In the moments before my life ended I was arrogant, opening my eyes and looking with curiosity at the doctor who had just pronounced “there is no blood pressure ... and the pulse is fading fast.” I thought to myself “he looks Egyptian ... silly man, sounds as if he thinks I’m dying” and I closed my eyes again, hoping to work out for myself what was going on.
My next thought saved me. I had just given birth to a son, and on the way to the hospital we had passed, driving in the opposite direction, my regrettably little-loved sister-in-law who had, two days previously, given birth to a stillborn son, full-term but throttled by the umbilical cord.
This second, bloody-minded, thought – which began only mildly incoherent and ended with a scream at least as loud as the initial pain of my rupturing uterus – was “motherless child ... childless mother ... tidy solution ... NO! ... I do not want her to have my child.” And it was this which arrested my death and which enabled my GP to speak of me as a ‘modern day miracle’ since the charts which I saw later confirmed that yes, I did, in fact, have only minutes left – maybe as many as three.
[This originally appeared as a Thinking Ten piece]
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