Fates

"There are fates worse than death. Longevity drags if you have buried your children. Poverty, loneliness, incontinence, dependence, and dementia are some of the final rewards. Not everybody hopes for a long life followed by death from boredom. Plato in The Republic recalled the gymnastic teacher Herodicus whose skills enabled him to reach old age in a prolonged death struggle. Hesiod’s golden race died swiftly, as though in sleep; they had no old age. Why be afraid of sudden death from coronary heart disease if you cannot regret it the day after?"

Skrabanek, Petr. "Preventive medicine and morality." Lancet 1, no. 8473 (1986): 143.

the nineteenth of April

today is the day my brother died. we don't know when, exactly, but the landlord found his lifeless body in the communal hallway around half past ten. nobody knows what was going through his mind then. he didn't leave a note. just two empty vodka bottles and a body that ran out of breath.

i remember quite clearly the phone call. i was walking past Dream beds on Tottenham Court Road when the nightmare began. "the inevitable's happened. Paul's gone." i think i squeaked something out before a strange, impassive sense of calm descended on me.

i met my boyfriend at Warren Street and greeted him with the cold, hard words: "Paul's dead". we hugged for too long and then walked up Hampstead Road to get back home. past the old alcoholic's treatment centre, of all ironies. past flats full of alcoholics like Paul, i expect.

when i got home my housemates asked if everything was alright like they already knew it wasn't. i don't know if they did. i know i didn't want to upset them so i just said yes, with a fake cheerful smile that i stuck on my face over the coming black weeks. then i went home to my mum.

i don't remember anything of that weekend.

on Monday i called my boss into a meeting room and told her with what i thought was the appropriate tone of voice that my eldest brother had died last week and i would need exactly two days off for the funeral and no more because i was absolutely fine and i wouldn't need to take any more time off from work at all.

i don't remember anything of that week.

until the funeral. i wasn't sure whether to wear trousers or a skirt. but i couldn't ask my mum because my voice had disappeared. maybe it was visiting Paul's soul to say the last words i never got to say. i didn't visit his body.

Jason cried in the car park. it was the first expression of grief i'd seen. it just made me more like stone. i wasn't upset. i was relieved, and guilty that i was relieved, and angry about feeling guilty, and ashamed because i couldn't cry. my Dad did though.

i read a poem. well i tried. the congregation gasped as my shell-shocked vocal cords straining at the sounds a normal person would make. but i wasn't normal and i never will be again.

at the wake, Jonathan played Paul's music and distributed copies of his poems, "because they should be seen." shame no one saw that while he was alive. i was angry again, but only on the inside.

it took a long while for my anger and guilt and shame to reach the top of the bottomless pit of deep dark despair that i didn't know existed in a hole in my heart. once that happened i started leaking. it wouldn't stop.

it doesn't stop.

How the Wellcome Trust once thumbed their noses at Margaret Thatcher

On the day of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher's funeral, it seems appropriate to flag up a wonderful story from the history of the Wellcome Trust. I first came across it while researching interesting aspects of Wellcome's history for their 75th anniversary project, when I was seconded to the public engagement team. My job was to tease out a dozen tales from Wellcome's history that demonstrated its impact, influence and achievement.

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher pulled funding from a survey run from UCL that would assess the state of the nation's sex lives and attitudes towards it. She believed the survey was "an invasion of people's privacy and did not want her government to be associated with it." Sir Donald Acheson, the Chief Medical Officer of the day, saw its importance and went to the then director of the Wellcome Trust, Peter Williams with a plea. Anne Johnson, lead investigator of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) sent her original grant application to Williams and nine days later Wellcome's scientific committee recommended to their Trustees that they provide the full funding for the survey: £900,000. The Trustees unaninmously agreed that same day.

Journalist Mike Durham with his Sunday Times story about Margaret Thatcher blocking NATSAL funding. 

Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Some involved in the decision were concerned that Wellcome might appear to be "thumbing their noses" to the Prime Minister. Fortunately, they also believed that politicians should not have "a veto on a well-designed study that many saw as key to the tackling of a looming medical emergency."

And it seems Wellcome's scientific committee and its Trustees made the right decision. The rest of the story is published on the Wellcome Trust's website, as written by Nic Fleming following mine and Benjamin Thompson's initial research.

And The Winner Is...

Early morning, never sleep
Enough to have a dream.
Dreads bathing mother, fears
That no-one will be
Her selfless friend
When the time draws near
That is misnamed 'the end'.

The postman nearly visits,
On the mat a letter
Sealed in dumb reply
To her only ever
Rush of madness -
"Why you should have a holiday
In twenty words or less."

Excitement lasts a gulp
Then stood one foot upon
The pristine pedal of the bin
The thought that if she'd won......
If frightens her to laugh;
The unopened letter gets dropped in
And she goes to run the bath.

Paul Maddocks (1969-2007)

The Tubes and Flaps of Modern Medicine

I'm reading James Le Fanu's account of "The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine". It's a gripping whistle-stop tour of how medicine changed dramatically from the era of the First World War onwards. Le Fanu pulls out such glorious gems of whimsy in these tales of triumph, I just had to share one here:

In 1973, reports of the first "free skin flap transfer" gave hope that the old style "tube pedicle" transfer -whereby a portion of skin is removed from a healthy area and conjoined to skin that has been damaged (namely from burns) until this skin tube, or bridge, naturally gains a blood supply from the new site, is removed entirely from the healthy area and then sewn as a flap of healthy skin over the damaged area - could become a technique of the past.

The first of the new microsurgical free skin flap transfers involved the complete removal of healthy tissue from an Australian patient's groin area and subsequent transfer to the area of damaged skin on the ankle. This technique made use of the newly-invented operating microscope to enable grafting of miniscule blood vessels between the skin surrounding the damaged site and the healthy skin graft. The tension lay in the skill of the surgeon connecting these pin-head sized vessels, and the question of whether they would immediately carry blood through to the grafted skin.

In this case, they did. And here is the gem:

"After 17 days the sutures were removed and a few luxuriant pubic hairs were noted growing on the ankle."

Le Fanu mined this quote from the original paper in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery*. It is the appearance of the word "luxuriant" more than "pubic hairs" that really makes me smile. I can imagine authors Daniel Rollin and Ian Taylor enjoyed inserting that into an otherwise standard technical account of an extraordinary technique that transformed the treatment of skin burns.

*Available to subscribers only, sorry.

Just So

There's no harm in asking
Why everything should be just so
There's no harm in dreaming
That someday I'll know all there is to know
I just want to know
Perhaps it's true that some surprises
Are much better left untold
But there's no harm in hoping
That one day their secrets
Unfold

Why does the ostrich have feathers that grow in a plume?
And why does the hippo have tiny red eyes
When there's so much room for eyes to bloom?
Why do camels get the hump?
Why does the crab play with the sea?

Why does no one seem to be bothered by questions but me?

In these High and Far-Off Times
There must be reasons behind rhymes
There must be answers to every question
And puzzle, I propose
Though I've asked all of my cousins
Aunts and uncles in their dozens
The only thing I've learned
Is no one knows
No one knows...

There's no harm in asking
Why everything should be just so
(I like his young, inquiring mind)
There's no harm in dreaming
That someday I'll know all there is know
(A joie-de-vivre...?)

Perhaps it's true that some surprises
Are far better left untold
But there's no harm in hoping
That one day their secrets
(One day their secrets)
Unfold

There's no harm in asking
(No harm in asking)
Why everything should be
Just so

Anthony Drewe, from the musical Just So based on the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

if today were the day you had to stop dancing…

these lyrics are from A Chorus Line, a musical i have a dance chorus part in, but will likely have to drop out of because i have fractured my foot. i broke it in July when i fell off the fence i was peering over when i was lost taking a shortcut home. i have been dancing on it since then, not knowing it was fractured but feeling something wasn't right. the pain has been overwhelming at times, but it's worth it. just for the sheer joy of dancing.

Kiss today goodbye
The sweetness and the sorrow
Wish me luck, the same to you
But I can't regret
What I did for love, what I did for love

Look, my eyes are dry
The gift was ours to borrow
It's as if we always knew
And I won't forget what I did for love
What I did for love

Gone
Love is never gone
As we travel on
Love's what we'll remember

Kiss today goodbye
And point me toward tomorrow
We did what we had to do
Won't forget, can't regret
What I did for love

What I did for love
What I did for

Love
Love is never gone
As we travel on
Love's what we'll remember

Kiss today goodbye
And point me toward tomorrow

Point me toward tomorrow
We did what we had to do
Won't forget, can't regret
What I did for love what I did for love

What I did for love
by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban