GRATITUDE

Judg­ing by all the cough­ing and hawk­ing I’ve wit­nessed around me this win­ter, many read­ers will be able to iden­tify with the topic of this month’s col­umn. As thou­sands of young doc­tors walk off the job in the UK, this is not the first time I’ve praised the Cata­lan health sys­tem, al­though here’s hop­ing that for my own sake it’s the last for a very long time.

After vis­it­ing the UK in mid-Oc­to­ber, “that land of pesti­lence” as one friend re­cently de­scribed it, I re­turned with my first ever bout of Covid. Since then, I seem to have had what my GP de­scribed as “an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of viruses”, pos­si­bly not helped by a bronchial in­fec­tion. All of this means that for around 10 weeks I was cough­ing up all man­ner of dis­gust­ing spu­tum from my throat and chest. At times it hon­estly felt like hav­ing glue in my air­ways. Enough of that though, and on to the anec­dote.

Due to the above, I felt it nec­es­sary to seek out some med­ica­tion on Fri­day De­cem­ber 8. Poor tim­ing of course, given that the long week­end had kicked in and the CAP was closed until Mon­day, but de­cid­ing I didn’t want to wait that long I duly headed off to the ER in the hope of pick­ing up some­thing to ease the con­ges­tive mass build­ing in my chest.

Forty-eight hours later I was lying on a ter­ri­fy­ingly cold sur­face in an op­er­at­ing the­atre hav­ing a tube pushed through an artery in my wrist to reach my heart. Not what I had ex­pected when I’d jumped breezily onto my scooter on the Fri­day morn­ing. The rea­son for this frankly quite trau­matic ex­pe­ri­ence? El­e­vated lev­els of tro­ponin had been de­tected in my blood dur­ing my visit to the ER, mean­ing only one thing in West­ern med­i­cine – a heart prob­lem. Since it was a hol­i­day, the only re­course was to admit me to the car­di­ol­ogy ward and wait for a heart scan to rule out any im­me­di­ate dan­ger.

This is where my praise for Cata­lan health pro­fes­sion­als comes in. Firstly, for the young car­di­ol­o­gist whose job it was to per­suade me to stay in hos­pi­tal for the week­end. Be­cause I was hav­ing none of it… I was fine, my heart was fine, there was noth­ing to worry about, just give me some meds for the con­ges­tion and I’ll be on my way. After much del­i­cate ca­jol­ing, she even­tu­ally re­sorted to the only thing that was going to get me to stay, “Well, we can’t keep you here, but if you go home and have a heart at­tack, your fam­ily will not be able to deal with it in the same way we can here at the hos­pi­tal, and you might ac­tu­ally die”. Gulp. Ah, well, in that case, maybe I’ll stay, I mut­tered, slightly em­bar­rassed that I’d forced her to this point.

After two days in hos­pi­tal, I was for­tu­nate that the team in charge of doing the heart pro­ce­dure was called in on the Sun­day morn­ing (al­though sadly sug­gest­ing that some other per­son may not have been so for­tu­nate), and they were able to give me the all-clear and send me home on the Sun­day evening. More praise is due to those who con­ducted the pro­ce­dure, whose pro­fes­sion­al­ism around some­one who was start­ing to feel quite pan­icky about the pos­si­ble out­come was ex­em­plary, cul­mi­nat­ing in the words “You’re fine!” while the tube was still there deep in­side me. In other words, as soon as it was pos­si­ble to al­le­vi­ate my con­cerns.

It was at this point that, to my great sur­prise, I broke down in tears, re­leas­ing all the anx­i­ety that had ev­i­dently built up since they had told me about the heart issue. I will need fur­ther tests to de­ter­mine just why these lev­els are or were el­e­vated, but I rest as­sured in the knowl­edge that, what­ever my phys­i­cal con­di­tion, I am in the best pos­si­ble hands.

On a final note, a friend later asked me whether it was now “busi­ness as usual” or whether the whole ex­pe­ri­ence had changed my out­look on life. “Very much the lat­ter”, was my reply, and I enter 2024 not only with a feel­ing of grat­i­tude for all that life has brought me so far, but also a first ever bucket list of things to do be­fore... well, you know. A Happy New Year to all.

Opin­ion