  I suppose the three of them, Naylor, Goldstone and Linch, are all married to bumptious vicious malignant stupid ignorant butchering murdering tard skivvy vermin.  All hanging on every word that drips from the twisted animal mouths of evident butchers, evident traitors, evident psychopaths, in defiance of the evidence of their own eyes.
 
No transparency, no accountability, no oversight, no factual basis for their conduct, no reason, no use for language, no ethics.
 
Only the sniggering and tittering of skull-faced subhuman vermin who should have been instantly struck off, finding terribly amusing my objection to having been crippled and insistence I live in a free, democratic, rational and civilized country, half-wits jabbering and lying and whining behind closed doors. 
 
Perhaps offal such as McGuckin and Plucinski who by their accents quite possibly do not have British passports, could be put out to sea in small boat, if those who are not British nationals cannot be prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the Queen.  Disgusting filthy bottomlessly evil sick twisted psychopathic and of course mongoloid animal creatures. A fucking capering arse-wiper criminal made me into a fucking labourer probably filled with lies from another dirty little arse-wiper, the mong Wilson, probably backed by Coulter herself, not wanting her pig-boy’s money-sinner compromised, and I end up ignored, isolated, thrown on the scrapheap. 

What the hell is the matter with these fucking people?  They’re fascists, traitors, committed to the destruction of freedom and democracy, psychopaths who think they decree the lives and deaths of others.  There is no other fucking explanation of their absolute insolent evil.
 
On the plus side I do not think the Welfare State is about to be destroyed just yet, so I should totter along OK and I shall expose the traitors, the insolent insolent vermin who shit on the Seven Principles of Public Life and those who honour them and keep them in positions of power, the psychopaths who reject all questioning of their conduct as inconceivable, the butchers and murderers, the wordless mindless subhumans who have no use for fact, language, reason, the apes whose response to language is wordless violence, bloody capering arse-wipers.
 
But don’t worry I’ll do it laughing and keep my cortisol levels happy; I think in fact  my excessively low mood previously was due to infection but love to my adrenals certainly.
 
Possibility: I have only one adrenal gland, not the usual double issue.  This may be a factor.  I had a kidney removed. I read that the adrenals sit ‘on top’ of the kidneys.  Are they attached?  Did they take the adrenal gland with the kidney?    
 
So back to the NHS in general, do let’s talk about arse-wiping.  I gag.  I gag in the dentist’s chair.  I gagged when having a bronchoscopy.  I gag at smells. I am champion gagger.  This is clearly not a quality required for working with both the human and the non-human body, whether live or dead.  Whether the reflex can be overcome, whether there is a pill that suppresses it, I know not – whether indeed anyone has ever had to drop out of medical/nursing/veterinary training because of an inability to overcome it, though I don’t suppose four-legged animals mind. 
 
Given general aversion to the by-products of the body, especially the sick one, those who cope with them are designated angels, when their key feature is actually their sense of smell.  There is no other reason to seriously object to a pile of shit, so long as you do not stick your fingers in it, unless it is thought to have emanated from some infectious person.
 
There are of course other reasons for the ‘angel’ epithet, being kind, being gentle, giving time.  None of these apply to sitting behind a computer. They apply to some nurses because they are nice people.  They do not apply to others who are less nice people.
 
So you put a moulded piece of cardboard under someone, wait for him or her to partially fill it and remove and dispose of it.  This does not require much in the way of brain. Nor does reading the machine that measures BP etc.  Reading what tablets someone should take and solemnly handing them over is also actually not complex specialized work: millions of people do it for themselves at home or do it for others, as I did for Katie.  Hate to tell you, Nurse, this is not prescribing, which does require something in the way of a brain. 
 
Someone called Ruth May has just celebrated nurses for International Nurses Day and of course no-one is gainsaying her and indeed ITU nurses for instance do display ‘skill and expertise’ but we do not want to get carried away here and insist skill and expertise are vital. The devil is in the detail and is probable, unless she has traversed a very gilded path to the top that this woman perfectly well knows that. 
 
There was an article about Florence Nightingale, about which it may be said that she would almost certainly have given Jane Average Nurse the bolloxing of a lifetime.  For instance  it does not seem that  ‘can’t’ was a word in her vocabulary.   I don’t think the cleaning would have impressed her either. 
 
No, she did not just waft around with a lamp.  She was dynamite, bloody, bloody bright.
 
“I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.”
 
But Nightingale knew that data was only as persuasive as the graphs that illustrated them, so she became a pioneer in data visualisation. She made famous the polar area graph, which showed that soldiers in Scutari died of preventable diseases rather than their battle wounds, and that their mortality rate plummeted when a sanitation commission cleaned up the hospital’s infected water supply. She would use the information to save countless more civilians and soldiers from dying because of poor living standards and sanitation at home. In 1858, the woman who was not allowed to attend university because of her gender was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/05/how-would-florence-nightingale-tackled-covid-19-200-year-anniversary
 
I know nothing about infection control bar what any sentient householder knows and the wildly conflicting versions in the papers.  I cannot therefore pronounce on correct procedures but I can pronounce on, what shall we say, differing approaches.  Everyone in the hospital wore a mask but beyond that there were clear differences in the wearing of aprons, the use of sanitiser, the washing of hands. 
 
Perhaps it has been tested and decided that it is for instance simply not necessary to wipe down everything with disinfectant each day, which is just as well because it isn’t so wiped.  If that sounds antsy, it’s broadly only what I do at home, even without the plague, not the floor daily, but wipe down all surfaces. 
 
Er, isn’t that what people do.  You do the washing-up, put it away and wipe down the surfaces.   I’m no Ms Ideal Home.  Maybe I don’t immediately put it away, but when I do I wipe down the surfaces. 
 
There is no point in a sentient middle-class woman being shocked at the standards of some of the working-class.  There, that’s said.  Others of the working class of course are meticulous, historically known as doorstep polishers.  Remark casually in the Sun’s comments that they wipe down any shopping they have delivered, any deliveries.  It can’t do any harm and may do good. So how many people have handled whatever it is, breathed over it, had a quick hack, sneezed, no matter how innocent the cause. 
 
Enormous fun can be had checking out various versions of how long this bloody virus survives on wood, paper, plastic, cardboard, metal. 
 
Let it be clearly said that many of the basic tasks of nursing are only what millions of unqualified relatives do. 
 
So we’re playing a game here, which might be summed up in one line as ‘all nurses are Florence Nightingale worthy of election to the Royal Statistical Society’.  It is of course mad crap. 
 
Florence Nightingale or just my Aunt Margaret, my Aunt Betty and my Aunt Ray, all of whom, you may recall were theatre sisters at UCH – and all of whom were entirely capable of being acerbic. Very very acerbic.  Family trait. 

Indeed the NHS does not live by bread alone.  It lives with criminals untouched on lies, violence, corruption and the naivety of those who fall for the hype and insist that its being fundamentally A Good Thing means it is without flaw, beyond criticism, anything anyone forced to admit is wrong with it the result of underfunding.