The human body is a very resilient thing. An average adult can lose about 30 per cent of their blood – three out of the nine pints that flows in their system – before their blood pressure would show any significant drop. This is possible because the body is designed to “make do” in situations of temporary stress. Your body compensates in a whole host of ways – your kidneys, your capillaries and your heart all try to pick up the slack – which allows us to weather brief spells of blood loss without even noticing it. But if the blood loss is not stopped, then these changes – which are so helpful in the short term – become problems in themselves. Our kidneys stop working properly, our capillaries stiffen, and our hearts grow thick with overwork. In medicine, such stretched-beyond-its-limits maladaptation has a name: decompensation.
For years now – decades, really, but particularly since the undemocratic introduction of the damaging Health and Social Care Act in 2012 – our healthcare workers have been trying to compensate for cracks in the system. Those of us who work for the National Health Service are, almost constitutionally, programmed to “keep calm and carry on”; the kind of people who are not afraid of hard work, and who want to give our patients stellar treatment, no matter what is going on around us. We try to cope, but eventually, we reach our limit – our nurses are sick of being undervalued and threatened with redundancy at every round of cutbacks; our doctors are “burning out” after being made to work like robots; and nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of my colleagues who work so hard to make the health service tick are fed up with underfunding and the introduction of market principles in their beloved NHS.
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