THE NATIONAL healthcare system in Britain is having trouble these days living up to its constitutional promise to wet-nurse us through every hangnail, hernia and heart attack "from the cradle to the grave." I am not convinced, though, that shortening the distance between the two is really a desirable solution.

Let me explain: If in passing through Britain you come down with the platypus pox or Adam's apple ague or, in fact, any ailment serious enough to land you on one of the National Health Service's padded planks that passes for a bed, keep your bloodshot eyes on the clipboard containing your medical notes and watch for any set of initials posted in the immediate vicinity.

If you espy the letters "DNR," or a notation reading "Not For 555," tuck your hospital nightie between your thighs, cover your derriere as best you can, then make any excuse and a dash for the door, the nearest airport departure lounge and the first flight to any destination where the NHS is not allowed to scribble on paper, charts or walls.

This procedure is particularly advisable if you can remember the day the St. Louis Browns won the American League pennant, or you voted for either Harry Truman or Tom Dewey, or your wrinkles and liver spots suggest that you might have passed your sell-by date.

"DNR" stands for "Do Not Resuscitate" and "555" is the hospital number for the resuscitation team (and attaching the words "Not For" makes it a number only slightly less fearsome than the Mark of the Devil, last seen ranked No. 666). And they are beginning to pop up with alarming regularity on the medical notes of elderly patients.

These constitute a system by which doctors and nurses in the NHS decide which patients can look forward to the next series of "ER" and which won't. And the older you are, the less chance you will have under this scheme of finding out whether Dr. Romano ever got spayed.

If you are lying there already a pile of misery and you suddenly have a stroke or a heart attack, the "DNR" on your notes means do not disturb the liar's poker game at the nurses' station, the "Not For 555" means "don't bug the resuscitation boys" and Dr. Kildare can carry on worrying whether to use a mashie or a niblick at the dogleg 15th.

Jill Baker was trying to get herself comfy abed at St. Mary's Hospital in Portsmouth when her eyes glommed on the "Not For 555" notation on her chart. She may be little and 67 years old, but she went incandescent when she discovered that a doctor who had never even laid a finger on her pulse had decreed that "in the event of cardiac arrest or stroke, resuscitation would be inappropriate."

In other words, girls, if the old bat down the hall starts hanging on the buzzer and banging on about having a heart attack or something, just get on with emptying the bedpans, and she'll shut up. Sooner rather than later, with a spot of luck.

Jill Baker was not amused. It was bad enough that she was there in the first place suffering from blood poisoning contracted from a dirty tube they used in her chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Then to be told her life didn't warrant interrupting anyone's tea break to save definitely put the doctor-patient relationship under strain.

"They were going to let me die," says Jill. "I was absolutely appalled. How dare that hospital make that decision for me? They clearly thought I was a little old lady who would just go quietly."

Jill Baker did indeed go, but not the way the medics thought. She promptly checked herself out of the Portsmouth blood and bone emporium, hailed a taxi and went home. That was nine months ago. Today she's still healthily ranting about "death notes."

The junior doctor who authored her "Not for 555" directive has left to seek gainful employment elsewhere, possibly in charge of formaldehyde supplies down at the mortuary. The hospital has deemed his message on Jill's notes to be "inappropriate" (that word again, this time meaning "we got it wrong but aren't about to tell you").

Meanwhile, campaigners for fairer treatment of wrinklies say they have detected an epidemic of DNR letter-writing in the medical profession - about a hundred or so cases, in fact. So if you suspect there's a chance of your landing in a hospital anytime soon, best check your birth certificate before going anywhere near any building labeled "NHS."

That being said, my own experiences with NHS hospitals have been salutary in the extreme. They broke me of the cigarette habit (triple bypass heart surgery did the trick) and got me off the booze (three weeks in intensive care with pancreatitis and five months more of the alternative poisoning known as hospital food put paid to that one).

In fact, the only total horse's derriere I ran into was a twentysomething administrator who tried to get me to sign, or scrawl an "X," or simply nod "yes" to some sort of document he was waving about while I was lying there with tubes running out of every natural orifice and some unnatural ones they had invented for the occasion.

That issue was speedily resolved by my wife Elizabeth, who suggested that this admin type should do something rectally harsh with his document and get out of her sight within 1.63 seconds, or he would come instantly in need of the world's first head transplant.

Whatever, all that was years ago, and I've aged a lot since then. Which means I am quite leery of setting foot on any NHS premises anywhere. I want to stick around long enough to see and hear Dr. Romano singing soprano in the County General Hospital choir.

Thought for the Week: If you look like your passport photo, chances are you're too ill to travel

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