I’ve just had to pay a large fine for wasting hospital time – or at least I should have done. That’s the view of a stomacare nurse when I told her I’d started using a Medina catheter for the first time.

“Just think, you’ve spent twelve years hanging around in hospital waiting-rooms, going to appointments with puzzled consultants and making worried phone calls about your troublesome pouch when all you had to do was use a catheter,” she told me.

And she was quite right of course. For in 1996 I was given one of these long thin plastic tubes by a nurse specialist at St Mark’s to try and clear my reluctant pouch.

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. These words from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner almost came true for Red Lion member Emma Edwards and family when their water rates rose so high that they nearly had to cancel their annual bill.

Emma’s problems started when her supplier Thames Water fitted a meter to her family’s household supply and they found their water bill rose by £130-a-year. She wrote to Thames Water and pointed out that she had a medical condition that meant she had to go to the loo 10-12 times in 24 hours and thus used more water than most people.