A woman has shared a photo of her dying mother on Facebook in a bid to encourage people to vote Labour in Thursday's general election and protect the NHS.
Rebekah Hodgson, a secondary school teacher who is seven months pregnant, said she felt “compelled” to share the photo of herself sleeping next to her terminally ill mother in hospital after watching the Prime Minister “lie about the state of our NHS” on TV.
“I've debated long and hard about posting this as I feel it is a very private family moment which my severely ill mother may not wish to be publicised,” she wrote. Her mother, Juliana Hodgson, had been receiving NHS treatment for her breast cancer for the past three years, The Independent reported.
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“I am a seven month pregnant secondary school teacher who has sat in the Royal Berkshire Hospital for 11 days with my mother and I can promise you that our NHS is struggling,” Hodgson wrote.
“That last night no one was free to help my mum go to the toilet. The staff were appalled with how long she had to wait for personal care and greatly distressed to have caused her and us such upset but they had to firefight. That [this] wasn't their fault.”
She continued: “I know from my experience in school what it is to desperately want to help but not to be able to; given a lack of funding and resources.”
While people are “impassioned” about Brexit, anti-terrorism and nuclear weapons, she added: “NONE of that means anything if we cannot give our loved ones respect and care, if the values our society are based on are forgotten. What would Manchester have done without the NHS last week?”
In the three years she has been spending time in the hospital, she has watched it “crumble” before her eyes. She added: “Please, if you really think it is just a 'lefty/Snowflake banging on about the NHS and schools' come down here then. Spend time on these wards. Watch the suffering and then ask yourself what the right way to cast your vote is.”
Hodgson said she “[doesn’t] want sympathy for my situation” but “justice for our NHS and its patients”. “For the 'immigrant' doctors who saved my mum on Thursday night, staying five hours longer on shift in a bid to help my mum meet my son in two months and for all the young people who want to go to Uni to study to become doctors & nurses who can't afford the fees.”
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Hodgson said she wasn’t previously “the biggest Corbyn fan”, recognising the “flaws in his personal character and leadership” before noting "true of any human of course", and concluding her post with Labour’s campaign slogan, #forthemanynotthefew.
The post has been shared more than 30,600 times, received more than 46,000 reactions and has garnered nearly 4,500 comments at the time of writing.
Theresa May, along with the previous Conservative government, has faced harsh criticism for the current state of the NHS, which many have deemed in crisis. Many hospitals have chronic shortages of staff and dangerously long waiting times. Bursaries for student nurses have also been scrapped.
May has also been criticised for not guaranteeing the rights of EU workers to stay in the UK. There are around 57,000 EU citizens working in the NHS – without them, the service "would collapse", according to the Institute of Public Policy Research.