“Anything can happen to anybody at any time.”

This one principle does guide what I think about people and health.

It’s what I think when a friend of mine living with dementia suffers a bereavement. It’s what I think when a friend of mine gets told he has bladder cancer.

It’s also how I come to rationalise my six week coma in 2007 due to acute bacterial meningitis. I was rushed into the intensive care unit of the Royal Free Hospital Hampstead, having been resuscitated successfully by somebody I used to work with in fact. He knows who he is.

His team stopped me fitting in an epileptic seizure. His crash team got a pulse back on their third cycle of jumping down on my chest after I had been flatlining in cardiac asystole. He managed to put a tube down me as I had stopped breathing.

I then spent six weeks in a coma, and my mother and late father came to visit me every day in intensive care, and in the neurorehabilitation unit (Albany Ward) at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London (a hospital in which I had worked in 2002 in a rotation which included an interest of mine, dementia).

I am now living with physical disability. I can now walk, and I remember my protracted time in a wheelchair. I remember people’s reactions to you in the street. I remember how ‘available’ black cabs would simply drive past. I was, in effect, taught how to work again by inpatient and community physiotherapy.

Due to my meningitis, I could barely speak; the “speechies” helped me with that. I had difficulty planning a cup of tea; the “OTs” helped me with that.

I can relate to all the current NHS concerns how you become stripped of identity in the modern NHS: you become a bed number, or at best a surname.

But in many ways, as my late father kept reminding me shortly before his own death in November 2010, that meningitis in a way saved my life.

I then engaged properly with the NHS as a patient. I used to see my GP regularly.

As a medical student, I had felt as if I was too busy to see my own GP. Big mistake.

As a young house officer in hepatology, I used to be surrounded with very pleasant patients; but for whom I had to perform an abdominal paracentesis, as they were often bright yellow due to liver failure (but awaiting a liver transplantation).

I slowly became alcoholic and isolated. I have often been asked when did I start to drink heavily. This is very difficult for me to place, as most people like me go through a phase of problem drinking.

My official diagnosis for the alcoholism is severe alcohol dependence syndrome in remission. I have now not drunk alcohol for seven years. I know I am an alcoholic as it is unsafe for me to have an alcoholic drink. If I have an alcoholic drink, I would either end up in A&E or in a police cell. I am incapable of having a social drink.

Receiving a medical diagnosis for my mental health condition, in my particular case, helped me to rationalise the cause of my problems which had caused so much distress to others including especially my mother and late father.

I was listening to LBC last night and the presenter was joking that he had a listener rung up “I am an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink for 35 years.” But seriously folks, it is like that.

I am now regulated by the legal profession. I spent 9 years at medical school, doing my basic degrees for medicine and surgery, and my PhD in the early diagnosis of frontal dementia. As a junior in the medical profession, walking around as the most junior member pushing the Consultant’s trolley and writing in the notes, the thought that you might be ill did seem an alien one.

And yet I was extremely ill. For all people in addiction, there becomes a time when you are in complete denial and lack complete insight. That’s when it is impossible for you to be regulated.

I also have a lot of sympathy for the regulators who regulate people who I think can be best be described as a “dry drunk patients” – i.e. they spend months or even years dry before relapsing. They are, I feel, “living by the seat of their pants”, or “whiteknuckling” it.

The alternative is recovery – where you are not merely abstinent, but where you embrace a life which is utterly content, but in the absence of your addiction of choice.

I indeed find this hard to explain to people who have never experienced addiction. I do not wish to compete with ‘patient leaders’, or think tanks who go on and on and on and on about patient involvement.

But I do wish to recommend to you, if you are in their catchment area, the Practitioners Health Programme (PHP). An incredible ambition of Prof Clare Gerada, the programme is a lifeline to doctors who are ill.  It’s been shown in numerous numerous surveys that an ill doctor under-functions as much ‘use’ as a doctor who is completely out of the service. I would simply say to anyone who is ill in the medical profession, put your own health ahead of your career. Your patients deserve that too. Do not be blinded by your own career. I am proud to attend regularly PHP.

I don’t do much apart from hundreds of blogs for the SHA, or campaigning for people living with dementia. But I am at least at last content.

 

 

 

Update: I (Dr Shibley Rahman) was returned to the GMC Register for the UK 26 August 2014. I had been in recovery from alcohol since the onset of my coma due to meningitis in June 2007.