The inability to swallow is something so much more complex than you would immediately assume.

Hello there, my name is Tom Bright, and I’m here to talk to you about life with oesophageal atresia. I’m very lucky to be here. I was severely ill.

Life has been interesting and very difficult at times. I underwent a lot of major life saving surgery as a baby, and that carried on until I was 16, till I stopped growing. One of the main things that happened to me was my chest was opened up five times, which has created long lasting respiratory problems for me.

It’s probably something that people don’t think about so much when you’re talking about something so linked with the digestion system. But my stomach was brought from down here to up here, and I was fitted with an artificial food pipe, which kind of goes here now. So my stomach lives here and it’s like a thick pipe. And I had a couple of ribs removed here. So, you can probably hear my breathing is rather loud, and I’ve been left with this kind of constant rattle, which means I have to look after myself. I have to be very disciplined in my morning walks and exercise routine and make sure that I clear my chest constantly because I’m kind of wide open to infection and build-ups.

Other ways having my stomach here affects me. Well, gastric reflux a lot. It’s not pleasant. I guess, when your stomach is so close to your throat and your oesophagus itself. Yeah, I can get a lot of stomach acid coming up.

My childhood was difficult with oesophageal atresia. The chest damage, the breathing difficulties, having my stomach here, my blood sugar level constantly dropping, leaving me woozy and fainting all over the place. Constant struggles with stomach acid coming up.

One of the major, major problems while I was growing up, and this was a very scary one. And it would happen every year as I grew, my artificial food pipe didn’t. So we would be sat having dinner, and then I would start choking. And it was really, really scary. We know it’s time to go back to Great Ormond Street and get it widened. So that was always a dramatic event.

Sometimes I would overeat, and because my stomach’s here and it’s half the size of a normal stomach, it would swell up. And if I drank water, that wouldn’t help. So let’s say I had a big bowl of pasta and some water, and it would swell, and then it would make my breathing very difficult. That was not pleasant, and it happened a lot of times, and we’d have to go to hospital, to A&E. And, yeah, they weren’t nice experiences at all.

In adulthood, after my last operation when I was 16, my main use of using the health system has been for, like, chest infections. All boil down to the long-lasting respiratory problems.

I’m a devout user of the NHS, I think they’re wonderful and it’s incredibly important that we do all we can to support it because people like myself are pretty reliant on it.

Being really poorly as a child has had a massive impact on my choice of career. I think from a very young age, I saw life maybe a little differently to most. Every day is an absolute blessing for me, and I’ve got an enormous gratitude for everything around me and all the things I can do.

So, I made that decision to commit my life to writing songs. Songwriting is the strongest language of connection. It’s so rewarding when you kind of get to do things that you were dreaming of. There has been quite a few high points. Now, obviously, getting married was an absolute high point, to an absolute sweetheart. But on a career level, I’ve performed on stages that I could only have dreamt of, really. The London Palladium, Shepherd’s Bush empire, Glastonbury, a few times, which is just magical. I’ve worked with some of my heroes.

I appeared on The One Show. I returned to Great Ormond Street Hospital and was reunited with Professor Lewis Spitz, who saved my life. I performed one of my songs, “Remarkable Things” for a lot of the staff at Great Ormond street. And it was a very, very emotional, special day. Truly full circle life moment.

I’m a very lucky man. I live a beautiful life, which I’m eternally grateful for. I know that my life experiences have been perhaps more unique than most. It’s been a lot of hard times, and so if I can remind people that life is a wonderful gift, then that’s kind of my life’s mission, really. And I’ll be a very happy old man if I can spin some positivity on the world.