Diana Webster - So Many Everests: From Cerebral Palsy to Casualty Consultant

Copyright 2010 Diana and Victoria Webster

First published in Finland by Sderstrms Frlag, 2011

This edition copyright 2012 Lion Hudson

The right of Diana and Victoria Webster to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published by Lion Books

an imprint of

Lion Hudson plc

Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,

Oxford OX2 8DR, England

www.lionhudson.com/lion

ISBN 978 0 7459 5595 7

e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5761 6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image: Press Association

To Mike

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

DIANAS STORY

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

VICTORIAS STORY

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

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 Caesarean 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 sex 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 that 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, rexene-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!