Pain

I was number three. But by 10.30, I was at the top of the list and so was wheeled out of the ward and into a special waiting bay. The waiting bay was in a corner and I had been placed facing the wall - like a recalcitrant student. So there I lay, freezing my relatively exposed ass off in a shitty hospital gown. Wondering why, after nearly a decade of spirited resistance, I had accepted my dentist’s advice to get my wisdom teeth out.

Denied a view, I began to listen to the workaday sounds around me. Behind me I could hear nurses, encouragingly asking after each other’s flu recovery. But the aural landscape was dominated by what seemed to be some kind of building works – a concrete drill perhaps, interspersed with staccato bursts of chiseling.

Prone to episodes of extreme self-absorption, this seemed a useful reminder that, although I lay in rigid anticipation of the extraction, the rest of the world had not in fact stopped, rather, it was getting about its business.

Continue reading "The getting of wisdom teeth extracted" »

Nicole Kidman has welcomed a new biological daughter via a ‘gestational carrier’, Princess Mary had her twins in a natural, four-hour birth and Miranda Kerr released a statement that she gave birth to her 9 lbs., 12 oz., baby in a long, arduous and difficult labour ‘naturally, without drugs or painkillers!!!’. 

As a mum of three who has been through labour twice, I fully appreciate Miranda’s use of three exclamation marks to describe her drug-free birth.

Gosh, I give myself three for enduring it with drugs and scramble to find enough punctuation to describe the caesarean.  One way you can’t sit down.  The other way you can’t stand up.

Continue reading "Competitive childbirth - it’s ‘mum-upmanship’" »