Mark Watson

Mark Watson

Dear Vlad,

It’s me, Mark. Mark Watson? Yes, sort of a minor comedian and author. Taskmaster, QI, that sort of thing. Rugby’s Funniest Moments. What? Are you sure? I thought everyone watched that.

Nothing? Oh. Well, I’m pretty confident you’ll remember me when I tell you about the day our paths crossed, in Archway, north London. In the theatre for emergency surgery, or whatever frightening name flashed past my eyes on the way in. It was a sunny afternoon, late May 2014, although the weather was something of a moot point as we had been in the hospital for twenty-one hours when I met you. We were waiting for our second and final child, our daughter. I suppose ‘we were waiting’ doesn’t entirely do justice to the division of labour, no pun intended. My wife was going through the most gruelling physical process available to humanity; I was mostly fetching bottles of water, pacing up and down and – my main skill in this or any crisis – hoping for the best.

Due to this endless, exhausting stalemate between the baby and her mother, it had been decided the delivery was going to need an emergency caesarean – as had happened with our first kid. Once more, the corridor full of scrubs, the lonely room high up in a hospital wing, the frightening arsenal of metal equipment. A sheet hung up to separate our heads from the butchery that was about to take place. I tried to digest the idea, just as incomprehensible as it had been the other time, that this daughter already existed, had existed for months of course, and in half an hour would enter our lives forever – but for now was in this bewildering waiting room between nothingness and planet Earth. Bewildering for us to think about and, to be fair, probably a little bit strange for Rose Watson, aged minus twenty-five minutes, as well.

And there you were, Vlad. ‘I am the consultant anaesthetist,’ you said, ‘and you are the father?’ ‘Yes,’ I agreed, even though I was so addled that I probably would have said yes if you’d claimed I was the anaesthetist and put me in charge of the epidural. Sensibly, though, you did not do that. Instead, you began the process of injecting my wife at the base of her spine.

While this was going on, you chatted to me about the fact you were from Ukraine. I had been to Ukraine a couple of years before, for a football tournament. With adrenalin surging through me, with my brain grasping desperately at distraction, I gabbled at you on this subject like an over-eager Just a Minute contestant, supplying what was probably a very full breakdown of the game (a 1–1 draw between England and France), the goals, the layout of the stadium and the night my brother and I spent on the floor of Kiev airport before flying home. Yes, surely you remember me now. Surely you remember thinking, ‘How fortunate I am, that the husband of one of the day’s final patients is in a position to give me such a precise summary of a group fixture in Euro 2012. Yes, lucky old Vlad!’

‘Everything is going good,’ you said, ‘everything is fine.’ You said this several times as the rest of the team began work; your tone of voice was as casual as if you were welcoming us on board the service from Paddington to Cardiff Central. This was even more valuable than you probably realised. I, after all, was trying to give exactly the same reassurance to the mother, but it didn’t mean a huge amount coming from me, any more than in turbulence it is worth me saying, ‘Oh, I’m sure we aren’t going to crash or anything.’ I had absolutely no idea what was going on. But you did, and you made me feel bolder than I really was.

By now – with the epidural fully kicking in – it wasn’t clear to me whether you still had actual clinical tasks in the operation, but what I did know was that you had now become a full-time helpline to me and, by extension, to the mum. ‘You like music?’ you asked and, without warning you switched on a small, old-fashioned transistor radio. The birth of the first baby had taken place with only the quiet chat of the surgeons and the clinking of unspecified scary tools behind it and I think I’d assumed that was how things always went. The birth of a child didn’t seem, in my head, like something you deployed massive beats for. But it couldn’t have been more welcome. You yourself seemed very into it. Your face relaxed into a grin. You looked moments from shouting ‘EVERYBODY GET ON THE FLOOR!!’

‘You like the tune?’ you asked – remember, Vlad? – and, yes, I said, I very, very much did.

The song was ‘Once In A Lifetime’ by Talking Heads. Always a favourite of mine, but never quite as perfect a soundscape to anything as it had suddenly become. The celebrated opening bars with David Byrne’s spoken-sung sermon, concluding in ‘… and you may ask yourself: Well! How did I get here?’ What an amazing note, I thought, to enter the world on. But was she coming?

‘Yes, yes, everything is going good,’ you said once again. ‘Everything is absolutely normal.’ I clung onto that word, ‘normal’, like the life-raft it was in these dizzying circumstances. With whatever small recess of my brain was still processing actual thoughts rather than just blasting alarm bells, I thought: ‘How could this ever be normal? How can it be that your work day consists of nothing but people like me – maybe more composed than me, as almost everyone in the world routinely is, but still people on the precipice of one of the defining moments of their lives? How can you possibly handle six “defining moments” in a shift without the stakes overwhelming you?’ I know it wasn’t your child, Vlad. (At least, I’m pretty confident it wasn’t.) But to be so calm that you could transmit calm to two scared people; three, if you count the emerging baby, who was having a stressful Monday of it herself. It’s quite something to be able to do that, Vlad.

If it had been a Netflix show, ‘Once In A Lifetime’ would still have been playing as Rose spent her first few seconds in London and on Earth. But not even your team could complete a C-section in less than the playing time of a single – unless we’d struck lucky with ‘Stairway to Heaven’, I guess. The song that followed it was ‘There She Goes’ by the La’s. Again, not bad: a woozy, iconic anthem, seemingly in praise of a girl – but unfortunately, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with it, Vlad, it’s widely known to be about heroin. ‘You like the tune?’ you asked again, but I didn’t get a chance to answer, because suddenly one of the midwives had my new child in her arms.

The few seconds of suspense, and silence, when the baby first appears are like nothing it’s in my power to describe. You still know anything could be wrong; disasters happen, unforeseen ones – you will have seen plenty, Vlad. Then she opened her mouth and wailed. ‘It’s a lovely, healthy big girl,’ said someone. I was crying. My wife was crying. Rose was loudly making her initial impressions of the planet known. ‘There you are,’ you said, Vlad. ‘Everything is good, right?’ And it was. Like you’d said all along.

So, all of this ring a bell? No, I guess not. Like I’ve said, to you this wasn’t even your first wonder of the afternoon. You saw more babies born that day than I have seen in my life. And the better things went in each case, the less you will remember about them. For all I know, even the music wasn’t some unique choice of providence; maybe you have a playlist that you always pop on, to make every dad feel like there’s something special about him and his experience. If so, fair play, you judged it to perfection. And I hope the Super Furry Animals are on there somewhere a bit later.

So, in fact, you won’t have had a single thought about me since 26 May 2014, or my then wife or our now six-year-old, delicious daughter. But I’ve thought about you plenty. Every time Talking Heads come on, every time I drive past a hospital, every time someone talks about ‘going into theatre’. I don’t know if you still live and work in this country. For all I know, you might be a painter and decorator now. Or, I guess, a DJ. But that’s the point: you don’t even need or want me to know anything about you. You represent the thousands of people in the NHS whose names we barely learn, to whom we make no special gesture other than a muttered thank you on the way out of the room and who, nonetheless, change our lives as a matter of course.

All the same, I didn’t change your name, or invent any of this. You were called Vlad. You were working in a north London hospital on that day in May. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll see this, or someone will somehow work out it was you and tell you about it. And this will maybe serve as some sort of thanks.

Mark Watson (from Taskmaster and stuff)

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