“You’ve got polyps.” – The Doctor said to me, after he peered up my nose with a bright light.
Polyps are growths within your nasal cavity that can:
- Cause your nasal cavity to swell, resulting in the worst pain I have ever experienced. Pain in your nose, across your cheeks, forehead, jaw and teeth.
- Cause swelling of your sinuses.
- Make breathing through your nose extremely difficult.
- Give you a runny nose or blocked nose.
- Make snoring worse.
- Reduce your ability to smell and taste.
- Sadly, doesn’t get better on its own. But instead gets worse as the polyps grow.
Here is a photo of just one of my nasal polyps (apologies, it isn’t pretty):
The treatment is surgery to remove them. The problem being that the National Health Service (NHS) here in the UK is really stretched at the moment. And when I say really stretched, I mean it is stretched to breaking point. This means that the surgery I need, I would have to wait several months for. That’s several months of ever increasing pain as the polyps continue to grow.
Waiting several months clearly wasn’t an option. I was unsure if I could tolerate the pain for that length of time. I also had to consider the impact of being unable to work on my life. So I’ve had to go private.
The NHS is a wonderful organisation. It has saved my life and the lives of people that I love on more occasions than I care to recall. But it is essentially becoming an organisation that only delivers emergency and crisis driven care.
It’s very sad to see the state of the NHS today. Over the 11 years of a Conservative Government, they have made efficiency savings (cuts), had no plan and not invested in the NHS. The state of the NHS can only be blamed on those in power.
Write soon,
Antony
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