Blink and back in hospital, like a nightmarish deja vu
Another emergency - and handing in my book in between
When you’ve spent a stint in hospital being very very unwell - in agony, helpless before being cut open - as soon as you feel well, it’s natural to move and put it behind you; to focus on the here and now, not the past. I started running again, finalised my book, went to New York for work, a wedding in Italy, enjoyed the chaos of parenting, busying myself in their social world, leaving little time for my own, because that's what parenting is.
But what if that terrible event happens all over again, only four months later? On Sunday night (30 June) I finalised the email to submit the first draft of my book, all 80,000 words of it, (having cut it down from over 95,000) aiming to send it Monday morning (01 July), the deadline day. We had an Aperol spritz to celebrate.
Except at 2.30 a.m., Monday morning, I wake with excruciating pain, turn over, and hope it goes away. I don’t fall back to sleep. It goes through my mind that I can't miss my rescheduled dental appointment again, so it better not be bad. At 8.30 a.m. I crawl out of bed to find my laptop and press send on the email to my editor. At least the book draft is in. I try to sleep to distract myself from the pain.
Unfortunately the pain gets worse, not better, and when I finally get up at 10 a.m. and feel nauseous, alarm bells. I don’t bother trying to call an ambulance this time because it will take too long. I call an taxi instead, sobbing. The downside is upon arrival, there’s the dreaded (and long) queue, full of sprains, eye infections and issues a GP might be able to sort if people could get the appointments they need. There's nobody medical around to see me stumbling, struggling. I sit awkwardly on a chair, designed, it seems, to prevent people from lying down in the waiting room. It’s agony to sit upright.
What’s different this time is my husband meets me there, and instead of shivering and shaking in a corner, without a voice, he speaks to the people who can escalate the case - they are surprisingly hard to find. A room full of patients and clerical staff, no person of medical authority in sight. It’s really not like the movies.
I think we have an emergency
It seems you can’t be seen until you check in and are on the system. He tries to reason with the receptionist, and had to re-iterate over and over again: “check her history, then you’ll know!” The receptionists have heard it all before, they shrug. They can't respond to every drama with alarm, because this must happen all the time, everyone here has something that feels urgent. There’s a comic moment where a receptionist asks him to ask the others waiting in the queue if it's okay for us to register next. “I think we have an emergency,” he says again to them all. Someone grumbles about there being a queue - we are in the land of quiet queues after all - though most don't respond at all, vaguely agreeing that yes it’s okay for them to wait, when clearly I can’t.
I start feeling a growing sense of deja vu. The waiting for a doctor, the recurring sickness. The pain, the eventual morphine at 3 p.m., which makes me feel groggy but doesn't stop the pain. The dreaded NG tube down my nose that won’t find its way into my stomach as it makes me gag. I wonder if this is a nightmare. How can it all all be happening again? At some point a consultant agrees to delay placing the NG tube until I’m in the operating theatre. I try to do some deep breathing but the pain feels too overpowering.
This time the call for surgery feels like a relief. Imagine that. Two surgeons in a room tell you you have to be cut open through a scar that has only just healed, within the hour, and it feels like relief. It’s not a small surgery either; it’s another major one, so they can see everything they need to do, to handle it all carefully, to cut away the pesky adhesions (scar tissue) that have got everything stuck again. Adhesions don't show up on a CT scan, all they can see is that my intestines are twisted in a “closed loop obstruction” like a twisted party balloon. It needs to be open surgery so as not to risk damaging my intestines even more, a registrar tells me.
It’s a relief because of what happened last time. The waiting made it worse, much, much worse, bad enough that I'm back here four months later (perhaps?), though nobody links the severity of then with now. But surgery begets surgery, that much is clear. Each surgery creates new adhesions and increases the risk of recurrent obstructions. Like a nightmarish loop. Literally. I read later that the infection (peritonitis) last time could also have caused additional adhesions too; not a reassuring fact given the infection was the result of hours and hours of waiting.
This time they've calculated my risk of death. The surgeon tells me reassuringly that it only comes out as 0.07%.
Before the surgery they once again read out the risks to me before signing the consent form. A form that is now annoyingly familiar. This time they’ve calculated my risk of death. The surgeon tells me reassuringly that it only comes out as 0.07%. Nobody told me my risk last time, which was significantly higher. Surgical delay is a major risk factor of death, unsurprisingly. Mortality rate of an untreated obstruction is 100%.
I make some joke about being here again too soon, and we joke about there being no loyalty points. A moment to laugh during the chaos. At 6 p.m. I’m in the operating theatre and put to sleep. I remember feeling thankful to all the kind anaesthetists, because finally I won’t feel the pain anymore. They are so chirpy, trained well to put minds at ease before going under. Everyone is so kind, and so sorry.
At least this time there’s no perforation, resection or infection, a shorter surgery and a slightly reduced hospital stay. It should make recovery a little easier I hope. I know the drill by now and after five nights I even beg to go home early. Recovery speeds up when you can sleep well.
I never intended to cover my own health in this newsletter, but I share this because I want to iterate that events like this will inevitably shape my outlook on the future. What the experience has clarified for me once more is the importance of living for today, of accepting the reality that suffering could be a part of the future, but fully understanding I have very little control, so it's wasted energy to dwell on past medical trauma. That and holding my little ones extra tight as often as they’ll allow.
If anything, going through this has made me all the more determined to get back to what gives me purpose, my family, my friends, work and my writing. And thanks again to so many of you reaching out. Each message gave me joy in a terrifying time. It shows the importance of community, of friendship and long lost connections, even though I feel like I've rather used up everyone’s sympathy. It's uncomfortable to be vulnerable, but it gives great comfort to be cared for.
The Motherhood Complex is available from most book stores. Breadwinners is out in summer 2025
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