Special Treatment

“Does that mean you’re going to get a lot of money?” enquired my 13-year-old son as he scanned the headline in the evening paper: “Telly’s Leslie wins £500K (sic) MRSA award – Record NHS payout for actress”. “I’m afraid not,” I replied tersely. He wasn’t surprised.

“Is it just me, or is that outrageous?” I asked a friend the following day. Imagine my feelings when he told me that the story I read had left a nought off, and that the payout was actually £5m. Curiously, it didn’t fan my sense of outrage. It just left me feeling rather disgusted and depressed.

The illness has clearly blighted the actress’s life. But despite having endured an experience myself of being admitted to hospital and things then going horribly wrong, I find I have a stubborn lack of sympathy or fellow-feeling. Why is that, I ask myself?

It’s partly because my own experience of MRSA was such a non-event – a completely innocuous skin infection cleared by a few of smears of cream in its most recent manifestation (see my blog Return of the Superbug). Even when I contracted it post-operatively five years ago, I would never have known I had it if the doctors hadn’t told me. There were no symptoms as such, and it was treated with intravenous antibiotics that had no discernible impact on my condition. I did notice the pneumonia that I contracted, probably as a result of having MRSA, but even that was pretty small beer compared with the raging fever and massive stomach haemorrhage that landed me at death’s door in Intensive Care and required 45 units of blood in transfusions over one tumultuous weekend to replace what I had lost.

So I find it mildly bewildering when people ask me in disbelief “You’ve had MRSA then?” I’ve done a number of photo-shoots for the press over the past week to promote my forthcoming book, and that is the question that every photographer has raised – usually in a tone of awed amazement that I am still alive. I feel a bit of a fraud when I shrug it off as having been the least of my worries.

Still, the mythology that surrounds the disease has served Leslie Ash well – even if she actually caught the strain of staphylococcus aureus that does respond to most antibiotics. She has clearly suffered far more radical effects than me of her hospital-acquired infection. But when the average payout for breast cancer blunders is £25,000 – and some women have died or been comparably damaged as a result of these – her award does seem to represent special treatment.

That’s also true if you compare it to other awards made to MRSA victims. The award-winning TV documentary a couple of years ago A Dirty Weekend in Hospital featured a host of people who had suffered hugely distressing consequences from having had the disease, but apparently Leslie Ash’s payout is equal to the total of all the payouts to MRSA cases in the period 2004-6. Her lawyers have argued that this reflects the scale of her lost earnings, but having worked as a TV drama producer for many years and knowing well the kind of fees that different actors can command, I cannot help feeling that the payout reflects an extremely generous or optimistic assessment of these.

The other thing that grates for me are the circumstances that landed Leslie Ash in hospital in the first place. Apparently she was admitted with a punctured lung and two broken ribs after an “energetic sex session” with her husband. What the couple get up to in private is entirely their own affair, but when it ends with one of them in hospital seeking help and that person then contracts an infection (which is always a risk when you go to hospital), it seems a bit rich that the rest of us end up having to foot a massive bill in consequence.

This is a dangerous line of argument, because it begs the question of where you draw the line when accidents might be considered to be people’s own fault. Are you less deserving of sympathy or recompense because you were hospitalized as result of a skiing accident or bungee-jump? Because of a car-crash or from smoking?

I don’t think the issue would arise if this payout had been on a more moderate or “normal” scale. But when £5m is being taken out of the health service, which will deprive others of treatment, it is hard not to entertain such thoughts. One of the underlying principles of the NHS is of people’s right to be treated more or less equally when confronted with ill-health. By agreeing to this immense award, the NHS managers, or their insurers, are bowing to the celebrity culture that so bedevils our society, and rubbing our noses in the fact that, sadly, the system does not treat everyone the same.