In the early-1990s my late Mum told me it would ruin my health suing doctors after they failed to spot my ectopic pregnancy and I almost died, so is it worth fighting the system today?
I’LL never forget my late Mother’s “words of wisdom” (or rather experience) in the mid-Nineties after NHS doctors missed my ectopic pregnancy diagnosis and I almost died.
“Should I sue them?” I asked her as I lay deathly pale in bed recuperating in a ward alongside elderly hysterectomy patients following a life-saving op at St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester.
“You could do”, she replied, “but you know what doctors are like. You’ll never win against them. You’ll only make yourself ill trying to fight them. It’s not worth it.”
At the time, I knew my Mother was more than qualified to offer me advice after cheating death from tuberculosis herself as a beautiful young woman in her early twenties in 1950s Britain.
She didn’t confide often in my sister and myself about her months lying dying at Aldingbourne Sanatorium, near Arundel, West Sussex, but one of her stories has stayed with me throughout my life.
“They (the nurses) told me to stay in bed,” our Mum told us, explaining that she had defied them to go to the toilet. “They didn’t know I was in a cubicle,” she went on.
“I heard them talking outside and one said, ‘Isn’t it sad about Enid Davies, so young and beautiful and only a short time to live’.”
My Mum fainted, apparently, on hearing her true diagnosis. “That’s it,” she told us. “The doctors don’t tell you the truth and you know when they’re lying because they’re being overly nice to you.”
Luckily, my late Mum was a true fighter so she held on to life until antibiotics became readily available on the NHS to cure TB and she survived the disease.
I’m not sure how much of my Mother’s lungs had been eaten away due to her illness and bed-ridden years in the Fifties, but I do know NHS surgeons snipped a nerve at the back of her neck.
She told us they’d wanted to prevent her from breathing too deeply to slow down the spread of the disease. Whether it worked or not, I’m not sure, but I know she told us she began to suffer from sinus problems and headaches afterwards.
Of course, she went on to marry my late Dad Gordon Gavin in their home village of Singleton at that time in 1954 before my sister arrived in the late Fifties and I appeared in 1962.
You could say my late Mum had a love/hate relationship with NHS doctors and nurses throughout her life until she died in 2016.
On the one hand, I seem to recall she told me that she named my sister after a kindly midwife at Rustington maternity hospital.
On the other hand, she told me her GP had prescribed a pill, which she believed was Thalidomide, when she was suffering with morning sickness carrying me.
Thankfully, both my Mum and Dad had more common sense than the demi-God doctors of the Sixties as my parents both agreed that taking medication during a pregnancy could harm an unborn child.
I don’t intend to tell you the story of my home birth in Donnington in this blog post and I’m also not going to spend time recalling the trauma of my”bright-light” brush with death in the Nineties too after doctors failed to act early.
Suffice to say that I have had a love/hate relationship with the NHS throughout my life like my Mum, and I am still having one now.
Two years ago I requested my NHS medical records under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI Act) and I can truly say it made sorry reading when I received it months later and it still does today.
Admittedly, NHS bosses have apologised to me for historical mistakes made thirty years ago but they are, in my view, still being cagey about more recent ones.
In short, Mum was spot on when she warned me not to expect the NHS to own up to its mistakes because you (the patient) can never fight the system. But she was wrong when she told us doctors are nice to you when they’re holding back.
At the end of the day I suppose it’s a question of self-preservation and, at the moment, it seems an ordinary patient like me can’t win against the NHS bigwigs who have recently dismissed my very valid complaints.
I’m not going to bore you, the reader, with the ins-and-outs of my complaints now, but suffice to say that I don’t know why it took my regional NHS hubs so long to deliberate on a supposedly simple case.
One thing is for certain though, Britain’s healthcare system isn’t killing me with kindness.
By Hilary Gavin, copyright March 28th, 2025
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hilarygavin.blog
grumpywoman@hilarygavin.blog
Hunston, Chichester, West Sussex
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