Organ donor

I've had an organ donor card since 2001. It requests that after my death any part of my body can be used for the treatment of others.

It seems to me like a harmless and altruistic thing to do. What could be more generous than bequeathing parts of my body to others who urgently need them?

And yet there's still a large number of people who oppose organ donation. Transplant waiting lists are growing and yet 2½ million people are refusing to help. The number of organ donations is actually falling.

What on earth is stopping people from becoming organ donors? Once you're dead you have no further use for your bodily organs so why shouldn't they be passed on to people who desperately need them? The dead person isn't going to object, so what's the problem?

So what if granny was totally opposed to organ donations? Surely the urgent need of a living patient for a vital organ trumps the well-meaning observance of granny's wishes?

Going private

Given that the waiting time for NHS surgery can now be several years, Jenny and I have decided that if either of us needed urgent surgery, we would have to do the unthinkable and opt to use a private hospital.

But one thing that bothers us about private surgery is that if anything goes horribly wrong, the hospital won't be able to deal with it (as most of them don't have intensive care units) and we'd have to be transferred to an NHS hospital. Which was easy enough a few years ago before the ambulance crisis, but now you may have to wait several hours for an ambulance, by which time you could be dead or much more seriously ill.

As we're both in fairly good physical health and have no problematic medical conditions, we assume that the chances of an unexpected medical emergency are pretty small, but even supposedly routine operations can lead to unforeseen mistakes and catastrophes.

Literally tens of thousands of people are dying because they're not getting prompt medical attention from the NHS. Ambulances are overwhelmed, A&E departments are overwhelmed, hospital wards are overwhelmed. We don't want to end up as another delayed-treatment statistic.

If either of us need urgent surgery, goodness knows what decision we'll make. All I know is that more and more people are going private because of the huge NHS waiting lists. They're willing to take risks in order to end chronic pain and get a normal life back.

Happy to wait

This increasing trend not just to buy fashionable clothes or go to fashionable restaurants but to go on massive waiting lists for them is absurd.

The Mary Jane Harrietta shoe is currently almost impossible to get hold of, with a waiting list of 800 people. Or you can wait four years for a table at the Bank Tavern restaurant in Bristol.

You or me would surely say, I'm not going on a huge waiting list, that's ridiculous, I'll try another type of shoe/ another restaurant that's more easily available.

What if when you finally get your table at the restaurant, it turns out the chef is having an off day and the meal simply isn't up to much? Then you'll kick yourself for enduring the long wait.

Is it sheer snobbery that people are prepared to go on a waiting list for months or years rather than walking into the local Pizza Express and getting a table straightaway?

Do people get a bit miffed if they're number 754 on the waiting list and they discover their friend is at number 23? Might a few banknotes be exchanged so as to jump the queue?

And how miffed would you be if the famous restaurant burnt down just as you got to the top of the queue?

Pic: the hard-to-obtain Harrietta pumps

Health emergency

The NHS in Northern Ireland is in dire straits. More than 288,000 patients* were waiting for their first outpatient appoint-ment at the end of March. It's now routine for people to wait over a year to see a consultant or receive medical treatment, unless it's a life-or-death emergency.

Felicity McKee, who ironically is a nurse, has moved from Northern Ireland to Wales to get proper healthcare, after getting the brush-off from one health worker after another in her home country. In Wales a patient is nearly 50 times less likely to be waiting over a year for care than in Northern Ireland.

The main reason for the crisis in the NHS is the 2½ years shutdown of the Stormont government because of a row between the two big political parties. There has been no Minister of Health to take the necessary decisions, and the civil servants have had to keep things going as best they can.

The reason I tell you all this is because I dread the possibilities if my trace of prostate cancer turned into something much bigger, or if I developed some other major illness. How long would I have to wait before I got the necessary treatment? Would my health have got a lot worse by then?

Of course there's always the option of going private, but our savings are limited and if I needed major treatment on a regular basis, we simply couldn't afford it. If I arranged a private session with a consultant, the NHS wouldn't accept the consultant's findings and I would still have to wait to see an NHS consultant before I could get any treatment.

In any case I'm strongly opposed to going private (a) because I'm fiercely loyal to the NHS and (b) because if large numbers of people go private and vanish from NHS waiting lists, then the situation in the NHS doesn't look quite so bad.

There are rumours once more of a return to direct rule from Westminster, in which case the situation might improve. But at the moment things look pretty bleak.

*Out of a population of 1.7 million. That's 17 per cent.

Pic: Health workers at Ulster Hospital.