Orla Tinsley

As anyone with a chronic illness knows, hospital is not a holiday, it’s more of a gladiator match

This account of living with MS is a work of activism as much as it is creative nonfiction, memoir and cultural criticism

Here I am swimming around in death, and hope and transplant, but something gloriously gloomy is already afoot

The irony is, before I was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease, I mostly avoided fast food

Soft opt-out policy, where family has final say, has scant evidence to show it works better than current practice

We cannot have a fully functioning national CF service in Ireland until we can fully support our heart and lung transplant service and all that comes with it

We need art on every centimetre of Ireland’s hospital walls, and artists-in-residence to bring nonsecular, open-hearted warmth to our medical spaces

Sara Byrne says she was distressed by conditions at Crumlin children’s hospital. ‘It is bedlam in there’

Orla Tinsley: No matter how far we get, there are always those who are happy to project their unchecked ableism on to us, with real-life consequences

Doctors you can’t get hold of, hospital teams that don’t talk to one another: patients can feel forced to try to solve problems it’s the HSE’s job to fix

The free taxi transport system that brings patients to life-saving treatment is that it has been nothing but problematic from the beginning