As my regular readers will know, I love Spain, and although I enjoy visiting the UK, I wouldn't want to live there again. However, right now I'm glad to be here. My daughter had a serious stroke three weeks ago, and now my husband has been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. He'll need to be on warfarin for the rest of his life, and it will probably take a while to get the balance right. The doctor says some people are easy to regulate but Tony has spent 79 years being awkward, so I can't see him changing now.
Fortunately, we've never needed to call on the services of the Spanish health service, but I know from visiting friends and hearing of their experiences that both Tony and Elizabeth would have received exemplary care in Spain. However, there are two problems with being ill in Spain - the language difficulty and the isolation from friends and family members.
I speak Spanish quite well, although I'm a fair way from being fluent. The thing is, my Spanish is conversational, so it's not up to in-depth technical stuff, which is what I need to know about my daughter and my husband right now. I need answers to all my 'What ifs?' and I need to have the worst case scenarios explained to me, so I can come to terms with that. I couldn't get that in Spanish, and it's a necessary part of my coping mechanism.
Some people prefer not to know what may happen, but I need to know that, so that when setbacks arise - as they are bound to during the course of any serious illness - I can recognise that it's part of the process, and not a complication specific to Elizabeth. Expect the worst and hope for the best has been my mantra for the last three weeks, and it's taken some of the sting out of the roller coaster ride of emotions we've all been experiencing.
The other thing that makes me glad to be in England is that all the family can be here within hours if they need to be. That happened twice during the first week following the stroke, and it's amazing how much strength you can draw from each other in the dark days following a major illness. We're all in contact with each other on a daily basis, and those of us who live close to the hospital are working out a rota so that nobody has to spend hours sitting by her bedside alone. That would be more or less impossible to organise in Spain.
Of course, I'm missing my friends and the Spanish lifestyle, but here is where I need to be right now, for as long as it takes. And I'm being reminded of just how good the National Health Service is. Like any big organisation, it has its problems, but the care my daughter and my husband are receiving is the best it can be. Several medical professionals have told us that if they had to suffer a stroke, they'd want it to happen in Plymouth, because the Stroke Team there is the best in the country. On the evidence so far, I have to agree.
