Let’s keep it 100: the NHS is absolutely falling apart right now. Multiple hospitals across England just had to declare critical incidents because they can't even handle a summer heatwave. We’re talking about MRI scanners breaking down, cancer treatment machines shutting off, and IT servers about to melt. It is wild out here, and the regular people who rely on this system are the ones getting squeezed.

The big bosses over at the Royal College of Physicians are already out here saying the NHS buildings need a massive upgrade to deal with the heat. But honestly, how did it even get this bad in the first place? You’ve got doctors calling their own workplaces "unfit to cope" because the wards and hallways are sweltering. It’s a mess, and everyone is feeling the heat.

People are flooding into the emergency rooms because they’re collapsing on the street or getting dangerously dehydrated. And when they finally get inside a hospital, it’s not even any better. The overcrowding is terrible, and barely any of these places have working air conditioning. One doctor said they had elderly patients trapped in a geriatric ward where the temperature hit 35C. That is straight-up dangerous for old folks.

And get this: even on the fancy wards that actually have built-in AC, they had to turn the cooling units off. Why? Because the heat was so bad they were scared the AC machines themselves would blow up. So instead of keeping the patients cool, they shut down the system to save the hardware. You really can't make this stuff up.

The medical gear is completely quitting, too. Two linear accelerator machines—the ones they use to treat people with cancer—just stopped working because it got too hot. Labs that do vital medical testing are also failing. One doctor working in a newer wing said the whole place is basically "tacked on to an old Victorian hospital," making the infrastructure a total nightmare. He straight up called it "hopeless."

On Wednesday, the IT servers at one trust started overheating so bad they thought they were going to lose all their data. The managers panicked and told everyone to turn off non-essential computers, electrical gear, and even the lights. Imagine being a doctor trying to save lives in the dark just so the hospital computer doesn't crash. That is absolutely crazy.

Down in Portsmouth, the Queen Alexandra Hospital went into full-on crisis mode when their cooling units failed. The heat took out their digital systems, operating theatres, cardiac labs, and scanners. Mark Orchard, the big deputy chief executive, had to admit that the heat combined with the broken chillers caused major disruptions. They cancelled appointments and literally told patients who were coming in to bring their own water because the hospital was like an oven.