Sandi Toksvig

Sandi Toksvig

I’ve had my life saved several times which, if there is a plan, suggests I ought to have some purpose for being here. The first time I was a small baby. I contracted tsetse fly fever, thanks to some oversharing fly, and my fever soared to alarming heights. We were living out in the African bush and, as the story goes, the flying doctor was called and arrived by small plane. I must have been boiling because apparently he declared, ‘Put her in the fridge.’ I’ve always been small and certainly as a baby I was tiny enough to go in beside the eggs. I don’t think this is actually a recommended medical procedure, but here I still am. The upshot is a fondness for the fridge over and above it being a place to keep fruit jelly.

The second time medicine intervened to keep me on the planet was when I was twenty-one. I was at university, in my second year, and gradually had become less and less able to eat. I would consume a little and then be unable to force down any more. My fellow students loved sharing a meal with me because I always ordered well and left much, which they could then gorge on. I have never been interested in my looks. My wife says I am the only person she knows who doesn’t look in a mirror to comb her hair. As a consequence, I had not noticed that my small appetite did not seem to marry up with an ever-expanding stomach.

During the summer holidays, I visited my maternal English grandmother, a forthright woman not awash with empathy.

‘Are you pregnant?’ she barked at me.

I shook my head. I was a secret lesbian, so pregnancy had not occurred to me as a worry, but I didn’t want to say so. Granny took me to her local doctor, a woman I had known all my life from our annual English visits. Dr Johnson had seemed old for as long as I could remember. How many times I recalled her coming to my grandmother’s house for one thing or another with her small black doctor’s bag, which, in a Mary Poppins-like manner, always seemed to have the very thing in it that was needed. She examined me. My stomach was very large indeed and I was sent to the Middlesex Hospital in central London. It was 1979 and, unbeknown to me, they had something still very rare in the NHS – an ultrasound machine. I think everyone was still going with the pregnancy theory as I kept getting asked about it.

I remember the grainy pictures that flickered on a screen as they examined me. I appeared to have swallowed a rugby ball. This is not usual and caused some consternation. I think the machines are more refined now. There was talk of tumours and cancers; surgery was scheduled immediately and soon I had a scar which ran like a railway line from one side of my stomach to the other.

It turns out I had an ovarian cyst so large it was written up in the journal The Lancet, alongside other matters of medical interest. Seven pints of fluid in it. The surgeon joked that they had all had to wear wellingtons. This unwanted sac of fluid had pushed against all my organs and stopped me being able to eat. My stomach was large but in truth I had gone down to five and a half stone. I was starving.

The recovery took many weeks and I got to know Broderip ward at the Middlesex extremely well. Here the team of nurses were led in an old-fashioned way with Matron shooing doctors away when she thought they had had enough time with the patients. They were glorious women who managed a tricky mixed collection of patients, including an elderly woman with advanced dementia who drove us all mad waking us at night to see who we were. The nurses were kind and patient and dealt with my distress when I had a sort of post-traumatic realisation at how ill I had been. How little attention I had paid to my body. They healed every part of me. They changed bandages, they brought tea and, most of all, they made me laugh.

Hard to believe that an ultrasound machine was still cutting edge when it helped to keep me here, but the NHS has ever moved forward and adapted. In 1987, Broderip ward became the UK’s first ward dedicated to caring for HIV patients, when it was opened by Princess Diana. It changed the face of how people were treated and brought dignity to the gay community. I was proud to have ever been in it.

There are photographs of the patients from that time taken by Gideon Mendel, which were published as a book called simply The Ward. In one of them, a nurse is leaning across her patient to give him a kiss on the cheek. It represents all the caring and kindness which I know first-hand from those who work in the NHS. My own daughter is now a doctor in their service and I wish Dr Johnson were still alive so I could tell her.

I still have that long scar which divides me in half. I’ve been thinking of having the fastening for a zipper tattooed at one end for no other reason than it would have made the Broderip nurses laugh. I thanked them then and with all my heart I thank them again.

The Middlesex Hospital is gone now. In its place stand expensive flats and offices. A hospital had stood on that street since 1757, but was closed down in 2005. Perhaps with hindsight one should still be standing there now.

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