Rylan Clark forced to pull out of radio show as he reveals mum Linda has been rushed to hospital with mystery illness
The presenter told fans he would be absent from his usual Saturday Radio Two show, and told how Linda had been taken to an emergency ward.
Rylan said: 'Mummy Linda isn't well sadly so I won't be hosting the show tomorrow.
'Thank you to the emergency team at Princess Alexandra Hospital. Especially Tanya who really looked after my mum.
'Will keep you updated as she's on the mend. She's a trooper.'
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In Pemiscot county, where census data shows more than a quarter of residents are below the poverty line and the median income is just over $40,000 a year, he was the choice of 74% of voters, and Republican lawmakers representing the county played a notable role in steering his tax and spending bill through Congress. Senator Josh Hawley publicly advocated against slashing the healthcare program, writing in the New York Times: 'If Republicans want to be a working-class party – if we want to be a majority party – we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America's promise for America's working people.' He ultimately supported the bill after a $50bn fund to help rural hospitals was included, but weeks later introduced legislation that would repeal some of the very same cuts he had just voted for. 'I want to see Medicaid reductions stopped and rural hospitals fully funded permanently,' the senator said. 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Spokespeople for Schmitt and Smith did not respond to requests for comment. In response to emailed questions, a spokeswoman for Hawley referred to his introduction of the legislation to partially stop the Medicaid cuts. Down the road from the hospital lies Hayti Heights, where there are no businesses and deep puddles form in the potholes and ditches that line roadways after every thunderstorm. Mayor Catrina Robinson has a plan to turn things around for her 500 or so residents, which involves bringing back into service the water treatment plant that is the town's main source of revenue. But that is unlikely to change much without Pemiscot Memorial. 'Half of those people that work at the hospital, they're my residents. So how they gonna pay their bills? How they gonna pay their water bill, how they gonna pay their light bill, how they gonna pay rent? This is their source of income. Then what will they do?' Robinson said. Trump's bill does include an array of relief aimed at the working-class voters who broke for him in the last election, including tax cuts on tips and overtime pay and deductions aimed at senior citizens. It remains to be seen if whatever financial benefits those provisions bring to the workers of Pemiscot county will outweigh the impact of the stress the Medicaid cuts place on its healthcare system. 'The tax relief of server's tips and all that, that's not going to change the poverty level of our area,' said Loren Clifton, the hospital's administrative director. 'People losing their healthcare insurance absolutely will make it worse.' Work can be found in the county's corn, wheat, soybean and rice fields, at a casino in the county seat Caruthersville and at a shipyard along the banks of the Mississippi . But Green questions if those industries would stick around if the hospital goes under, and takes with it the emergency room that often serves to stabilize critical patients before transferring them elsewhere. 'Our community cannot go without a hospital. Healthcare, employment, industry – it would devastate everything,' Green said. The board is exploring partnerships with other companies to help keep the hospital afloat, and has applied for a federal rural emergency hospital designation which they believe will improve their reimbursements and chances of winning grants, though that will require them to give up other services that bring in revenue. For many of its leaders, the stakes of keeping the hospital open are personal. 'This is our home, born and raised, and you would never want to leave it. But I have a nine-year-old with cardiac problems. I would not feel safe living here without a hospital that I could take her to know if something happened,' said Brittany Osborne, Pemiscot Memorial's interim CEO. One muggy Wednesday morning in July, Pemiscot's three county commissioners, all Republicans, gathered in a small conference room in Caruthersville's courthouse and spoke of their resolve to keep the hospital open. 'It's 50-50 right now,' commissioner Mark Cartee said of the hospital's chances of survival. 'But, as long as we have some money in the bank of the county, we're going to keep it open. We need healthcare. We got to have a hospital.' They were comparatively sanguine about the possibility that the Medicaid work requirements would harm the facility's finances down the line. 'We got a guy around here, I guess he's still around. He's legally blind but he goes deer hunting every year,' commissioner Baughn Merideth said. 'There's just so much fraud … it sounds like we're right in the middle of it.' A few blocks away, Jim Brands, owner of Hayden Pharmacy, the oldest in the county, had little doubt that there were those in the county who took advantage of Medicaid. He also believed that fewer enrollees in the program would mean less business for his pharmacy, and more hardship overall. 'Just seeing this community, the situation it's in, the poverty, we've got to get people to work. There are a ton of able-bodied people that could work that choose not to,' he said. 'To me, there's got to be a better way to weed out the fraud and not step on the toes of the people who need it.'
