This is where last Thursday and Friday. I moved slowly down a corridor at Wexham Accident and Emergency unit and would, had after 24 hours I’d been released, have eventually found my way to a ward.

There was an aged man in front of me, an aged woman behind me, we had no privacy. I came in by ambulance , I left by bus to Slough and then home.

But it was my saving. In the 24 hours I spent I was in my day clothes and I went for two scans to decide what was wrong with my brain that I had been told was a stroke but found out was a seizure. Not only was my problem discovered but I am on drugs that make me better.

If I had not gone through the agony of A&E I would be waiting to have these scans on June 23rd at a Central London teaching hospital.

My point is this. In A&E you are an emergency and treated as such. It is the way that you get the attention that the GP system simply doesn’t get you.

And here is the crunch of the debate we are having in these weeks after Christmas about how we treat our ill. There were people I spoke to in those 24 hours who were in a bad state physically and mentally but not one patient was making a fuss, we new this was what we had to go through and we found a way to make the best of it.

There was no hot food, there were sandwiches from time to time. There was very little charges so we couldn’t always keep phones alive, for most of us, there were no toilets accessible. Yes , this is not what you expect from hospitals but it is what you will get these days.

But for all the complaints, we find a way to get through it, we are all in it together, here are the numbers (thanks the Sun)

As I suspected, I was in a relatively well off neck of the woods (the South East) but we are all in this together and the sooner we recognise it could happen to us or to our closest, the better.