Michael collected me and my belongings and we drove to Stoke Mandeville, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Stoke Mandeville Hospital had started life as an infectious diseases hospital, and as its purpose expanded, the building was extended. It was now also the National Spinal Injuries Centre. It was a single-storey building, and to walk from the doctors’ quarters to the wards along the main corridor took some time. Michael was concerned that I had lost so much weight, and said if my indigestion continued, to go and see a physician. He had contentedly settled in Lewisham Hospital.
My room in the doctors’ mess was simply furnished with a washbasin, and was quite comfortable. But the walls were thin, and not sound-proofed. There were the usual communal bathrooms, and unlike at Sheppey, there were about 20 resident junior doctors, nearly all of them white, polite but not friendly. They were mainly from the London teaching hospitals. I was to work with Alan Gibbs, the Senior House officer. I was a pre-registration House Officer, which was the lowest rung of the doctors’ ladder. Alan was a slight, pleasant, unassuming man, about five years older than me, and had qualified in London. I could not have asked for a nicer colleague. We both worked for the consultant, Dr John Lloyd-Hart (L-H). Again, I could not have asked for a better boss. Alan immediately took me under his wing, and took me to our two wards, one male and one female, and introduced me to the two ward sisters who presided over them. I also worked in two outpatient clinics, alongside Dr L-H, as he questioned, taught, teased and joked with me. A tall, lean man in his fifties, he was shrewd but a joy to work with. I was determined to be a first-rate House Officer. After a few days, he said to me, “You are so thin and look unwell. But I cannot fault your work. Is anything the matter?” I smiled and said nothing.
In my first week at Stoke Mandeville, I went to the dining room for lunch one day. Not having had any breakfast, because the smell of bacon put me off, I was feeling empty, and thought I would try an early lunch. None of the other doctors had arrived. I sat at a table, waiting to be served. A maid came up to me and said I could not sit there, because it was Dr Guttman’s table, and he liked only his staff to sit with him.
“Who is Dr Guttman?” I asked, in my ignorance.
“What!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know who he is? He’s a very famous man. Everyone knows who he is.”
With that, she walked away, and I found myself another table. I also found out that he was indeed a famous man, and also somewhat pernickety. I did not ever come across another consultant who decided which junior doctors should sit at his table.
Ludwig Guttman was a Jew who had left his native Germany in 1939 for Britain. In 1943 he was asked by the Government to set up the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. He transformed the lives of patients with spinal injuries with his methods of rehabilitation and brought hope to thousands. He was later knighted. He could also be called the Father of the Paralympic Games.
It was Michael who suggested that I might be pregnant. The thought had not occurred to me. All I could think of was alcoholic gastritis, brought on by Christmas excesses. Alan Gibbs was worried that I was eating so little, and I confided my suspicions to him. He wrote out a pregnancy test request form with a fictitious name, and sent it with a specimen to the laboratory, and the result came back positive. I was shattered. It could not have been a worse time to have a baby. I think Mike was equally shattered, but he put on a brave face, so as not to compound my woes. He told me not to worry and that all would be well, especially if the baby was a girl.
I wondered how I could possibly carry on. I felt so tired and weak, and retched every morning and felt queasy all day. Night duty was a nightmare. When I was on call, I would be seeing emergency medical admissions throughout the night, clerking and examining them, taking and sending off blood samples, often doing hard life ECGs on them, and dashing to the lavatory in between leads to get sick.
Alan and I worked alternate nights and weekends, and he urged me to let him do some of my nights and weekends. But I could not take advantage of his goodness. This was my problem. On nights when I was not on call, I would be so tired that I would find it difficult to drop off to sleep. I would usually do a final ward round with the night sister before I went to my room, just before midnight. I told her I could do with a sedative occasionally, and asked for the new drug, which was found to be so effective. It was called thalidomide. She suggested we stick to an old one that was tried and tested, and gave me Doriden instead. Her caution and wisdom probably prevented a catastrophe, as I was at the stage of pregnancy when thalidomide inflicted its horrific damage. In those days, there were no rules and regulations. Staff prescribed for each other, but very responsibly.
“Don’t worry,” Alan Gibbs would say. “It will last only a few more weeks.”
And he was right. I started to eat again and put on weight and look normal. There were times in moments of desperation when I thought of leaving my job and going back to my mother to have the baby, leave it with her, and return to Mike and England. My mother urged me to do this. But Mike would not hear of it, and I did not want to be parted from him. Despite all these problems, deep within me there was a growing happiness. I hoped it would be a girl. When my girth was beginning to expand, I thought it was time to tell Dr L-H; he was very excited and said, “Is there anything we can do for you?” Of course, there wasn’t. I was just so relieved he did not look or say anything disapproving, because that is the way male or unmarried female consultants would react, on hearing such news from their junior doctors. It would be as if something indecent had happened.
I carried on doing my best and became more and more exhausted, but I was greatly encouraged by Dr L-H’s appreciation of my work.
“Isn’t Dr C wonderful?” he would write at the top of the page in the patient’s case notes. This would be when I had made a tricky diagnosis before he had. He would tell the ward sister that I was the brightest star in his firmament, and embarrass me further by calling me “my precious” or “my jewel” during ward rounds. Alan Gibbs would stand in the background with a smile on his face. Dr L-H frequently commented on my memory. As we went from bed to bed on ward rounds, I would reel off every detail about the patient, without reference to the case notes, and he would ask how could I remember so much, just as Mr S did in Sheppey. I had always had a very good memory, but it was also due to the training I had had in Vellore.
Dr L-H and his wife were very hospitable and generous to their junior medical staff, taking us to the theatre and picnic dinners. They once took me to the Oxford Playhouse, where we saw a young Vanessa Redgrave. My six-month post was coming to an end. When the time came, there was the usual leave-taking. I was showered with gifts for the baby. I said a special goodbye to Alan Gibbs, who had in the meanwhile got himself secretly married. Dr L-H made me promise I would keep in touch.
Excerpted with permission from Three Countries, Three Lives: A Doctor’s Story, Lindy Rajan Cartner, Aleph Book Company.