I previously wrote about my recent health experiences, but it is safe to say that my opinion of the NHS and how it currently works is now through the floor. I feel uncomfortable writing that because I have always been extremely supportive of the NHS, my wife works for the NHS and so do many people I know.

At no point have I sensed that the staff are not giving their full efforts to what they need to do and that they don’t want to help, but the processes and current culture is not good enough for anything apart from stopping a patient dying ‘today’. If they need to come back tomorrow so be it, but as long as they don’t die today the box will have been ticked.

After a few weeks of tests with the NHS, missteps from my GP and almost no communication I had no choice but to go private to get some idea of what actually is wrong with me.

A quick look at the availability of cardiologists showed that even via this route the next available appointment would be weeks ahead. I guess this highlights the increasing demand for private health in light of the NHS failings.

I was lucky and managed to pick up an appointment 2 days later where I had an ECG, a long chat about my symptoms, and a promise to look at the echocardiogram and monitor tests the NHS had done. I was also booked in for a cardiac MRI with stress test for only 2 days ahead.

I had the cardiac MRI this morning and it was probably the scariest moment of my life. Lying in an MRI machine for more than 2 hours is one thing while you have to continually hold your breath on command, but the drug used to induce stress on the heart induced immediate panic in me. I felt like I was suffocating and my brain could not understand why my heart was racing and why I could not breath properly. Somehow I managed to stay in the small tube throughout this and the test was eventually completed.

After the test the cardiologist advised that extra beats were apparent and also a leak in the Mitral Heart Valve. These still need to be studied fully, but I am expecting the follow up early next week to see what follows.

The point of this article, however, is to work out what would have happened if I had not gone private. The echocardiogram done by the NHS came back fine, but it was noted this morning that this test should have found the valve issue. I have received no contact from the NHS since that test just under a week ago and I understand that the monitor test done a week before that has not even been looked at.

If you have a heart problem, one that could be serious or potentially resolved with an operation, this will not be resolved by the NHS at this time. There is simply no capacity and, as I said at the start, they are merely firefighting what is coming in through the door.

This is not a fault of the NHS, it is the fault of successive governments not planning ahead and in particular the last Conservative government who in my opinion have allowed many thousands of people to die needlessly. The problem here is that it destroys an individual’s view of the entire system we live by.

I have paid my National Insurance for 30+ years, have never been unemployed and I also paid extra National Insurance on top when I worked freelance on top of my day job. And then it comes to the first really major health problem of my life and they have done nothing positive at all after 8 weeks. A private cardiologist costs +£200 for a 30 minutes appointment, the MRI today cost £1,500 but so far these have been covered by my insurance.

Where it will now get trickier is that surgery of this type could easily cost +£20,000 for which I will not be covered and the real kicker is that the NHS will usually not accept private health findings to continue my treatment. I could effectively go back to square one.

If we have an NHS today that knows it is failing patients, that cannot save lives and which is continually firefighting, how on earth can it recover from that position? The new government is trying to work out what to do, I certainly do not blame them at this time, but I really do not think the NHS is recoverable at this time.

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