For me, Christmas Day 2025 will go down as one of the greats. Great tinsel-decked disaster that it was. While my children whooped over their mountain of plastic tat and the aroma of turkey filled the air, I sobbed with an ear pain so intense it felt like the devil himself was attacking my lughole with a Phillips screwdriver.
The trouble had begun a couple of days earlier, when we were flying back from a family holiday in the French Alps. As the plane descended, my right ear became blocked and painful. Rather than dissipating on landing, the pain built and built until – like a spectacular fanfare for the King’s speech – my ear drum ruptured at 3pm on Christmas Day.
I sipped a celebratory Kir Royale, thinking finally my torture was over. Oh, no! It was only beginning. The ear-stabbing agony continued into Boxing Day, at which point I was gobbling paracetamol and ibuprofen like smarties.
The pain was unreal. What to do, with the GP surgery closed?
My first thought was A&E, but my husband – a cancer surgeon – thought this a terrible idea. Given his profession, he is entirely unsympathetic to anything not actually life threatening. Unless the grim reaper’s scythe is tickling your cheek (or ear), you steer well clear of A&E.
At Christmas, I sobbed with an ear pain so intense it felt like the devil himself was attacking my lughole with a Phillips screwdriver, writes Clare Foges
As he put it: ‘An ear infection is not an emergency!’
Despite my whimpering pain, I agreed. I have long bemoaned those who go to A&E for an ingrown toenail or a bad case of hiccups. ‘This is what’s crippling the NHS!’ the argument goes. ‘People need to pop a paracetamol and get on with it! If we had more Blitz-era stoicism about coughs and colds, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess!’
And so, not wanting to be a burden on the most besieged part of our beloved health service, I plumped instead for a call to 111. At this point various substances were trickling out of my ear non-stop (excuse me if it’s too much information). I had also gone completely deaf on that side. You could have fired the starting pistol for the Grand National inches from my head and I would have been blissfully unaware.
Eight hours after my initial call to 111, a clinician rang back and prescribed me some antibiotic tablets to rid me of this ghastly ear infection. I started the course with great hope but still, three days in, I was in searing pain, with a hot water bottle clamped to my ear 24/7.
Another call to 111. The current set of antibiotics didn’t seem to be working. What to do? They prescribed me another set of pills and sent me on my merry way to the pharmacy again. A few days into the new course and things were no better. I had become another person: permanently wincing, a woolly hat pulled over my ears at all times, shuffling to the cupboard for another co-codamol.
My next port of call was the GP, who couldn’t see much due to the gunk in my ear but thought I should keep calm and carry on taking the antibiotic tablets, even if they didn’t seem to be working.
After another night of painful tossing and turning, I decided enough was enough. I was going to A&E, whether it made me a time-waster or not!
Despite horror stories of 12-hour-long waits, it was only a few hours before I saw an ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist – an angel in scrubs with a very direct manner.
‘Why have you been taking these antibiotics? They’re useless,’ she said briskly, tutting at the GP and prescribing me some ear drops instead.
What bliss it was when within 24 hours of starting these drops, the pain began to subside. The hearing is not fully yet returned – I still shout ‘what?’ like a dowager aunt wielding an ear trumpet – but the earache is no more.
The whole ghastly saga got me re-thinking my assumptions about the NHS. First, those ‘clogging up’ the A&E waiting room often have no other choice. It’s not just that a GP appointment is harder to get than an apology from Donald Trump; it’s that a GP might not have the specialist expertise you need, even if your complaint is easily dismissed as ‘minor’.
Not wanting to be a burden on A&E – the most besieged part of our beloved health service – I plumped instead for a call to 111, says Clare
Second, I cannot help but wonder if 111 is a gigantic waste of money. A lot of the time they just refer you on to your GP or to A&E. When they do deal with physical concerns over the phone, clinicians are severely limited by the fact they can’t examine you. If a professional had taken a quick look at my ear in the first place, it would have avoided almost two weeks of pain.
Official data on the costs of 111 is hard to find, not least because private providers are involved, but it’s in the hundreds of millions. The idea is this stops people going to A&E unnecessarily. But how many like me end up there anyway? And how much money is this actually saving the NHS?
While technology is often seen as the cut-price answer for the public sector, with medical issues we often need a face-to-face consultation with a doctor trained in the particular malady suffered.
It’s a false economy for patients to be shunted around phone lines, pharmacies and GP lists. What’s needed is more A&E-lite places for acute but not life-threatening issues. Some walk-in centres exist but we need more – not only nurse-led but with specialists who know their way from cochlea to coccyx.
One thing’s for sure. The next time my family or I suffer something like this, we won’t be troubling the handlers at 111.
Posh can’t dance around truth
Victoria, Brooklyn and Nicola Peltz attend the UK premiere of Beckham, a Netflix documentary about David Beckham’s rise to football stardom
Brooklyn Beckham’s bombshell has millions of us wondering whether Victoria’s ‘inappropriate’ wedding day dance was a mother-son twerk. More importantly, it’s taught the important lesson that those envy-inducing lives we see on social media are often not as happy – or as natural – as they seem.
China is the only winner here, Keir
The proposed new Chinese embassy is set to be built at the Royal Mint Court, a site in the heart of London
Sir Keir Starmer has given the green light to China’s mega-embassy in London, which MI5 says is not without risk. Which has hundreds of underground rooms. Which will be equipped with a top-secret bunker like something out of a Bond villain’s lair. This may be in the national interest – but it’s the national interest of China, not the UK.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
First Trump acts like the Terminator. Now Macron wears mirrored shades a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Are we living in the real world, or an 1980s action movie? And, if so, where’s our generation’s Die Hard hero John McClane?
I’m scared of sharks in Sicily
Sydney faced its fourth shark attack in three days on Tuesday when a surfer was lucky to escape with minor cuts
The spate of shark attacks in Sydney has me thinking twice about a summer holiday in Sicily, where great whites have been spotted. I blame the poster for Jaws, which spawned my childhood phobia of getting in the sea. Forty years on, that image still scares the living daylights out of me. Thank you, Steven Spielberg.
