The clock is ticking in A new era

This week, a lady was admitted to our ward with a suspected blood clot. She had with her her six day old baby, as she was breastfeeding. You can imagine the stir this caused on the ward, anyone comes along with kids or animals and everything gets dropped. The whole ward ground to a halt for 45 minutes the other day because a man came by with a guide dog!

When the time came for her scan, her husband still hadn’t arrived so I ended up minding the baby. He was absolutely beautiful, ridiculously alert, and so calm and well behaved. He had a little cry and wouldn’t settle so I picked him up and rocked him and he just lay there, wide awake, taking it all in.

The patient’s husband arrived and was delighted he was able to finish his coffee before having to take over baby duty, and frankly he’d have had to have wrestled the kid off me, I was in heaven!

We were chit chatting and he said he couldn’t believe how many staff work bank holidays, and how the level of pay is disgraceful, and we’re all worth so much more. On the one hand it’s hard to argue with that, none of us would say no to a payrise! But when you’re holding a freshly cooked baby in your arms, and you’re sitting in a gown because you were about to give chemo before you had to go babysit, it was the easiest thing in the world to look that man in the eye and say, with honesty, not all riches are financial, there are bigger perks than money when you do this job.

I got to spend my bank holiday working, yes, but I also got to spend my bank holiday nursing his baby, a completely unexpected turn to the day, and giving life saving drugs to patients. How many people can say that when they go to work they have the opportunity to give someone their life back?

That little boy though, it was hard not to just sit and sob looking at him. He was so incredibly precious, and it was just a stark reminder of where I’m at in my life, which is nowhere near having that.

I blame my stupid mother and her stupid cancer. Before then, I was bumbling around under the impression I’d have kids ‘someday’. Then mum was diagnosed and the biggest regret I’d have had if she’d died was that she would never have seen me with kids, that she’d have died without having grandkids. And it just switched something on inside me. And now, 4 years later, she’s absolutely fine and will probably live til she’s 90 just to spite me, but that absolute desire hasn’t gone away.

It’s the one thought that terrifies me, that I might never get to become a parent. And not just for the baby bit. For all of it. I see people in the shops with their kids of all ages, like the little boy who must have been 4, holding hands with the mannequin in marks and Spencer! When his mum told him it was time to go, he leaned up, gave the little boy mannequin a kiss, and skipped off. Absolutely heart melting.

And when we went to the theatre on Thursday, mums with their teenage daughters, sharing that time together.

I just can’t see a time when this happens for me. I know things turn on a knife edge, I know that anything could happen, entirely unexpectedly, at any time, and i lie in bed at night hoping for that, that someone will unexpectedly come into my life and make these things possible.

Xx