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As I packed my seven-year-old daughter Liberty’s sleepover bag with her Labubu and toothbrush last week, I thought to myself, “It’s a miracle she’s even going.” This was no ordinary sleepover. Not only was I going too – but it was on an NHS ward in the middle of an outbreak of superflu.
We’d all just had the worst flu of our lives; Liberty and I were better, but her sister Lola, nine, was still spiking a fever of 39.9C. Things weren’t looking good on the NHS front either.
As we set off at the crack of dawn to our local Chelsea and Westminster NHS hospital for her operation, the mutant H3N2 strain had sparked an NHS meltdown with hospitals declaring “critical incidents”. Now, half of all UK hospitals are battling their worst-ever flu outbreak.
An average of 2,660 patients per day were in a hospital bed with flu before we’d even walked through the revolving entrance door on the Fulham Road – up 55 per cent from the previous week. It’s only set to soar this week, with health secretary Wes Streeting warning the service is close to collapse if resident doctors go ahead with a planned strike.
There are now enough flu patients each day to fill more than three whole hospital trusts, according to reports. And to top it all, children’s operations have been cancelled as superflu ravages the NHS.
The pressure is particularly bad on paediatric intensive care units across the UK, The Independent has been told. Cardiac and other operations are being postponed, paediatric wards are full, and intensive care units are unable to move patients out when they are ready.
The idea of getting our own little side room for the night seemed highly unlikely due to hospital overcrowding, and I braced myself to be turned away on arrival. I was wrong. Not only did the NHS continue with Liberty’s operation, but they also threw her a party.
It was hardly an emergency operation. Liberty was born with talipes (club foot), a common condition that affects approximately one in every 1,000 babies born. It’s treated with methods like the Ponseti technique soon after birth using casting and bracing to gently correct the foot’s position. But in Liberty’s case, her left foot started to slowly relapse a few years ago – and I was advised to fix it with surgery before the age of nine.
She was scheduled for a tibialis anterior tendon transfer, often known as a TATT; an operation used to rebalance the muscles of the foot. It involves moving a tendon, a structure that joins muscle to bone, the tibialis anterior tendon, from its normal position at the inside of the ankle towards the outside of the foot.
The transferred tendon is fixed in the new location with a surgical button on the bottom of the foot. The button stays in place for around six weeks, covered by a plaster cast.
We’d waited months to get the operation date – and it landed just before Christmas. But despite the dire warnings, I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong with the NHS in crisis as we arrived on Saturn Ward – a children’s surgery unit with a new space-themed makeover for children under the age of 16.
It was empty at 7.15am, other than one other child and his parents. We were ushered into a play area where Liberty was allocated a “play assistant” and given coloured pens to design a Christmas tablecloth. We waited less than one hour for the surgeon and anaesthetist.
The ward started filling up as we left for the operating theatre, where I stayed with her until she fell asleep. Two hours later, after I’d paced up and down an empty waiting room for parents, she woke up in the recovery room and waved at the nurses to get me.
None of the nurses or doctors – or even the anaesthetist – looked remotely stressed as the NHS creaked around them under the pressure of a superflu crisis.
They played quiet classical music to keep everyone calm in the recovery room. Any questions about the superflu were met with a relaxed smile. “Oh yes, the wards are full of it upstairs,” they all told me, but then quietly got along with their jobs.
As we headed into the main children’s ward for our NHS sleepover during the nightmare before Christmas, the festive decorations were being put up – mostly made by inpatients. Care assistants sat around on the floor with boxes of paper swans and detangled baubles to put up around the ward as if no major incident happening. It all seemed in stark contrast to the headlines dominating the news. I knew how bad this mutant strain was, having been reduced to a wreck by it days earlier.
Liberty was wheeled into a dormitory with a screaming baby behind another curtain. They very sweetly then moved us into another dorm with only one other child who was waiting for an appendectomy.
I laid out her Squishmallow blanket on the hospital bed to make her sleepover homely and popped out to get her a chocolate crepe. By the time I returned, a “play assistant” had joined her and was rustling up a load of arts and crafts activities for her to make in bed.
By tea time, Liberty, looking slightly groggy from all the pain relief, was making intricate artworks with a precision-tipped stylus that picked up and placed gems effortlessly onto a pattern. Despite the rest of the hospital drowning in flu, she had on-call entertainment, and I felt like I’d dropped her off at a Montessori nursery, not my local NHS hospital.
Having promised her a slime-making kit as a post-operation present, the nurses brought her cardboard sick bowls and wooden cutlery to mix up the activator glue, glitter and magical liquid together. Her best friend, Sapphire, was even allowed over for a playdate.
Sapphire arrived with her mum, brandishing blind box pink plushy toys, and as I ordered them a Deliveroo Margherita pizza to the room, the nurses popped in to check on how the party was going. By this point, I was pulling out my camp bed to sleep next to Liberty – and the nurses were bringing in tons of clean, laundered sheets and blankets. And as no sleepover is complete without hot chocolate, the nurses ordered us some hot milk and Sapphire’s mum had brought snowman chocolate lollies and marshmallows to dip in.
Feeling a bit peckish later, we ordered cheese sandwiches and yoghurts. The room looked like a bomb had hit it. Slime is always a nightmare, and it was in Liberty’s bed. The nurses ran to the rescue with new sheets. Nothing was too much bother. We fell asleep after I put the radiator on full blast, and I shut the door. It was dark, warm and quiet, and we were left to sleep in until 8am.
By the time I returned, a ‘play assistant’ had joined her and was rustling up a load of arts and crafts activities for her to make in bed
Breakfast was a buffet in the parents’ room – fresh fruit and cereal. It was as if we were staying with friends. I didn’t hear or see any sneezing – and nobody wore masks. It was as if the superflu didn’t exist – and we were in some pink bubble.
A teacher turned up from the hospital’s education department to offer Liberty a day of lessons, which she declined, preferring to play in bed with a play assistant one-on-one, as and when needed.
The surgeon visited us. All had gone well, he said, and we could leave after we’d seen the physio. “How long will that take?” I thought – knowing waiting times in the NHS can be huge at the best of times. We’d had a nice time, but I still wanted to get home. Yet, unbelievably, the physio turned up like the genie out of Aladdin’s bottle 10 minutes later, complete with crutches and a walking frame.
A doctor then hurried into the room with good news: they’d located the festive Christmas cast clay and could wrap it around the boring white cast on Liberty’s left leg. Her face lit up. Not only that, there would be some gold glitter to sprinkle all over her cast to give it a Christmas glow.
I couldn’t quite believe this was the same NHS I’d been reading about that was at breaking point. He returned 20 minutes later, out of breath, and proceeded to cover her cast in a dark blue snowman print and to shake the glitter on top so it sparkled. The medication arrived without delay –and we left the ward.
How did they pull off the best sleepover during a flunami? Like maternity care, it’s a postcode lottery and I’m not sure my experience would be replicated across the UK. The flunami has put an incredible strain on hospitals up and down the country, which is why I was so surprised by my experience.
As we left and the nurses waved us off jollily, I thought, I never hear anything positive about the NHS – and now I’ve experienced it at its best. It might be buckling under superflu, but they managed to make a small child’s operation at Christmas almost fun. That is quite something – a miracle, maybe?
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