Of Rawleigh’s Relief, Bad Backs and Unintended Consequences - Chronicling the road to our serfdom.

I had a bit of a niggle going into this Friday night, though not in my back, fortunately. I’m a hermit, by preference, and Friday night has always been ‘my night’, by which I mean Mrs H and I grab a bottle of our favourite wine, each, and sit down with a bag of sea salt crisps and chill out the evening watching telly, which currently, with Coro Street, Graham Norton and Seven Days is good, uncomplicated, fun Friday night entertainment. Best of all, after over twenty years of marriage we don’t have to yabber at each other about the meaning of life, the silence is comfortable, and there are no people we have to take that extra effort to talk to. I was especially looking forward to this Friday because I’ve averaged over twelve hour days for six days on the trot, working to mid-night, a pace I have to keep up until the end of March, and Mrs H has had me on vegetable juice:

… every lunchtime, a regime I’m told is set to continue until I go below 100 kg again, plus I’d seen too many people over the week, and was frankly feeling peopled out: there had been too much noise. So when friends rang up and invited us out for a tea party, and we couldn’t politely, on the spot, think of a way out of it, I lost one of those small things that make life that little bit better, my Friday night sitting quietly in my own head. Though the night that unfolded ended up being about those crucial small things that make life better, and how even those, or should I say, especially those, are being crushed under the weight of the statist, regulated, planned society we’ve voted in.

At 5.00pm that afternoon, a client had called in with her records. She’s one half of an old age farming couple, a bent up little old lady whose done it hard all her life on a farm not quite big enough in scale – and who isn’t on the Internet, so this post is safe. A good life, however, she’d be the first to say, I’m sure, and made that ‘little bit better’ by being able to have afforded the odd little luxury she otherwise wouldn’t have, from being a Rawleigh’s distributor; albeit the profits left each year after tax were always meagre. But she’s throwing it in. I don't know the facts of the full story, she was bamboozled herself as to the details, so I’ve asked she bring in the two letters she has from Rawleigh’s stating the demise of her few small pleasures at the hands of the recent natural medicines regulation foisted on us all by those busy-body meddlers in the Fortress of Legislation. Her top five items, including what we all, of a certain age, know to be the miraculous Rawleigh’s salve, are now too hard to sell, with customers having to supply their  names as if it were contraband, and paperwork and approval having to farcically go to and come back from Australia or some damned stupid thing, so no longer could she simply sell me a salve, I’d have to give up my privacy and wait at least a week to be delivered of product. She’s a no meddling, hardworking, farming wife, she doesn't understand what Rawleigh's has told her, it was doing her head in, so she’s out of it.

I tucked that to the back of my mind, and thought that was the end of it, little knowing, squat, bent over Mrs Rawleigh, by night’s end, was to become the topic of conversation in circumstances even less sanguine.

Travel forward in time about five hours, when after a lovely tea put on for eight of us, our hostess, Mrs C, slowly, and painfully, delivered herself to the floor between us all, and laid down on her back. We always knew she’d had back problems, but nothing like it proved to be. Sometimes her pain is so acute that even at our dinner party she had to lay herself on a hard floor for at least half an hour so the pain can subside enough for her to go on. She said it would've been rude to disappear for that length of time, so she may as well lay here with us. We all laughed.

The conversation that ensued went like this:

‘Mrs C. you need to get that seen to, you can’t stay like that.’

‘Afraid I need an operation,’ Mrs C’s voice came up from the floor, ‘it’s the only thing that’ll fix it, but the doctor can’t get me onto the waiting list.’

‘Demand your doctor puts you on the waiting list. You can’t live like this.’

‘There’s no point demanding, I’ll probably just make it worse for my chances; the doctor can’t get me on the list because the hospital won’t put me on the list.’

‘Why not?’ In unison.

‘Because if the hospital puts me on the waiting list, and then doesn’t get the operation done by a politically governed time, they get penalised by the District Health Board. It's safer for them not to put me on in the first instance.’ Mr C passed me the nut mix bowl over his wife.

‘Why would they be charged a penalty?’ said Mrs G, new Scottish immigrant, apparently having lived far enough from the NHS to not have figured it out like the rest of us had as to what had happened in New Zealand.

‘The penalties are designed,’ Mr C took over from his floored wife, 'to make sure they get through the waiting list.’

‘But because of that Mrs C can’t get on the waiting list at all.’ Said Mrs G.

‘No. She can't. Bit of an unintended flaw, isn't it.'

‘So you’re,' Mrs G addressing the floor, 'on a waiting list for the waiting list?’

‘There is no waiting list for the waiting list.’

‘Then how do you get onto the waiting list?’

‘The doctor doesn’t know,' came up from the floor,  'I’ve been not-waiting to start the actual waiting for two years now. We should’ve got private health insurance, but didn’t on principle, because we thought all the taxes we paid entitled us to free healthcare.’

I could have said at this juncture - but didn’t, it would’ve been inappropriate - but Clive James once said of the Soviets they thought they had free healthcare, but it ended up costing them everything they had.

Come to think of it, Mrs C has been not-waiting for almost as long as Mark Hotchin has had his life frozen without a single criminal charge laid, two and a half years in his case. Why have we all allowed the horse traders in the Fortress of Legislation, for I seem to remember the natural health remedies dictates were about horse trading with the Aussies as much as anything … why have we allowed them to narrow our lives down, take away our choices and freedoms, even in the details like this?

Back to the evening, in a closing synchronicity, Mr P said ring that little women, the local Rawleigh’s agent, and buy some of that Rawleigh’s salve from her:

… it did wonders, said Mr P, for his knee two years ago when he’d had some sort of a misdemeanour with a ewe. At which point I put my hand up, stood, stepped over Mrs C, hostess, grabbed another bottle of Wither Hills from the table, and said to them I had a sorry little story to tell …

So next time you read anything about hospital waiting lists, ignore them: they’re probably bullshit: just bureaucrats ‘playing the game’ they play with our lives.