THE strike by junior doctors is very distressing, they have my full support because I know that it is the only response left to them following Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's intransigence.

Junior doctors are very dedicated and conscientious. They already ensure that all their responsibilities are covered for seven days a week. Therefore, Jeremy Hunt's latest threat is insulting and unnecessary. I have asked my MP, Michele Donelan, to do everything in her power to get Mr Hunt back to the negotiating table.

The fact that I have reached the age of 76 is entirely due to the good services of NHS doctors, over the years, beginning when I was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven and the consultant gave me penicillin, and ultraviolet radiation.

When I haemorrhaged, immediately following the birth of my first child, in 1962, I had to be given an emergency blood transfusion.

And after having been suffering from crippling pain for years, which I took to be indigestion, when a duodenal ulcer perforated in 1968, I was rushed into Bath Royal United Hospital and given emergency surgery, on a Sunday. The junior doctor who first attended and diagnosed me had been on duty for 36 hours.

When in 2001, I started haemorrhaging, the diagnoses was cancer of the uterus. The solution was emergency surgery. The thickness of the uterine wall is about 15mm but cancer had penetrated the uterine wall to 9mm. It would not have been long before the tumour cells invaded the lymphatic systems, which would, almost certainly, have been a death sentence.

Wendé Maunder

Church Street

Semington

Trowbridge