I'm Back, Mostly

Where the hell have I been? Answer — sick. Very sick. Serious infections are often thought of as quite un-modern, something from history books that used to be people's most likely cause of death. And while it's true that modern medicine has diminished the role of pathogens in paroling us beyond the corporeal, infection still kills around 5% of us in developed nations. Add in a plethora of infection-related deaths — some bug that finishes a weak heart, for instance, or the ever lurking threat of sepsis — and the true figure is quite a bit higher.

My recent infection resulted in about a week of feeling like a pain-addled old sock left out in a storm, a burst eardrum from the pressure in my ear-nose-throat system, and several weeks of slow, still ongoing, recovery. I was lucky. England had its worst viral end to the year since the pandemic.

I got much sicker once before. About twenty years ago, a common virus took a hard left turn into something horrific and near fatal. I lost almost all motor skills, and sat a long hospital stint with doctors struggling to figure out what was wrong with me. I was prodded and poked and tested, and slotted in and out of scanning machines like a pound coin in a shopping trolley. Then, suddenly, my system cleared it. I required physiotherapy to relearn how to walk afterwards, and used a cane for a while, but the worst part was the post-viral fatigue. It went on for years and took such a chunk out of my confidence that I lost much of my twenties.

When I rejoined the world, my over-correction was abnormal. I went from having a healthy fear of infection and filth, to having almost none. I thought nothing of stepping into covid hot sites at the start of the pandemic, long before we knew the risks, and I got so angry.

I've written several times on the failings of the UK government (and others) to tackle the pandemic. Actually, scratch that, "failings" is the wrong word. "Selfish, self-serving, short-sighted, incompetent, egotistical, arrogant, and utterly corrupt" is better. We spent more time working to limit the damage of Boris Johnson's populist brain-farts than we did leveraging the inherent excellence of the National Health Service. Such was the avalanche of disasters he attacked us with.

Take the Nightingale hospitals. Half a billion pounds poured into building temporary new hospitals to house covid patients. Sounds good in a press release, until you consider that we lacked adequate staff for our existing infrastructure and couldn't possibly find doctors and nurses for them. This was not an oversight on the government's part — they were told, they just didn't care. It was the press release that mattered to them, so the Nightingales sat unstaffed, wasted and idle.

As did much of the £12 billion spent on hugely overpriced PPE — gowns, masks, gloves, and so on. The whole world was scrambling for these items, but the UK's response was to introduce a competition-free procurement process in which "trusted" companies would be awarded immediate contracts. Logic suggests these companies were the ones already procuring PPE via their long-standing, global networks of reputable suppliers. Reality was that entirely new companies were set up by Tory cronies who had no experience of procuring PPE whatsoever. Much of the rubbish they brought into the country was so substandard that £4 billion of it was simply burned to produce energy. I don't know how much energy you get from burning latex gloves and plastic gowns, but I suspect this may have been history's most expensive source of non-renewables.

Then we had the mass vaccination events sucking away management and planning staff, understaffed local vaccination hubs, a separate data system that wasn't fit for purpose (and was downright dangerous!). And consider this: every year we vaccinate for flu. It's the single biggest thing in the healthcare calendar, and it's been going along swimmingly for decades. We know exactly how to do it. But the government couldn't let us vaccinate for covid in a quiet manner that we knew would work because they couldn't take credit for that. Boris Johnson wanted the covid vaccines to be a firework display for his re-election campaign, a poster for Brexit Britain, a feather in his sparse, now trampled and soiled, cap.

I lasted until the end of the vaccinations, until the second doses were administered to everyone, then I burned out and quit. I've been angry ever since, but I'd never considered that my anger might be rooted in my own experience of a near fatal infection. It seems silly that it never crossed my mind, but until this last virus, I hadn't had anything bad enough to make me think about it. I just mentally archived the whole thing. Now, I'm getting short of breath every time I climb the stairs to my office, and I'm still flushing hot and cold as I type. Both problems will pass, but I'm feeling a bit triggered. Annoyingly, and quite ironically, I'm feeling very angry about having wasted so much time being angry.

How did I let a shaved orangutan like Boris "let's invade the Netherlands" Johnson put a hobbling nugget of rage in my psyche? Why have I allowed such a pointless historical footnote to stymie my development as a human being? I've never met the clown. I don't wish to. But him, and Hancock and Gove and Cummings and Mone, and every other goon who stroked their egos, or thrust their snouts into the trough, set my blood boiling. I'd very much like that to stop, but I have no idea how to make it happen.

My wife suggests dropping my healthcare career and doing something else entirely. Something that doesn't involve people suffering, or seeking pharmaceuticals. It's tempting. Maybe I could find a beach somewhere and rent out deck chairs? I saw it happening all over sunnier climes as a kid, and if you squint at the entirely cash-based operations, and don't think too much, they're almost certainly… probably… not ways of laundering drug money.