Lauren Child

Lauren Child

A lmost exactly a month after my sixteenth birthday, my appendix popped. It didn’t happen completely without warning, it took approximately seventy-two hours. Beginning on the last day of the Christmas holidays when it was snowing – proper snow, the sort that stops the traffic.

I’d spent the day with friends, wondering at the strangeness of our now silent town which appeared ‘rubbed out’ – all its edges gone. I was aware that something strange was also happening to me. I thought it was the cold that was causing this odd feeling. By the next morning, it had become an ache that became a pain which grew into something akin to a wolf gnawing at my insides.

I didn’t make a big fuss about it, not because it wasn’t agony but because I wasn’t entirely sure whether saying it was agony would be considered ‘making a fuss’. This was my first reason: in my family, you needed to be mortally injured not to be ‘making a fuss’ and how could you claim you were in agony without ‘making a fuss’?

Secondly, I was lying about the location of the pain. If I told the truth, I feared my mother would enquire if it might be my period? – this word always uttered in a whisper on the rare occasions it had to be spoken – being eaten by a wolf was certainly preferable to this.

Thirdly, I didn’t want my parents to call a doctor. I had a deep fear of doctors – all those embarrassing questions – and I could think of little worse than one coming to the house.

In the end, my mother did call a doctor, who immediately called an ambulance. This was very embarrassing because the ambulance arrived at exactly the same time as everyone from my school was walking past my house. While my parents were awkwardly explaining their delay in phoning, I was considering the tragedy of just how many of my classmates might have caught a glimpse of me in my sweat-soaked pyjamas.

The roads were closed due to the ongoing blizzard and they couldn’t get me to the big hospital in Swindon, so I was taken a mile up the road to Savernake, the cottage hospital on the edge of town. This was a place very familiar to me; my sisters and I had made various visits over the years to have squashed fingers stitched, greet newborn babies and watch our grandmother fade away.

Even as I was wheeled to theatre, being at death’s door did not assuage my embarrassment. I had not washed for three days and my hair was tangled and damply stuck to my face. I was very conscious of this. Yet what I remember most clearly was how nice everyone was to me, incredibly nice. They made no mention of my unclean state. There was no eye rolling, no holding of noses, one nurse even held my hand. No judgement, just kind words and a nurse who held my hand.

When I came round from the operation, I appeared to be on a geriatric ward. The patients were all extremely ancient, although thinking about it some of them may only have been ten years older than I am now. I didn’t mind a bit because the ‘old ladies’ were sweet to me and funny to listen to, and I didn’t have the energy to talk. They were always trying to get me to eat but I didn’t have the energy for that either – not even the Yorkie bar my sister had placed on the shelf beside my bed.

This bar was spotted by my nurse, who promptly picked it up, broke off the end and ate it. ‘I love the ends,’ she said.

She came back the next day and ate its other end. ‘It’s the ends I love,’ she explained, ‘I’m not interested in the rest.’

What I did have the energy for was walking to the toilet and no amount of imploring or scolding was going to stop me.

The kind Yorkie nurse seemed to understand a sixteen-year-old girl who was embarrassed by bed baths and bed pans and too-personal questions.

Nurse: ‘Have you had a movement?’

Me: ‘Pardon?’

Nurse: ‘A number two?’

Me: ‘Sorry?’

Nurse: ‘A poo?’

Me: silence.

The nurse told me I was lucky. She said that I’d come in ‘with just two hours to live’. She said my survival was down to the surgeon, ‘He’s the best in the area.’

She was right, I was lucky. Lucky for the snow which meant I was taken to our small-town hospital, no trouble for friends to visit. Lucky that we had a small-town hospital. Lucky that the best surgeon in the area lived in our town. Lucky to have a nurse who understood me. And lucky for my fellow patients who made me laugh.

The whole experience changed my life, and not simply by saving it.

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