disposablepyjamas

The NHS is broken. Snapped. Crushed. Mangled. It’s so broken, that if it were a patient in A&E, it would be fast tracked onto a gurney, rolled down the Intensive Care corridor, out the double doors and into that sink hole that’s opened up in the car park; another free bed and another target met. Personally, I would also choose the sink hole over waiting 4 hours to be seen by a doctor, sitting next to a potty-mouthed bleach blond reeking of cider, bellowing at the top of her voice and demanding surgery for a wrist she sprained punching her son in the face. You’re a class act mum.

The NHS spends around 300 million pounds every day. That’s a lot of money but I simply can’t believe all that just goes on replacing the soap, surgical gloves and pillows I steal? And although I know that those Surgical Theater Lamps are very expensive, if they could just see how great it looks in my sitting room, illuminating my Cole & Son accent wall and highlighting my pointless collection of sticks in a jar…well, I’m pretty sure they’d think it was money well spent. Not to mention (although I am about to) that as surgery costs about £15 a minute and 25% of that time is spent adjusting the lights, by stealing their lamp I’ve saved them the £225 they would have spent fiddling around with it during a 60 minute operation and freed them up to get on with losing the patient. How do I know these fascinating hospital facts? Well, I spend a lot of time on Google and even more time stealing study reports from my doctor’s desk, although that is of course another saving – with the extra time he’s saved by not being able to read them, he can now concentrate on getting his nose hair to rapidly appear and then disappear, with every derisory snort.

‘Do you really need to take them both?’ ‘I have two sitting rooms, don’t I?’

So with an estimated shortfall of £22 billion over the next 4 years, what can be done to cut some of these spiraling costs? Obviously, I could stop nicking stuff but that’s just not feasible; it’s an illness dammit. And one that if only the NHS recognised as such, they could treat me and I’d stop pilfering their supplies. It’s complicated I know, a sort of chicken and egg thing. Much like the sandwich I stole from the café.

Instead, I implore the NHS to stop investing any more money and time into the grotesque chimera that is the ‘Pyjown’. As if patients’ lives are not miserable enough, the proposal to replace existing bedwear with this abhorrent monstrosity is terrifying; malformed spawn of hideous green pyjamas and shrunken back-less gown that had dirty, misshapen sex in the store room, the brilliantly named Pyjown is a pathetic combination of the two, although based on the name, it could also be created from a Pygmy and a Jewish Clown. In fact, I’d be a lot happier wearing that, along with a nightcap made from a placenta.

This ‘revolutionary’ garment, placed over the patient from the front and tied with cords around the neck, reassuringly resembles the peeled skin of another patient – yes, you can put other people’s organs inside me, but I will NOT ever wear their skin and most certainly not their gloves.

‘We’re just going to peel you now Mr. Johnson’

And revolutionary as it is, the Pyjown is basically a short sleeve shirt that has been miss-sewn by hopeless children in Asia and has a back opening, as well as one at the front. Offensively, it’s also the most beige I’ve ever seen in one place and although I’d like to say I wouldn’t be caught dead in one, such opinion can so often prove ironic for a hospital patient. Although, with my last gasping breath for life, my priority would certainly be to have a good go at wriggling out of it.

Thankfully, although being rolled out soon for trials in some UK hospitals, mine isn’t one of them. So I may still get lucky and die in existing misshapen NHS nylons after all.

And please, if that is the case, I’d like my epitaph to read ‘He died as he lived, in a backless gown, two sizes too small’.