Reading through the stories from well known and not-so-well-known celebrities, authors, presenters and poets who have contributed to the 100 stories here reminded me of my own recent reasons to be extremely thankful for the NHS.
In fact Jaqueline Wilson's story in this book felt closest to my own experiences. For the first 52 years of my life I've had minor brushes with being in hospital myself, a couple of childhood things, a rather fetching scar on my chin from trying to balance on a football at school after watching "Gerry Cottle's Circus" - that sort of thing. Most of the time I had reason to go into hospital was to visit family or friends who were in there. The NHS saved my little brother from kidney failure and I remember the selfish feeling of hating hospitals and never wanting to visit them, but wanting to go in there to see him, spoil him rotten and make sure he was OK (which he was). The same went for my mum when she had a hysterectomy, and of course I went in to watch my daughter being born (again a story in the book struck a chord - Charlie Brooker, you're not the only one who took a terrible, terrible bad quality photo of your newborn but it's still the best photo you've ever taken and your most treasured).
My wife has had epilepsy since she was a teen, and I've been in with her several times - for scans and tests, and for a week's worth of monitoring. Like everyone else, taking all this stuff for granted, that it will just happen, it's just there, it's just provided. Grateful but strangely detached from it all.
They say that it takes something actually happening to you to really give you some perspective. We've seen this with the COVID-19 stuff, those self-obsessed individuals blithely refusing to wear masks, fetching up at the beach for a day of peeing everyone off with their disposable barbecues and poo-filled burger containers, claiming that the whole thing is some government hoax and that it's not nearly as serious as everyone makes out, full of ridiculous bravado until a friend or relative or close family member ends up with the Coronavirus and ends up gravely ill (or worse).
A month and a half ago I got up for work as normal. I'd recently been diagnosed with gallstones and had had one or two painful nights where those sharp little buggers had decided to have a disco in my guts. After a morning of work I was in the middle of making lunch when I suddenly felt pain like I'd never experienced before. Pain swiftly followed by vomiting and a feeling that any minute I was going to hit the floor hard.
I started howling - and I do mean howling, that's how bad the pain was. My poor wife and daughter were in the house and my wife phoned 999. Within minutes an ambulance arrived and two paramedics were there - two complete heroes who I never got the chance to properly thank. They took me to hospital, dosing me up with much needed pain relief, soothing talk, and all the things you need when all you can think about is how you feel like you've swallowed a tiger and it's trying to escape through your stomach wall.
I spent a week and a half in hospital being scanned, tested and tended to (Emilia Clarke's "Fish in white sauce" anecdote from the book made me smile, it was about the only meal I had the entire time - for the rest of the time I was on a drip only allowed to occasionally sip black tea). I had one of the most painful procedures possible for someone who is already in pain (an endoscopic scan which took 2 hours and left me feeling like I'd been mugged), and since then I've been back to hospital several times for followups. Acute gall bladder disease / pancreatitis was the diagnosis and it scared the living piss out of me. I dropped two stone (when I came out of hospital I couldn't even recognise my own reflection in the mirror nor the shape of my body, which began as a bloated sort of pear shape but rapidly shrank down until I looked like Jack Skellington on a slimfast diet).
All the care I received, all the things that you think are insignificant while you're lying in a hospital bed, all the staff that it takes to maintain a ward under normal circumstances, and all the staff it now takes to deal with the same ward under the current COVID-19 crisis, all of that stuff is what's at stake from a government that plays the sly fox card of pretending to care about the NHS, throwing token amounts of money at it, but always with an eye on how they could dismantle the whole thing and leave those on limited means literally dying because they can't afford private health insurance or coverage.
We clapped, we support them, but somehow it still feels like the NHS is living on borrowed time, but we will all fight - we (me, my family, everyone I know) and those who contributed to this wonderful book and the many millions and millions in the country who have stories to tell like mine.