He hates the urogynaecology clinic: “a bunch of nans” - defined, with the use of “nan”, by their child-bearing - “with pelvic floors like quicksand and their uteri stalactite-ing into their thermals”. Instead, we have his disgust, for instance, for old women. This passage comes at the end of the memoir, and it is a fragment of the book he should have written.īut he can’t write that book because it would be too truthful, and it is not the book people wish to read. “When cornered,” he writes, “I would reach for my red nose and clown horn and bring put my anecdotes about objects in anuses and patients, ‘saying the funniest things’”. He became a comic when he left medicine, shortly after this baby died. In his memoir, when a baby dies, he “went for six months without laughing”. More from this author The deadly omertà of childbirth None of it is laughable unless you yearn for denial. It is all dangerous, particularly for black women, who are four times more likely to die during pregnancy in the UK than white women. I don’t think they are allowed to tell you that to have a first child at 40, when obese, is dangerous. I think I also had PTSD from the experience, and that is why I didn’t have another child. I had taken too much morphine during labour - I am a recovering addict and I lied to a midwife to get morphine, about which I am profoundly ashamed - and so it was partially my fault.
I put the bowl down and said something like: “Is this normal?” I was taken to a high-dependency ward, my stomach was syringed, and I was given a drip, and that saved my life. I was swollen and gassy, and it seemed to take an age to get there. The next time I vomited into the bowl I took it to the nurses’ station. He turned away, vexed, and I staggered back to bed. I begged a junior doctor to help me, since I was vomiting shit into a bowl. It is quite common after abdominal surgery. I remember, after my son’s birth in a London teaching hospital, my abdomen swelling with paralytic ileus after an emergency caesarean section. It is not like that from the other side of the screen.
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