Victoria Webster - So many Everests: from cerebral palsy to casualty consultant

Diana Webster

Victoria Webster

Dianas Story

Chapter I

It was the rubber boots that puzzled me. Why was the doctor in the room wearing rubber boots?

As he came to my side, I asked: Why are you wearing boots?

He looked surprised, then embarrassed and said: The blood

Blood? Wading through blood? Oh. I supposed foggily that there possibly was a lot of blood in childbirth, though I hadnt thought about it before.

Then another of the tidal waves hit me, rolling down my body like an unstoppable surge.

Puss! said the Finnish doctor. Puss!

I pushed or tried to.

More hard! Puss! More hard!

It couldnt be harder, I thought. Not possibly. Then the wave stopped as if it had met the shoreline. Almost immediately, another rolled in.

This time the doctor was not saying Puss but telling me the opposite.

Hold back! Hold back!

But how could you hold back the sea? My body was no longer mine but in the grip of something much stronger, over which I had no control at all but which simply took me over and did what it liked with me. I was as powerless as King Canute had been to stop the waves rolling in.

Finally they stopped of themselves and it was as if I had been thrown up floundering onto the shore, breathless, too tired to do anything but lie back exhausted. Had I had a baby?

Its a little girl, Mrs Webster, said the doctor.

Everyone seemed to be very busy somewhere. Didnt babies cry when they were born? They did in the films.

Wheres the baby? I asked

We must take the baby away.

Why?

There is lack of oxygen. It was difficult.

And that was how my daughter, an otherwise perfect and healthy baby, was born with brain damage.

It was nobodys fault.

It was Good Friday. The hospital was under-staffed. My regular gynaecologist was attending a conference. The baby was too early. None of this was supposed to happen. It was nobodys fault; there was nobody really to blame. It would perhaps have been easier if we had been able to blame someone: perhaps the doctor who had been on duty that night and who failed to give me the Caesarian which these days I would certainly have had. But the hospital was short-staffed. Thirty-five was not so very old to have a first baby even in 1965, and I was healthy and fit. Its perhaps understandable that the doctor did not think it entirely necessary.

Not that I understood anything at the time. I had of course read the books available for new mothers-to-be; I had gone to classes, practised the breathing. But it was all a bit like my early sexual education, when I had read an extremely detailed book called a Medical Dictionary of Sex. As a result, I was more primed than most with knowledge of sexual deviations and unusual positions and practices, but what had somehow escaped me was the basic information about the essential actions and sensations. The same was true now about childbirth. The fact was that I had really had no idea what to expect either in having sex for the first time or in having a baby. Whats more, I couldnt ask now. I was in Finland, in a Finnish maternity hospital and my Finnish was very limited. The ability to ask where the station is or to buy a litre of milk in another language does not equip one for describing the type and severity of ones contractions in labour or anything else I needed to explain or ask at the this moment.

In the early hours of Good Friday, Mike had taken me in to the maternity hospital, where he had left me outside the labour ward. Husbands were not allowed to come further. I lay on a hard, narrow, rexine-covered hospital bed in a dark indentation in a corridor with a very thin cotton blanket over me. Occasionally another woman would be wheeled beside me. The women never spoke anything else but Finnish, so we exchanged little but groans. Then one by one the women would be wheeled away and I would go on lying there alone. At what seemed long intervals a nurse would come to ask me how I was doing or so I supposed, because the only English-speaking nurse eventually went off duty. Had my waters broken? I didnt know, because I didnt know what to expect the books had not gone into details was it a tiny trickle or was it a flood? At any rate apparently my contractions were somehow never satisfactory enough, because I was never wheeled away.

The morning became the afternoon; the afternoon became night; the light in the corridor became dimmer; it was impossible to read or to do anything but lie and wait for the next searing contraction. At first I had rung Mike from time to time to tell him that there was no news, but the only telephone was a long walk down the corridor. Eventually I became too tired to make the effort. I longed for him. I longed for a friend. I longed for anyone who could speak English. I have never felt so lonely, so desolate and so helpless. To be bereft of the ability to make yourself understood is to be no longer in control of your life, to be disempowered.

At last the moment came when I was wheeled away to another room. It was in darkness, with light only showing from a small strip of window at the top of the door. I traced the glint of metal, the outline of lighting equipment over and above a slab a few feet away from mine. The Delivery Room? Now, I thought, now I will have the baby. But nothing at all happened, only the recurring contractions. Presumably they were still not satisfactory. To me, however, they were intolerable. Was this what labour was like? Was it always so terrible? The books had made it sound fairly easy, and I had no comparison to make.

How are you, Mrs Webster?

It was the Finnish doctor on night duty, someone I had not met before.

Not good. Can I have something for the pain? I dont think I can stand it.

It is normal, Mrs Webster.

It cant be. Please.

No. I am sorry.

Why not? Why not?

It can be not good. Not good for the baby. You must be strong.

Please!

No. Sorry.

He went, leaving me alone in the dark. I looked at the dim outline of the windows. Could I open them? Throw myself out and end this? But I felt too weak even to get up.

The next time the doctor came in I was screaming. This time he gave me an injection and things became more manageable again and a little vague.

Then bright, blinding lights. I was in yet another room, lying on yet another green-rexined slab. That was when I saw the doctors rubber boots.

So the baby was at last delivered, and taken away immediately before I even saw it. Not for me those touching scenes in the films where the midwife delivers the naked baby wrapped in a towel into its smiling mothers arms and she looks down with relief, pride and joy. I still lay on the slab, waiting.

After a time the doctor trudged over to me, still in his rubber boots.

What is the babys name? he asked.

What? We havent got a name yet.

We must have a name.

Why?

The doctor hesitated. The baby must be He didnt know the word, A priest must give a name.

You mean baptise her?

Yes. Baptise.

But that meant Surely that must mean

We had thought we had plenty of time for names: a situation like this had never crossed our minds. We had giggled over the choice, thinking up names that were not really for people but sounded as if they could be: Semolina, Forsythia, Rubella. I remembered now that Mike had also joked about calling the baby something beginning with V then she would be able to have a car with her initials on the front: VW.

What girls name began with V? Violet no, no! Victoria? Id had a great-aunt called Victoria. It was a pretty name, optimistic too: V for Victory, wed said as children in the war. What would Mike think of the name? I didnt want to decide our babys name without him.