Have you read the prequel to this project ? OUR REBEKAH A LOVE STORY FROM OUR NHS ? In not PLEASE do so as I explain why I am so passionate about our NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE and have been for almost 40 years. The e-book will cost you £1.77 and the paperback £8.99.
But on to I LOVE OUR NHS – David’s story….
I try hard to promote blood donation. I have so far given 35 pints myself BIT if I had not been such a sad, pathetic, miserable COWARD that number would be around 135 pints !
Read my story and see what a coward I was. Part two tomorrow.
I am a coward ! A sad, pathetic, miserable, despicable, wretched coward and I want the whole world to know about my cowardice. From that desire I hope to as many readers as possible, people who will act upon what I am about to say and themselves become blood donors. I am a sad, pathetic, miserable, despicable, wretched coward as I will now explain.
1972 or perhaps it was 1973, as a young man if only I could turn back the clock, I was attending teacher training college when the matron was about to donate her fiftieth pint of blood. She asked a small group of students to go with her to become blood donors.
NO WAY ! No way was I going to have somebody stick a needle into my body and draw off 12.5% of the blood flowing round my veins and arteries. ABSOLUTELY NO WAY ! It would hurt and cowards do not willingly submit themselves to pain. I think I was polite in declining Matron’s invitation, I hope I was and she simply let the matter rest.
Matron was a domineering lady who you did not argue with, I wish now so much that she had used that character trait to reinforce up her invitation. I wonder if back then Matron had the same philosophy as I do now when it comes to donating blood.
Donate a pint of blood but give it with a gallon of love.
Without this love the blood alone is worthless.
The years went by and cowardice faded into the background, donating blood did not present itself to me as a life opportunity again. Well it did but I was blind.
My daughter was born with chronic renal failure. In her very early life it was evident that she was not a healthy baby. We took her to our local GP surgery from there she was referred to our newly opened Milton Keynes General Hospital where a blood test was undertaken. The results came in and she was called back for it to be repeated as results showed a low creatinine level. My wife and I had never heard the word creatinine before but were told it indicated kidney function within the body.
My wife, Maureen, went to the hospital on a Friday afternoon to discuss the results of the second test. At the time I was running a sponsored twenty-four hour disco at Leon School in aid of Willen Hospice. I can picture so clearly in my mind our standing outside the hall, music playing inside and Maureen having a piece of paper in her hand with the test results and some notes from the hospital doctor explaining that ultimately Rebekah would need a kidney transplant. The next week Rebekah was in Guys Hospital in London, on Dickens Ward where years of loving medical treatment were about to start.
Years of loving medical treatment which involved seven different operations under the skilled hands of Surgeon Geoff Koffman and Paediatric Renal Consultant Sue Rigden. EVERY single operation involved my Beck receiving a blood transfusion yet I still did not step forward as a blood donor. Was that wrong or was that wrong ! Depends, I guess if you condone my cowardice.
It wasn’t actually cowardice that stopped me becoming a donor, that would have been bad enough, BUT in truth the prospect never occurred to me. My darling daughter received over her childhood something like ten pints of blood. Ten pints of blood lovingly donated by anonymous people from up and down the country yet her father never stopped to think that he should be repaying the debt by giving his blood to save the life of another person.
Cowardice or ignorance I am totally ashamed of myself and I want the world to know what a bad person I was, I want the world to know so others do not follow in my pathetic footsteps.
FIGHT REBEKAH FIGHT ! That was our family motto when Beck was seriously ill in hospital. FIGHT REBEKAH FIGHT !
Instead of fighting my fears of a needle being stuck in my arm and a pint of the red stuff being drawn out I subconsciously blocked being a blood donor from my thinking.
But then the transplant team at Guys Hospital decided the best chance of Rebekah having a successful kidney transplant would be by way of a live donor, initial tests were done taking a blood samples from both Maureen and myself. Owch ! I was going to have a needle stuck in my arm and blood drawn out, not a pint but a thimble full yet a needle is a needle is a needle is it not !
A friend told me that to overcome the fear of a needle being stuck into your skin the best thing to do was to stare at it, your eyes focussing on nothing but the point of the needle, ignore the nurse, ignore the syringe, just focus on the needle and dare it to hurt ! You know what ? It worked. It didn’t hurt.
A few days later I was in my office at Leon School when the phone rang. It was Paediatric Renal Consultant Doctor Sue Rigden from Guys Hospital In London.
“Are you sitting down ?” She said.
Actually I wasn’t.
“You might like to. From the tests we have chosen you to be the donor.”
My emotions were a kaleidoscope of excitement, pride but also of fear. Test after test after test followed with needle after needle after needle being stuck into me. I coped but when Consultant Transplant Surgeon Geoff Koffman kept warning me the pain post operation would be far greater for me than it would be for Rebekah receiving the donated kidney my response was. “Would you please stop telling me that, I don’t want to know !”
As part of the operation I was going to need to have a blood transfusion. Somewhere an anonymous donor would allow a needle to be stuck in his or her arm to draw off blood not to save my life but to keep my life safe during the operation. But do you know what it never occurred to me that post the operation I should sign up to be a donor. I was prepared to have one of my two kidneys removed to help my daughter but I was not prepared to have a pint of blood drawn from my arm to help a stranger.
In another chapter of this book you will read how I spent some time with Elizabeth Ward who founded The British Kidney Patients Association and gave us the first organ donor card. I contacted ITV News and persuaded them to make a documentary about the operations in order to support Elizabeth Ward’s work. Cameras were going to have to be specially prepared and cleaned, operators would have to pass tests before filming could take place simultaneously in the two adjacent operating theatres. The documentary would then follow Rebekah’s and my recovery.
I kept being reminded that the team of surgeons was treading a very fine ethical line. Rebekah’s operation would be lifesaving but cutting open my body would damage my health. A person can live comfortably with one kidney but it would be unethical to take one from my body if there was even the slightest possible chance Rebekah’s highly sensitive immune system could reject it.
“Don’t worry about that,” I repeatedly said. “Just do it.”
The day before the dual operations the team decided it could not sign off on the ethics of the operation and so it was cancelled. The ITV documentary became a short news feature which indeed did promote Elizabeth Ward’s donor card but not to the extent the full documentary would have. I was devastated, completely and utterly devastated. I came close to a nervous breakdown. I had been given six months paid leave by the school’s board of governors, I returned after just six days absence. My teenage students, so many all these years later I am still in contact with, wrapped me in a blanket of love and support.
Those teenagers, now in their forties reading this story I thank you but I want you to know what a coward I was. I did not sign up as a blood donor.
I am speaking here of a time in the early 1990’s. For twenty years I continued my life of cowardice by refusing to become a blood donor.
Monday 19th September 2011, I was less than two months away from my fifty-first birthday, I became a blood donor. Almost forty years since Matron approached me at college I finally managed to overcome my cowardice.
Do you know what ? IT DID NOT HURT. It did not hurt one tiny little bit.
Thirty, or thereabout, years of being a coward. Thirty years during which I could have donated a pint of blood three times a year. Do the Maths, NINETY pints.
When
I overcame my cowardice I made a promise to myself that I would live long
enough to donate fifty pints of blood and equal Matron’s record. Typing these
words now in April 2021 for our book I have just received the paperwork for my
thirty-fifth donation, fifteen to go. Donating three times a year, simple
maths, another five years. April 2027 at the age of seventy-six going on
seventy-seven I will have given my targeted fifty pints.
PART TWO TOMORROW..............
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