NHS staff are superheroes and we cannot applaud them enough – Susan Morrison

NHS staff, like those who make you the best tea in the world, tell you it’s normal to cry after cancer surgery, and unexpectedly incinerate your gall bladder, are amazing, writes Susan Morrison

Forth Valley Royal Hospital staff clap for the NHS, carers and all essential workers (Picture: Michael Gillen)

She came back after the surgery to tell me they had removed the offending cancery bits, checked the rest, and then dropped the bombshell that they’d also taken out the gallbladder, because there was a ‘respectably sized’ gallstone in there. So they just whipped the lot out. Where is it? I said, startled. We binned it, she said, airly. But that was my gallbladder, and my gallstone.

Sorry, she said if we’d known you wanted to make a pendant out of it, we might have kept it. But we’ve incinerated it.

Given that in the last two years my boobs, a chunk of my bowel, now a decent lump of my liver and my gallbladder have all gone to the fiery flames of NHS incinerators, I suspect I’m being cremated by instalments.

You don’t remember much after surgery. Nurses in masks come and ask questions, take temperatures, oxygen levels and blood pressures and wake you up to tell you that you’ve been sleeping well, but not peeing enough, which I apologised for, but was a bit baffled about what course of action I could take.

They make you tea. NHS tea is the best in the world.

Nurses have a superhuman quality about them. It’s not just the medical care. People like Nurse Jackie and Iris in high dependency, Colin and Bill on the wards, radiate calm and caring like a forcefield.

When I was a girl, we elevated the men who got themselves killed on foreign battlefields as heroes, despite the fact that most of those wars, with the exception of WW2, were pretty pointless.

All along, the real heroes were the ones who patch us up, incinerate our gallstones and bring cups of tea in the middle of the night, hold your hand and say, yes, it’s normal to cry, you’ve been through a lot.

Did you applaud the NHS? Well, do more. Commit to protecting our most heroic creation as a nation. Just watch them round your gallbladder.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive. We are now more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism.

Subscribe to the Edinburgh Evening News online and enjoy unlimited access to trusted, fact-checked news and sport from Edinburgh and the Lothians. Visit www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/subscriptions now to sign up.

By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Joy Yates

Editorial Director