Paul Malpas

I went to the hospital this morning, I go every six months to the diabetic clinic and sporadically to the heart clinic after they found I had an atrial fibrillating heart some years ago. They seem to want to shovel rat poison down my throat, sign me off and then call me back when they have a gap in their lists. I suppose they are on bonus for the number of patients they can engender.

With all my visits, they look at my data, blood sugars, cholesterol, blood pressure, liver function etc hum and hah and come up with a new drug to prescribe which I nearly always ignore. Now I do not mind these visits, it is more fun than writing a blog and you meet some lovely nurses and you can witness doctors, housemen and registrars learning their trade and generally ballsing up. We do not see the consultants in Out Patients, they are no doubt out and about earning a few shillings on the quiet. My cardiac consultant I last saw about three and a half years ago, my diabetologist, a new word I learned today, I saw about two years ago. Now I have to say they are two handsome ladies of uncertain years who have a lovely bedside manner, but I have to make do with their apprentices, people who have been through the mill and have forgot more than I have ever learned because they tell you so by wearing a white coat and their badge of honour, a stethoscope.

So although they tell me I am dying, at every opportunity, but isn’t everybody, I am not yet dead and I can parry verbal blows with the best of them as they transfer me from one stethoscope to another, as long as I can understand what the stethoscope is saying.

So as I said, three months ago I was at the Heart Clinic and was met by a very nice doctor of Arabic extraction. Unfortunately his spoken English was poor and after my ECG and a look at my present data on the computer, he must have decided that my ticker was great, so he started talking about my diabetes. He did explain he was a visiting doctor, presumably the Registrar and Houseman were out on the streets with the consultant earning quick money.

At the end of the session after conducting a one sided conversation in quasi-English/Arabic, he gave me a prescription for drugs on top of the bottles of stuff I am taking already. This prescription was for statins to lower my cholesterol reading which stands at 5mmol/l and another drug to make me lose weight. After discussing the situation with my GP a few days later, a man who can speak very good English considering he comes from Sligo, I decided to bin the prescription mainly because I distrust statins and anything to do with them.

Three months later, in fact last Friday, I attended my Diabetic Clinic and the registrar, a lovely man of African extraction asked me why I had not been taking the diabetic drugs prescribed by the Arabic doctor. I explained my distrust of doctors and the fact that they are learning the game at my expense and that each doctor prescribes different drugs and that there is no railway line in the giving of drugs. It is all so hit and miss. He exploded at my distrust of the medical profession and he asked me what was I doing therefore, in his clinic that morning, if I had so many reservations about diabetic treatment.

I said ‘hang on a minute, those statins etc were prescribed in a heart clinic. If you want a plumber, you do not go and search out a bricklayer’, I said, trying to calm him. Unfortunately this remark did not help and he huffed and puffed but after a while he slowly calmed down and I said that I am in a diabetic clinic now and I am willing to talk about the situation because I am in the presence of a diabetologist. He said the other man was a diabetologist also, I said I did not know that. I said it was a little like going into a stable to saddle a horse and find out when you have led him outside that you have saddled a cow. I told him that as I was now in the presence of an expert I would listen to him.

Will you take a statin that is not a statin, he said and I said ‘now you are talking and I certainly might.’ So he wrote down Tredaprive on the prescription form and he suggested Janumet instead of Metformin, my normal diabetic drug and one claimed as the best drug in the world by my diabetic consultant all those years ago.

I then explained to him that I would be discussing these changes with my GP before going to the pharmacist. I find it easier to discuss my drug problems with people I can easily converse with and unfortunately I find it difficult to get my point across to a lot of Commonwealth doctors without it sounding like an insult. It is a sadness that through no fault of their own they are thrust into these positions whilst still learning to get a grasp of a strange tongue.

By this time we were old friends and started chatting cruelly about our likes and dislikes, about the state of the HSE in Ireland, my distrust of southern English people, our mutual distrust of Americans and every other little bias that men from Manchester and Africa have got in their bonnet, as the queue reached epidemic proportions outside in the waiting room. By the time we were finished we had got a whole load of baggage off our chests and he had made me want to live for a few more years yet. That is being a proper doctor and is a subject they do not teach them about in Medical School

Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them.  There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body.  After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.

To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so.  But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system.  But this should not be the case.  Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances.  Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.

Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance.  A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics.  Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter.  Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants.  Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.

On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong.  Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation.  The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong.  Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good.  Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year.  If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..

You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark.  To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out.  To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.

I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence,  My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth.  I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.

So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine.  She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago.  Let us hope that they have now got their act together.

This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in.  Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics.  An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.

Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily.  Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed.  Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital.  An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second.  It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course.  My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”.  The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one.   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon.  I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine.  I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become.  Alleluia!

As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen.  The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.