Right now, life isn’t so bad for Robert Wells. “I get the odd uncomfortable day,” says the 48-year-old cartoonist. “But it’s not a major issue. You won’t catch me riding a bike, though.”
As recounted in his commendably – almost excruciatingly – honest new graphic novel, Wells has been experiencing chronic health problems since 1990, most notably a persistently upset stomach and a perennially aching right testicle. Which partly explains why his book is called Back, Sack & Crack (& Brain). If this sounds funny, he’s OK with that. “The main reason I wanted to do the book was because I could see quite a lot of opportunities for humour.”
These embarrassing ailments have had a debilitating impact, though. Decades of constant pain, anxiety about getting “caught short” in public and indifferent – sometimes hostile – medical professionals have all contributed to a deterioration in his mental health. Even though recent years have seen a drop in his physical suffering, Wells continues to take antidepressants.
At the height of his troubles, he also developed agoraphobia and panic attacks. “I wouldn’t go into shops that had sliding doors,” he says, “in case they got stuck and I couldn’t get out again. It was that bad. I still don’t go out on my own all that often.”
Then there’s the intermittent back pain, which has prevented him from holding down a regular job for years. When he began his graphic novel in 2014, he was claiming incapacity benefit, but that was stopped following an Atos assessment. “My health problems have held me back in life a lot,” he says. “They still do.”
The book follows Wells, who is from Ashford in Kent, through a series of encounters with the
NHS, as doctors misdiagnose his ailments (he’s erroneously operated on for a twisted testicle in 1997), express scepticism about his claims, or simply fail to take him seriously. “I’m quite oversensitive that everyone will now assume I’m anti-NHS,” he says. “But I’m not. I think, in part, I just got unlucky. My feeling is that I saw a couple of bad doctors early on, and their negative notes followed me to every other appointment.”
