Don't wait for Godot, live for today, tomorrow might never come!

It was the romantic poet, author and politician, Victor Hugo (of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables fame) who said ‘Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life’. This past week I have done a bit of both. The dreaming came courtesy of the antivirals I have been taking for my bout of shingles. The dreams were really weird. It felt like I was hallucinating and doing so on an endless loop. Very strange and disturbing. I woke up not rested at all, and the debilitating fatigue that followed was incredibly frustrating.

The shingle blisters have gone, leaving red and very inflamed skin patches behind. However, the nerve pain is still there and ever present. I know the shingles will eventually pass; I have just to be patient and wait for it to do so. I also have to be patient while I wait for my CT Scan results. I agreed to be part of an NHS lung cancer screening programme. This involved a telephone assessment, and yesterday, a CT scan.

The scan was over and done with in less than 10 minutes. However, I now have to wait 6 weeks for the result. I don’t have any of the associated symptoms of lung cancer, so I’m not that perturbed at having to wait. I was selected for the screening because of my age and because I once was a smoker. Other folk who might be waiting for health assessments or treatment are perhaps not so fortunate, although there has been a slight improvement in the numbers recently. 

In April this year there was 6,108,384 people on a waiting list. Some 2.53 million of these patients had waited over 18 weeks, and around 100,000 had been waiting over a year to receive their care. Being on a waiting list is not good for anyone. Research by the Nuffield Trust found that many patients experience a deterioration in their condition, sometimes resulting in more complex interventions being required. The research also noted the negative impact being on a waiting list can have on a person’s mental health and wellbeing.

Additionally, there are over 3000 patients each day who are receiving care in corridors and other ‘inappropriate’ settings. Often patients have little privacy, and such settings can be obtrusively noisy. Not a great environment for patients to flourish in. The use of such settings reflects the lack of beds for those assessed in A&E departments as requiring further in-patient care. So, until a bed becomes available, they have to wait in corridors.  

Both type of waits are not new phenomena. There was a growing waiting list problem before Covid 19, and the pandemic just exasperated the capacity issues secondary care services were increasingly facing. The NHS as a whole has been struggling to fully recover. Which brings me to Dave. On our recent Grand Lancaster Canal Adventure, we were forced to wait a day for canal services to open in order to buy some much needed diesel.

We had moored up at Galgate Marina. The marina boasts a nearby pub which we had frequented on our outward journey. We were looking forward to another good meal. Unfortunately, we arrived 5 minutes after the kitchen had closed for the evening. Sitting with a compensatory glass of wine and a G&T we fell into conversation with a chap at the next table called Dave. He had a magnificent handlebar moustache and a great story to tell.

Dave lived on his canal boat, but worked across the Lake District cleaning windows. He was very content with his life and was looking forward to his girlfriend finally joining him to share a life afloat together. He had also been a nurse. A very skilled nurse working in both intensive care and theatres. The stress of nursing through Covid had proved too much for him and his mental health began to deteriorate. He left the NHS soon after the pandemic started to settle. I didn’t disclose that I had also been a nurse, it was his story. I did thank him for his service and wished him well. Sad as his departure from the NHS might be, I admired him for not simply waiting for things to change for him, but to get out there and make things happen. He had long dreamed of living on a narrow boat, and leaving the NHS allowed him to do so. Dave described his life as being calmer and more settled these days. He was content. Listening to Dave's story reminded me we have but one life, so don't waste time waiting, get out there and live it.