Carrie Johnson has revealed that she spent a week in hospital after suffering from flu and pneumonia, as England’s emergency services struggle with their ‘busiest winter ever’.
Sharing a picture of her in a hospital bed, the wife of ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that she spent the first few days of 2025 at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxfordshire after enduring a ‘nasty’ chest infection for nearly 18 days.
‘It just got out and I was struggling to breathe properly’, she wrote in an Instagram caption.
‘Hospital confirmed I had flu and pneumonia. I was there nearly a week and I’m still not recovered. It could take another few weeks until I feel like myself again.’
Carrie went on to praise the team of staff who supported her through her recovery, calling NHS doctors and nurses ‘the best people on earth’.
‘I say it a lot but they have looked after me and my family when we’ve needed it most and I will never not be enormously grateful. They are the absolute best of us.’
‘I was at the John Radcliffe and I cannot thank them enough. When I was particularly low, one nurse even serenaded me by my bed’, she shared.
Carrie also urged people to get the flu jab, saying: ‘I really, really wish I had. It totally slipped my mind this year.’
‘No guarantee, but I very possibly wouldn’t have spent the last 3 weeks horribly, horribly ill had I got it’, she added.
The former PM’s wife also shared a second image of a green dinosaur and a heart-shaped princess key ring, which she said belonged to her young children Wilfred and Romy.
‘The second picture is Wilf’s favourite dinosaur toy “Greenie” and Romy’s princess key ring which they gave me to take to the hospital with me and lived by my bedside. Health and family are everything.’
It comes amid warnings that England’s emergency services are battling their ‘busiest winter ever’ as flu cases continue to soar.
More than 2.3 million patients visited A&E in December while ambulance teams tackled over 800,000 incidents—the highest number ever recorded in a single month.
Additionally, hospital admissions are up a fifth in a week and almost five times the amount recorded in early December, according to separate monitoring data that tracks England’s flu pandemic.
Twelve hospitals have already reported catastrophic occurrences as a result of the crisis, indicating that they are having difficulty offering patients safe care.
If general practitioners opened their offices over the weekend during this hectic period, it may be beneficial since these patients might be able to receive treatment at their office rather than having to visit A&E.
In order to relieve some of the pressure on A&E on weekends, it should be mandatory for them to open when assistance is needed, like right now with the flu and other infections. Mind you, it would help if you could get an appointment in the first place!
Many people have to call their GP surgery at 8.30 am and then have to join a gigantic phone queue or wait for a callback. For a face-to-face, you typically have to wait three weeks or more, and that’s for a doctor whose name you normally can’t pronounce.
But I don’t think Carrie Johnson had to wait for an appointment for hours, and I’m willing to wager that getting her a room wasn’t an issue! At least she had a bed, some people have to wait in hospital corridors for 18 hours, and some patients have to wait on a trolley in a corridor for 36 hours with a bowel obstruction – what has this country come to?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 