Play and Win
Hey everyone… honestly, I still don’t even know how to talk about this properly without getting emotional. My name’s Thomas Wright, I’m 27, and I work as a healthcare assistant at Manchester Royal Infirmary. People hear “hospital job” and think it’s stable, respectable, proper secure work. But they don’t see what it actually does to you mentally. You don’t just come home tired. You come home absolutely drained. The sort of exhausted where even lying in bed hurts. The sort where you’re staring at the ceiling at 4am knowing you’ve got another 13-hour shift in a few hours and genuinely wondering how much longer you can keep doing this 😅 Loads of nights I’d skip meals just to save a bit of money. Stopped going out with mates because I simply couldn’t afford it anymore. I remember my mum ringing me once asking if I could help pay her electric because she was struggling that month… and I lied to her. Told her I was barely managing too because I had about £402 left in my account. Truth was, I had £27. That honestly broke me more than anything. For years I was helping keep other people alive while my own life quietly fell apart in the background. Constant stress. Constant anxiety. Rent going up. Bills piling up. Barely sleeping. Sometimes I’d sit in the staff toilets trying not to cry before walking back out pretending everything was alright. One night around 3:40am I was sat alone in the corridor on my break, still in scrubs and gloves. My feet were killing me, I hadn’t eaten since morning, and I opened my banking app praying payday had somehow come early. £27 left. Still over a week till payday. I just stared at the screen completely numb. And honestly, that moment scared me because I realised I wasn’t properly living anymore - I was surviving hour by hour. After that I was mindlessly scrolling on my phone trying to distract myself and another advert for The National Lottery popped up. I’d seen it loads before and there were thousands of positive comments underneath it. N
