My Evening Standard column: a big thank you to the staff at Charing Cross Hospital

Blimey, what a weird few days. Woke up at 4am on Friday with a strange stabbing pain underneath my right ribs, took a codeine, went back to sleep, woke again at 6.30 with the pain still knocking on my ribcage so tried to get up to make a cup of tea and practically fainted back on to my bed again. It was my appendix and I wrote about the whole thing in yesterday’s Evening Standard column HERE. Couldn’t be more grateful for the extraordinary kindness of all the staff at Charing Cross Hospital. This has been my third general anaesthetic in seven months, and coming into contact with so many nurses, doctors, porters, anaesthetists, surgeons and domestic staff has only reinforced my belief that those who work for the NHS are superhumans, imbued with special powers that many of us just aren’t.

On Sunday night, one of the patients in my ward was up at 4am and confused, refusing to get into bed and shouting loudly down the corridor at all the staff. ‘Don’t tell me to get into bed! You get into bed! Don’t call me my dear, I’m not your dear. I want my phone! Where’s my phone?’ and so on. The nurse in charge spent about half an hour calming her down before leading her back to bed. She hadn’t even had time to pee that night, she later said, because they’d had such a busy evening. Like I said, superhuman.

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