When her father was taken to hospital last month after a car crash, Caroline Phillips prepared herself for an NHS horror story. What happened was very different.

“The doctors and nurses in intensive care were superb – honest but supportive”

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Equally, with the NHS, you don’t know what you’ve got until you need it.

On May 9 this year, my 79-year-old father, Ronald, careered off the M4 at over 70mph. He hurtled across three lanes on a busy Friday at 2.30pm, down a verge and hit a tree. Miraculously he missed all the other vehicles around him.

It was an hour before emergency services were able to cut him out of his car; then a helicopter landed by the motorway and airlifted him to Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. I only heard about it at 4pm. “Dad’s been in a major car crash,” sobbed my younger brother, Simon. “He’s got serious head and leg injuries …”

In the emergency room, we found our father: a frozen lump with a face the size of two footballs. He was on a ventilator, sprouting wires, bags and drips and tethered to monitors. He’d sustained fractures to his pelvis and one foot, a deep ankle wound and fractures to 10 ribs and his sternum – giving him a life-threatening flail chest [where the rib cage compresses, rather than expands, on breathing]. We were told he might also have had a heart attack, plus brain and internal organ damage.

“There’s only so much we can do,” warned the anaesthetist. “We’ll try to get him to breathe on his own later – but he has to want to help us.”

I’ve had a complex relationship with my father, a sometimes tricky, adorably eccentric and essentially kind family man. Now he was dying, with so much left unsaid. “You can talk to him,” said a nurse, sympathetically. “We think hearing is the last thing to go.” I whispered thanks to him for looking after me since I was 13 when my mother bolted; for my great education; and for being an incredible grandfather. I told him that I loved him. I begged him to live.

But standing amid the artificially ventilated bodies with my anguished half-sister, Dara, I was terrified – my fears fuelled by all the scare stories I’d read about the NHS. Weren’t these doctors exhausted and incompetent? Wasn’t Dad destined for a hospital-acquired infection? At his age, wouldn’t our father be a low priority? Wouldn’t these medics just leave him to die? Frantically, I phoned consultant friends in London, trying to engineer the best possible care.

Yet, while I panicked over the state of the health service, the John Radcliffe’s staff worked with professionalism and dedication. We were kept constantly informed. A doctor phoned and briefed my consultant friend so that I could discuss the prognosis with someone I trusted; the anaesthetist urged our family to eat: “You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

At midnight, Dad went into theatre. I prayed that my elder brother, David, flying from New York, would see him alive.

By 2.30am our father was in intensive care (ICU), off his ventilator – to the astonishment of doctors – conversing intelligently and joking. It was a miracle. And surreal. He had, according to doctors, defied all odds by surviving. The nurse showed me a Polaroid of his car, a Toyota. It looked like a foil wrapper crunched in the fist of a giant. He had only been saved by his airbag.

He stayed in ICU for a week. For four days, Dara slept in the relatives’ waiting room. My father’s condition remained critical, his breathing difficult, his heart irregular. There was the possibility he would contract pneumonia. Then he would have died. “It’s far harder being a relative than a patient in ICU,” remembered David, who had experienced intensive care after a spinal operation.

For 17 consecutive days, I drove the round trip from London. (In order to fit everything in, Simon would get to his desk in the antiques gallery founded by our father, at 5am.) It was physically and psychologically exhausting. Illness aside, Dad’s occasional morphine-induced confusion was frightening. “Did you put my V&A invitation in the orange juice?” he asked. Another time he smiled: “I’m on a boat.” (He’d been on a bedpan.) With the stress, my hair started to fall out in clumps; when I told Dara she said the same had happened to her.

We became part of a hidden community, patients’ relatives riding a terrifying roller-coaster. The young woman, careworn after three days of waiting to see if her sister was brain-damaged. The Lancashire couple, living in their mobile home in the car park, and despairing for their son whose pancreatic operation had left him on life support. “You don’t expect people to get infections in hospital,” said his father, tears welling in his eyes.

But, despite all my preconceptions, the nurses and doctors in ICU offered superlative medical care. They were also psychologically astute, honest but supportive. They always went the extra mile. One day, attaching an oxygen supply and face mask, they put our father in a wheelchair to enjoy the sun on the terrace. A nurse also put up with our touching belief in alternative therapies – decrying it as anecdotal, while authorising our use of Bach Rescue Remedy.

It was a tough decision whether to take our children, aged 12 and 10, to visit their grandfather at a unit where one woman wailed as if in permanent labour and many patients were wearing contraptions (metal halos) on their heads that looked better suited to a carpenter’s bench than a hospital. But the girls, distressed at not seeing him, wanted to go. Sensitively, nurses shielded them from the brutal sights by pulling the curtains around patients’ beds.

The demands on us as a family have been high. We’ve divided our father’s affairs among ourselves – as if dealing with a death but without the funeral arrangements. Paying bills, sorting insurance, cancelling appointments, arranging visitors, researching future medical care, taking him food and tending his dog, Pingu, who’d been in the accident with him and had a ruptured spleen. (A witness whisked him to the vet’s where, unbelievably, they performed an emergency splenectomy. Pingu is 14 – 98 years old in human terms – but his old age did not preclude treatment either.)

And as we faced the possibility of parental abandonment, rivalry, stresses and strains came to the fore. “It’s a myth that dysfunctional families suddenly pull together in a time of crisis,” said one friend, a family therapist. Instead, events have highlighted our family’s maladjustments. Perhaps a positive way to look at it is that we’ve had a dress rehearsal for a parent dying and can make changes before the final curtain.

Our father remained for two weeks in the trauma ward, one of the best in the country, where overstretched staff are as attentive as possible, efficient and reassuring. His private health insurance policy with Saga Health Plan proved to be a saga: he’d paid thousands, but at a lower premium because of agreeing to accept NHS care if the state could treat him within four weeks – thereby effectively nullifying his access to private healthcare for this condition. So he had to wait to be “repatriated” (as medics dub moving a patient to their local hospital) to Chelsea and Westminster on the NHS, as there wasn’t a bed for two weeks.

Meanwhile I’m counting my blessings. Sixty years since it began, we’ve experienced the NHS at its best. And this episode has enriched my relationship with my father. There’s the chance to love him for longer. His dog visited him yesterday: one patient hobbling on four legs, the other unable yet to stand unaided on two. Above all, staff at the John Radcliffe deserve nothing but praise. So, too, our father who, thanks to the NHS, has foiled the Grim Reaper this time.

THE HERCULES in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground. I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane, known to the crew as Fat Albert, is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly. The humour of the crew is macabre, like that in an operating theatre, a doctor comments later. The lashing tape is marked in red pen, ‘same shit, different day’. And they have sayings like: ‘You can kick ass or save Sarajevo – but you can’t do both.’ On the ground in Sarajevo, Foreign Legionnaires run around among white UN armoured vehicles. We deliver 26,000 lbs of tinned tuna and flour, with the plane engines still running. They like to get out in three minutes flat. But we’re picking up 30 Canadian soldiers going on rest and recreation leave, so we don’t manage to turn around for a full eight minutes.

The Canadians have been there for three months. What’s it like? Squaddie Guy, 20, smiles and looks puzzled. ‘I hope it’ll never be like that again.’ Tim Gunter is horrified. ‘There are little kids stepping on mines and people skinny and with fear in their eyes.’

Sergeant Renaud Marc asks: ‘Any news on that little girl? Nice of your PM to do that.’

In the body of the aircraft, eight racks for stretchers are pinned at the back, ready for the following day.

Azure lakes, ravines and hills blue in the morning mist of former Yugoslavia stretch beneath us. ‘They should be lying on the beaches bathing,’ says Flight Sergeant Steve Askey, with a bewildered expression. A UN Tornado buzzes underneath us in the opposite direction. ‘Why are the Press all here now?’ asks another crew member ingenuously. ‘Where have you been for the last 15 months?’

Back in Ancona, the doctors and those they teasingly call ‘just nurses’ are preparing themselves. They’re learning useful phrases like ‘are you thirsty or in pain?’ from the Red Cross phrasebook. ‘What’s Serbo-Croat for ‘I want to see a proper doctor?” jests one.

‘How about ‘are you private?’ or ‘I want a second opinion?” ‘Or ‘wait’. After all, they are going to the NHS.’

They are working intensely, lightening their load with humour. You couldn’t meet a nicer, better-meaning bunch. One doctor talks sensitively about the effects on his psyche of dealing with emergency cases. ‘It’s OK while I’m doing the job, because I’m plugged in. But afterwards I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

They mind about the added load their absence forces on their colleagues at home. And they care deeply about the well-being of those to be evacuated. To many of them, the ages of the evacuees are immaterial: Their health is more important.

They express fear at inadvertently saying to journalists something construed as politically inflammatory. Their leader, Tony Redmond, has worked so hard to achieve these mercy missions and is paranoid about the Press.

By Saturday afternoon, the medical team has been forbidden to speak to journalists. The instruction came from ‘very high up’, they say. Information is scant, but Operation Irma, they think, is becoming very political.

The question of whether Bosnian soldiers are to be evacuated is denied by officials. And the international slanging match about who to evacuate is hotting up between UN officials and cynical politicians keen to score political advantage.

You sense the doctors’ acute awareness of being used as pawns by politicians. They seem to want to mutiny against their enforced silence. You point out that they are only there because of the media and you note grateful recognition and a wish to help on their faces.

They are here simply because they want this to be the start of many humanitarian operations to rescue the sick and injured from a war zone. But they know they are simply putting a plaster on the gaping wound that is the medical problem of Sarajevo.

You find yourself thinking, simplistically, that children deserve priority in evacuations in this increasingly shambolicly organised public relations exercise with a media circus, photo opportunities and allegations of soldiers being rescued.

Now the medical team, which has divided into teams with specific duties, is preparing the field hospital on the civilian and military airbase of Ancona. It is set up in a cargo hangar next to three army tents – one with a Union Jack, one with a French flag and one with a Sky satellite dish. ‘’‘’‘’

There are canteen and toilet facilities and another area for walking wounded. And stretchers, toys, blankets, boiled sweets and fizzy drinks. Huge plastic bags filled with drugs hang on the walls. And hand-coloured nursery pictures of animals – a mouse carrying a breakfast tray on his head reads, ‘a little love makes a lot of difference’.

Information on the number and ages of evacuees and time of airlift changes frequently. As does the appallingly coordinated Ministry of Defence list of journalists allowed to accompany the flight.

I beg a place on a German plane going to Sarajevo, in an effort to see the casualties being loaded. ‘Welkom to zer Germunn airforce,’ they say, beaming. But a little MoD hiccup puts paid to that. So I secure a place on a Canadian flight and maybe it is the Overseas Development Administration which sees an end to that.

At 1.40 local time on Sunday, the tail of the Hercules carrying out Operation Irma opens. Three ambulances, assorted military and a Red Cross representative in fluorescent green jacket stand by. There are 21 people including seven children, plus 16 relatives. Some of the children the RAF team saw as priorities stayed behind.

A doctor stands by the hangar door, keeping telephone contact. The first through the tailgate is chronic meningitis sufferer Belma Salaka, three, with a breathing tube taped to her mouth. Seven people, mostly soldiers, carry her stretcher, careful not to jog her. It was her plight that prompted John Major to demand the number of children on the flight be increased. They bring out nine-month-old Eldar Kalamujic, a nurse shielding his face from the sun. He has liver disease. The TV crews and photographers fight for space, pushing through the restraining rope. The media throng becomes more unmanageable as time goes on and the police offer to make arrests. Now there are some relatives and walking wounded with bandaged eyes – clean but thin. They look tired but relieved. Then a third emaciated boy is carried out. There is 11-year-old Edhen Dedovic, denim-clad, with his right cheekbone eaten away by a mortar wound and his left eye gouged out by shrapnel, walking off, waving delightedly to the crowd.

There are nine on stretchers and walking wounded of military age. One man on a stretcher sticks up his fingers in a Bosnian army victory salute. Curiously there is only one woman, 44-year-old Branka Franic. Then they start to load them on the chartered Russian Tupulev 154 jet, a blue striped plane beneath a blue sky. It made the Red Cross ODA trip to Banja Luka last year.

It is five years old with torn carpets and seats folded down to accommodate stretchers. The doctors dub it a flying intensive care ward, saying its equipment is comparable to a ground hospital.

Professor David Southall, the only consultant paediatrician in the team, said: ‘The mission is orientated to moving children from the war zone. That’s what we’re hoping for if the Bosnian doctors and parents agree. Otherwise they have no hope. They are in a war zone which is getting worse.’

Next to the ‘door bell is a sticker bearing the legend: ‘Make his day. Break in.’ On it is a picture of a pit bull terrier, stocky and muscular with a steel-trap jaw.

So why would anyone want an American pit bull terrier-or APBT, as the new Sporting Dog periodical would have it?

There are an estimated 10,000 APBTs in England, of whom 1000 reside in Dave and Maria Britons’ borough of Waltham Forest, an area where youths walk in the park: one with an APBT, another with a rottweiler. With its killer instinct, the APBT is a loaded weapon.

Dave and Maria, 36 and 35, live in a terrace house in Walthamstow on a short stretch of road that houses no less than one dobermann, a Yorkshire terrier and 13 APBTs. Of these, 11, including nine puppies, are in the Britons’ 20-ish ft paved garden.

They have a one-bedroom flat on a heavy traffic road. They have lived in it for two years-with exposed plaster work and unfinished floor in the microwave-only kitchen. There’s a picture in the hall of a hand carrying a spearhead, blood trickling down-and in the sitting room, ones of fierce-looking tigers’ heads. In the bathroom, the Sunday article is open at The Hiss of Death. There is an uncomfortable atmosphere of violence restrained.

The dogs, Nash and Misty, don’t even bark when we arrive. They wag their tails. They show no sign of aggression. In fact, they are rather placid. And in the garden the five-week-old puppies frolic, squealing and squeaking. One chews my foot, another my handbag.

‘The vet’s always saying how gentle they are,’ says Maria, in black leggings, wine T-shirt and long brown hair. She has a face that looks as if it has experienced the rougher side of life and a character that fluctuates between being meek and showing a very hard edge. ‘It’s sad people are so nasty about them. They’re such lovable things,’ she says, passing them a tray of rice, egg and biscuit.

Maria is a housewife who says she doesn’t do a lot. Like her husband, she left school at 16. ‘I generally take the dogs out for a couple of hours a day.’ She says she only bred so her bitch would put on weight. But she hopes to sell them for upwards of £300 each.

‘They’re good with everyone, particularly children, very good guards, obedient, very affectionate,’ says Dave, showing me bookplates of one with a parrot and one pulling a baby in a cart.

He’s rough-spoken, bullish and thickset, wearing a tracksuit that he has worn to mend a friend’s car, and long hair. He’s clearly very strong. ‘Currently unemployed, and looking for business premises,’ he says, adding that he’s a motor mechanic when ‘working. They live on the dole, claiming (between them) £124 every two weeks.

They don’t have any children. ‘I have no intention of having any, either,’ says Maria. ‘The dogs are my kids.’ He, too, is mad on the creatures. Ask him to describe his lifestyle, and he says: ‘My dogs . . . when I get home I’ll walk them or play with them in the yard.’ He goes to the club for APBTs and other sporting dogs which started in Basildon six weeks ago. Operating alternate Thursdays, it offers events like ‘flirt pole variations’ and ‘weight pulling’-in which a 70 lb dog pulled 5151 lb harnessed to it. They sell T-shirts which read PITBULL, where P is for protective, I for intelligent, then tasteful, boisterous, unspoilt, loving and lively.

When Dave’s ‘not with the dogs, he’ll ‘shoot off to see some mates or go down the betting shop’. He’ll bet on anything, he laughs-except dog fighting. Nor would he fight his dogs. ‘If they get hurt, I get hurt.’ He says they’re part of the family.

‘My dogs have never bitten anyone and they’re never likely to. Only about .001 per cent of the 9000 registered dogs have ever attacked people. And a dog will only attack if it feels threatened, annoyed, protecting its own territory or jealous.’

But what about the case of the mutilated six-year-old, Rucksana Khan? ‘Sad,’ says Maria.

‘But we don’t know the full circumstances,’ says Dave. ‘You never hear both sides of the story as to why the dog attacked.’

Maria thinks it’s untenable that the RSPCA should suggest treating the animals in law as wild. ‘It’s disgusting because they are our pets!’ And what do they think of the MP’s suggestion that the dogs should be neutered and imports banned? ‘Well,’ says Dave, ‘I think MPs should be neutered.’

Originally the Britons had a German shepherd-which didn’t stop them being burgled. So two years ago they decided on an APBT. ‘We’re living in a high risk area with lots of muggings. When my wife goes out in the evening with her friends, I don’t want her walking around the streets with nothing on her arm.’

When he goes walking, he carries a breaking stick-a long piece of wood ‘with which I can open their jaws in a flash’. So there must be just a hint of a thought in his head that the dogs could attack? ‘Oh no, no, no. It’s just a precaution we take.’ And one that he’s been taking for the last two years. As he says, these dogs do have five times more power in their jaws than rottweilers.

Dave decided to let his dog breed. ‘So it doesn’t get possessive about its owners. A nasty streak can come out in them otherwise. If a dog hasn’t had a litter, it’ll show a lot more aggression to people,’ he says, letting his bull defence down for a minute.

He shows me their leather harnesses. ‘No princess, no darling,’ says Maria, as she picks up the brass-decorated leather, £35. ‘You can get them with spikes all over. And you can pick the dog up with it,’ he says, lifting the creature in the air.

He also has a leather arm protector. ‘To play with them.’ Like a piece of leather armour, it also has sackcloth over the hand (£120). And then there’s the treadmill (£250), which is like something for a giant hamster. ‘For walking the dogs when it’s raining. They love it.’

Once he had a visit from the council’s animal wardens. ‘They said they’d seen us hanging the dogs from the first-floor window. I thought: ‘That’s a bit strange since we live on the ground floor!’ The thing is, the dog was tugging on a piece of rope-and all they could see was the top of the head and a rope.’

And has he ever been in fights? ‘Years ago.’ His voice goes quiet. ‘Three or four years ago.’ That was when he worked as a doorman in clubs. He did that after he ran a security service company.

And has he ever been the wrong side of the law? He’s standing up now, towering above my seated position. ‘Er, yes.’ For what? ‘Well, if you read a book by James Campbell there’s a chapter in there called The Professional-concerning a robbery case I was involved in. I got eight-and-a-half years. That was in 1978 when I was 23. I was tying up the chairman of the Walthamstow Building Society and took some jewels that were given to him by Mountbatten. I lost all my remission.

‘But that’s years ago. I’m not anti-police. The police have got a job to do. I’ve had no trouble from the police concerning my dogs.’