This is why I fight...

Picked up my prescriptions again last week. Every time I visit the doctors now, I'm reminded of my most dramatic trip there, back in late 2010.

I'd been having bouts of illness for several months. Fatigue to the point where walking across the room was a challenge, frequent vomiting in the mornings, and endless feelings of dehydration. I was working from home at the time, and still managed to end up too ill to work for seven days during the year.

Then, in October, I was taken out of action for a whole week. I spent four days on the sofa, wrapped in a fleece and a blanket, shivering to my bones. On Wednesday, my wife dragged me to pester my GP again; they took blood tests and called me back on Friday. By Thursday night, it took me three attempts to walk up the stairs, and I was mumbling deliriously as I did so.

On Friday, they called me in to discuss my results. After months of suffering with this mystery illness, just to hear it given a name was a huge relief. That name was Addisons Disease. Invariably fatal at the time Dr Thomas Addison first discovered it, these days it's medicated with steroids and has no effect on quality of life or life-expectancy at all. I was in the midst of an Addisonian crisis, the stage of the disease that comes just prior to death by circulatory collapse. Pleasant, eh?

I was taken to the Medical Assessment Unit at the Royal. Given the state I was in when I got there, the nurses informed me that the Intensive Care Unit had been notified of my arrival. It's all of about sixty feet from the main doors of the Royal to the corridor off towards the MAU. Walking that distance was one of the most physically strenuous things I've ever done.

At the MAU, I was hooked up to a drip, given anti-vomiting drugs, injected with steroids and talked through the process by a medical staff whose bedside manner was invariably superb. At each stage, they let me know what they were doing and why they were doing it. From being on the brink of death on Friday morning, and having had half a Pot Noodle to eat all week (it's funny what you can get down when you're ill), by tea time I was in a fit state to eat, and enjoy, a whole meal. By Saturday morning, after a sleep in my own private room, I was ready for release. Walking through the lobby 24 hours earlier had been like climbing the north face of the Eiger. Leaving, I strode across it easily, and when I got to the car park did some Dick van Dyke heel clicks for my wife's amusement. It was the fittest I'd felt in years.

The staff of the NHS saved my life that day, and did it with smiles on their faces and decency radiating from them throughout. As I type this I still feel a profound sense of gratitude.

This, I think to myself, is why I fight.