I knew all about the NHS’s challenges and flaws. But then as a patient, I saw the love and the magic | Anne Perkins

I watched Nye, the National Theatre’s hit show about Aneurin Bevan, the former Labour MP for Ebbw Vale and his fight to found a national health service, twice. Both times it left me feeling a bit queasy. Bevan is a mighty working-class hero. Probably no other minister, even in that 1945 government of heroes, would have had the vision, the muscle or the sheer energy to make a national health service happen at all in those bleak postwar years, let alone in a way that no incoming government could unpick.

The NHS sits at the heart of politics and for most of my career in journalism, and charting the crises, the numbers, the arguments, the possibilities and the costs was a staple of my work. You can write all that, you can read about all that, but it can feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when, like me, you pitch up as someone who arrives as an emergency, with a condition that might require major surgery and at least a week of post-operative hospital care – or might just go away of its own accord.

There are other places in the world, I suppose, where you crawl into the emergency department wanting to die and are met with warmth and sympathy, competent professionals in more or less functional surroundings. It’s not, or not just, the security of not having to worry about the bill, because there are other ways of funding healthcare that are free at the point of use. I won’t pretend mine is a unique experience, or that all experiences are like mine, but proximity is important: having had the time to watch a ward at work, I feel there is alchemy in play here, and after six days with nothing to do but lie relatively flat and ponder, I think I may have identified it.

At its heart is the sense of a shared destination. It’s like getting on a bus, maybe not the sleekest model and definitely overloaded, but we’re all on the journey together. Everyone who’s seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Everyone. You don’t lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star facilities you might be enjoying if only you had more dosh, because it’s odds on that if it’s an emergency, that person too is just behind the curtain hanging limply to your right.

So there’s a common purpose among us all, and we all want to get to the other end. You don’t really want to die, at least not without some pain relief first, and they don’t want you to die either and are doing their damnedest to help. Somehow you know that even as you wait, cold with shock and in miserable pain, that you are seen. And counted.

But something else happens too. All the time I was there, my neighbours on the ward were two older women who weren’t entirely sure where they were and one of whom very much didn’t want to be wherever it was. They both had chronic conditions. They were incontinent. They were uncooperative. But every hour of every day there were one or two nurses or healthcare assistants or carers who made time to answer their calls, to keep them safe and clean and warm and sometimes even to get a smile out of them.

If you haven’t experienced it, it is hard to explain the effect of witnessing this level not only of professionalism and patience, but of love. There are studies that show that for all the criticism and brickbats aimed at the NHS, those who use it most are the most positive about it. When you’re there and watch, you understand.

As I began to get better (cheap date, no surgery) and was able to shuffle about my dog-eared old hospital, opened by Princess Anne sometime in the 1980s – about the time the Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson first started complaining that the NHS was the national religion – the feeling of common purpose I’d been aware of even in my fog of misery became even clearer. People are kind to one another here. The Friends Shop is hung with hand-knitted matinee jackets that emanate good-heartedness, and the manager of the WH Smith offers to help, rather than gesturing dismissively to the self-service tills.

Strangers reach across the spaces in between to introduce themselves to one another. It’s not intrusive, it’s not compulsory, but it is unmissable: that heightened awareness and sympathy that makes three people swivel at the sound of a dropped crutch, that generosity of spirit that leads people to spend draughty afternoons showing confused visitors to distant wards.

If we’re here, we’re in the same boat. We are in some way hurt, or we are supporting someone who is hurt, or maybe we’re making good on earlier kindness. It’s not magic. Everyone is still themselves, but softer. Warmer. Maybe even happier. Where else in our angry and atomised nation does this happen?

Backstage, nurses wrestle with airbeds that fuse the ward’s electrics and radiologists need to sweet talk the X-ray machine into useful function. But somehow this superficially clapped-out, awkward, unmanageable old behemoth produces human beings to work in it who are capable of a resilience and love that is contagious.

Bevan was driven by his own experience of want and avoidable tragedy. There are many things wrong with his creation. But whatever happens next in this most costly of long-running dramas, let us recognise the extraordinary value of what we already have. It is beyond price.