Broccoli for Breakfast

It falls to me to be the bearer of good news because the established media appear to have no truck with positive messages anymore - we seek them here, we seek them there and we desperately seek them anywhere - a single ray of sunshine or a shining silver lining. These days every page turn of our national dailies is another bad news story; every radio talk show is congestion, tolls, fatalities, rape, violent crime and hospital trolley tallies and so it continues incessantly shrouding our lives in a pall of social disaster stories. We are becoming a nation de-sensitised to every victim's history by the unending tidal wave of misery encapsulated in each news bulletin and headline. Sometimes I catch myself blessing myself and petitioning various heavenly representatives to ward off the spell of media doom and gloom when I set forth on a long journey, when I walk darkened streets at night or when I find myself in a queue at A&E. And I can't say I am a great believer. Last week my perspective changed and I finally shook off those shackles of cynicism.

On Thursday night my nine year old son shook the house and our hearts with howls of insufferable pain. Like me, he seeks out heat and warmth wherever he can find it and, for at least a year now, has refused to go to bed without a hot water bottle. Whatever the season it has been there with him toasting his toes while he sleeps. That is, until Thursday night when it burst and sprayed a steady fountain of scorching water from shin to ankle. In an instant my husband was there to dowse the leg. I watched him contain the terror of brutally wounded skin with simple banter about school, the forthcoming six nations match and lots of talk about all the sweets he would buy our son for being so brave, whilst I bit my lower lip until it bled horrified at the thought of my child's pain.

And so we move to A&E. We follow all the rules and visit our GP first the next day. But the burn area is simply too big for them to treat and we are referred to Temple Street A&E. My first thought is that we will spend the better part of the day in a waiting room, so I fill my new handbag, which is the size of a pillow case, with bottles of juice and chocolate bars and easy peel oranges as we head off into hell that we are so reliably informed is A&E these days.

After presenting ourselves at reception we are directed to the waiting room and we settle down to a game of top trumps. Within less than a minute two nurses appear and suddenly my son is on a bed under the concerned gaze of the on-call doctor receiving Nurofen and carefully chosen comforting words.

I know that we have issues in this country with our health service, I am not denying that; it is depicted as a raging Leviathan that many Ministers of Health have struggled to tame, but when it serves us well we are silent and I wonder why. Perhaps we were just lucky on the day, perhaps we arrived to A&E at an opportune moment, but maybe we should consider that this is how it is for many people who urgently need medical care, and because they don't get airtime or pages of print to tell their story the postive messages will always be lost to a media that trades in pictures of Armageddon.