No One Wants You (19 page)

I checked into Westminister Hospital as appointed. Harry came to visit me in the hospital and brought Anthony with him, which lifted my spirits. The doctors, nurses and medical students, were a great support to me, as it was near Christmas. They used to take me to their pantomimes, in the doctors’ mess. It sort of helped me to recover from the shock.

Luckily, I did not need to have a full mastectomy.

I got out of hospital on December 19, just in time for Anthony’s second Christmas. We spent that Christmas with some friends and for New Year’s Eve, we had a party in our flat. By this stage we had moved to Trinity Crescent, Tooting. It was a great party with lots of singing and dancing, but my heart was not in it, I was weak and tired all the time.

I got pregnant for the second time, immediately after the breast operation. I was so happy because it would be company for Anthony. This baby was due on August 19, 1977.

I was on night-duty in May, and started to have some pain in my stomach. The next day I was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital. After the doctors had done a scan, they said that the baby was fine, and left me to listen to her heartbeat. It seemed all right from the scan. We found out that it would be a girl and I decided to call her Mary Ellen.

I was taken back to the ward at 6 pm. At 2 am I started to haemorrhage quite badly. They rushed me to theatre but could not save her.

I was very depressed after losing this baby. I had a new GP at this time and his advice was that the best way of getting over it was to try for another baby. I decided that, while he had my medical notes, he should have been as familiar with my history as my previous doctor. I did not need to be told twice. I did not refer him to my previous history, which was in my notes. I still had that one per cent chance of pregnancy, shining like a beacon before me. I wanted to have another baby. I felt the chances were
becoming
greater as time went on. I knew I was capable of conception. I just had to be more careful about how I cared for the foetus, during its nine-month stay with me.

Just as things were looking up, life dealt me another blow. In October of that year, 1977, I found another lump on my breast. I went back to Professor Ellis for a consultation. He found not just one lump, but two. There was a lump on the other breast as well. He said that more surgery was necessary. I told him that my periods were late and that there was a possibility that I could be pregnant. He got a gynaecologist to examine me, who said that I was not pregnant. Also a urine test proved negative. So, with all the negative pregnancy tests, surgery went ahead.

I was very sick after this operation. I also had a lot of abdominal pain. The gynaecologist decided to do a laparoscopy to check the ovaries and uterus for cancer.

They found none.

I knew that I was pregnant. I wanted another pregnancy test. This time it was positive.

By this time I had been in direct contact with radiation. I had also been through two general anaesthetics, in the space of a two-week period. The senior registrar and some of the other doctors in charge of my case became very concerned. They strongly advised me to have a termination. I could not agree with this.

I felt under a lot of pressure. I did not know what to do.

They called Harry into the office on a Saturday morning. They told him that if I went ahead with the pregnancy, I would be risking my own life and that of the baby. They said that the baby would be very likely to be handicapped, because of the radiation from X-rays. They got a priest to come and talk to me. He said that if I had a termination under these circumstances, it would not be a sin.

I felt that everyone was against me.

Harry’s friends felt that I owed it to him and Anthony to
have
the termination. My friends were leaving it up to me. I said that I could not destroy a life under any circumstances. In desperation, I phoned Father Bernard, late one evening, and told him of my predicament. He was a great support, and told me that whatever my final decision was, he would stand by me. That was what I needed to hear.

First thing the next morning, I discharged myself from Westminister Hospital. I went home and prayed. I prayed that whatever handicap, physical or mental, that my child might be burdened with, that God would give me the necessary strength to cope with it. In any event, God had other plans.

One night, about 12 weeks into the pregnancy, I started to haemorrhage. Once more, I was admitted to St George’s Hospital, Tooting, as an emergency.

They could not save the baby.

1977 was another sad year in my history.

ELEVEN

A Place to Call Home

THE NEW YEAR
of 1978 dawned. I decided to try and put 1977 behind me. I had lost two babies but I really wanted another one. Anthony was now three years of age. He was enrolled at a local nursery school and seemed happy there.

The New Year optimism had me thinking that I might become pregnant again. I wanted a brother or sister for Anthony, so that he could learn to share. I did not want him to grow up as an only child. I had an obsession with the fact that only children can be selfish. They don’t want to share. It is entirely understandable to me now why they should do this, but at the time I did not like the trait.

My wish list for 1978 also included our own house. I wanted to buy a house for us, but I realised that to buy our own house I had to have a lot of money. Saving was never one of my strong points. Saving money was a subconscious acknowledgement of the fact that I might need or have use for it in the future. The reality for me was that I did not expect to have a future. The monotonous repetition of the fact that I was no good and that no one wanted me, meant that I had no hope for any kind of a positive future.

Having a child changed this. He gave me a sense of hope for his future, a hope I had never had for myself. Anthony’s existence made me feel a sense of responsibility. I wanted my
child
to have everything that I did not have. He had a mother and a father. That was a good start.

The next thing that he needed was a house. He needed somewhere that he could call ‘home’. A house of his own would provide him with far more than just the basic human needs of shelter and warmth.

It would be somewhere he would feel safe and could come to, in times of danger.

It would be somewhere he would be accepted unconditionally and be loved by his father and mother.

It would be his family home.

The first problem was money. We didn’t have nearly enough! The building society told me that if I could raise 20 per cent of the purchase price, they would loan us the remaining 80 per cent as a mortgage. In order to save money for a deposit on a house, I started to work extra shifts at the hospital. Doing extra shifts at work also helped me to forget the trauma of the lost babies. Between working such long hours and looking at suitable properties to live in, I recovered from my loss to some extent.

In October 1978, after spending most of the year saving, we bought our first family home. We got a loan of £2000 from a friend of Harry. They were both members of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association and she held him in high regard. We got a loan of £600 from Austin, Harry’s brother-in-law. I myself had £2500 in savings for a rainy day. I decided that the rainy day had arrived.

I was so proud. The house we bought cost us £15,000. We arranged a mortgage of £9000. We moved in and I busied myself with buying furniture. Harry carried out any small repairs and painted the entire house from top to bottom. Things seemed to be going all right for a while. But then I found another lump in my right breast.

I felt cheated once again.

I went to St George’s Hospital in Tooting, where they at
once
referred me to a consultant called Mr Gazet. He recommended a partial mastectomy. He carried it out himself two days later. I found him to be extremely supportive. Mr Gazet continues to check me on a regular basis to this day.

Once that was over with, we fully settled into the house. I concentrated on making a home for the three of us. I felt so whole, so satisfied at being a mother. I continued to work nights at the hospital and look after Anthony during the day. My work continued to be my form of running away from any emotional problems that I might have. While at work, I was completely absorbed in what I was doing. I could not be distracted.

Or so I thought.

The distraction materialised in the form of a beautiful baby boy of about six months of age, called James. He arrived on my ward at work suffering from a life-threatening enteritis. As he recovered, over a period of about two weeks, he became the focus of the entire nursing staff. Every nurse loved him and gave him their every attention. He responded to that attention by recovering into a thriving, active, laughing baby boy.

When his mum came to visit him, you could see the bond between them. He loved her with a ferocity that can only be generated and nurtured by a parent for its child. She used to hold him up in her arms, a few inches from her face and pucker up her lips, as if to kiss him. When she did that, he used to throw his arms in the air, beam his widest smile for her and launch himself forward with such enthusiasm, as if saying, ‘If there is a kiss on offer, I am definitely coming in for it.’

I witnessed their bond from an emotional distance, until one day I was coming on duty and I walked into a commotion at the nurses’ station. Veronica, the mother of baby James, was at the centre of it.

James was now well and healthy. He was due to be discharged that day. When it came to discharge him into his mother’s care, it was found that she had no home to take him to. The hospital would not discharge a six-month-old baby to a homeless mother. He would have to be put into care. It all unfolded in front of me. Veronica was a nineteen-year-old single mum. She had given birth to James in Ireland and had run away to London. She was staying at a hostel that would not allow babies. She had no money. But she did not want to be parted from her son. She was putting up a loud fight for him, but it wasn’t enough. The hospital was adamant, she had no home address to go to, consequently they would not discharge James to her care. As the duty sister lifted the phone to call social services and put an end to the argument, I piped up, ‘She does have an address; she can stay with me at my house.’

The entire crowd turned to look in my direction.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You don’t even know her.’

‘This would be above and beyond the call of duty.’

Even Veronica was gaping at me, with her mouth open. It was true that I did not know her at all, but I had seen her interact with her son. I saw how she was so concerned when he was near death with the enteritis. I saw how much he loved her and how he wanted to be with her, when he had recovered. I thought, ‘I cannot allow this boy to grow up without his mother!’ I knew the possible hardships and difficulties that could lie ahead for him and I did not want anything to happen to him. I was determined that they would not be separated.

The duty sister wrote my address on the discharge form and a crisis was averted.

I called Harry and told him that Veronica and baby James were coming to live with us. I didn’t ask him, I told him. He was always very generous in that regard. He said that it was
not
a problem. He never objected. He never complained how long anyone stayed at our house.

Mother and baby came to live at our house. It was a lovely time. They stayed for six months while Veronica got back on her feet. She got herself a job and a flat where she could raise baby James without being separated from him.

James is now a healthy adult man in his twenties who still loves his mum and sees her often. To this day, Veronica remains one of my close friends. While I have never told her all the facts about my past, except in general terms or in vague detail, I think she subsequently suspected that my empathy in her time of crisis was not entirely unfounded.

She bounces into my life about two or three times each year. I treasure her company dearly. She is not intrusive. She never asks me any difficult questions. She is always lighthearted and outgoing. She makes me laugh. I think myself that she is really keeping an eye on me, just to see that I am okay.

After work I used to be so engrossed in caring for my beautiful son that my mind never had any inclination to wander. Any time left over was used up with sleep, to regenerate my tired body. As things settled down again, I did manage to find a small bit of time to renew my friendship with Kit and Tony in Buttevant. Over the years, since I left the orphanage, I had lost touch with them. I was not a great letter writer. The only person that I used to correspond with regularly was Father Bernard. I wrote mainly in response to his letters, probably out of guilt, as he would continually remind me that I had not answered earlier letters.

Once communications had been restored between Kit and me, it was as if we had never lost contact. I invited herself and Tony to visit us in London. They came for a week, in the summer of 1979. It was as if they were my own family. We all became really close during that week.

I was so relieved when 1979 came and went, without any bad emotional trauma. If it had remained so, I would probably have convinced myself that I was happy with what I had. In truth, I would have only been fooling myself.

TWELVE

PUSHING the Odds

I WAS PREGNANT
again, for a fourth time.

I was due in hospital on the evening of Sunday September 14, 1980.

Harry drove me there. Kit and Tony, who were staying with us while I was in hospital, came along as well and stayed while I was admitted.

As soon as the battery of admission tests began, I asked who the anaesthetist would be. As a nurse, I was very particular about whom I wanted on my case and who I did not want on my case. I wanted no mistakes. I had a healthy baby in my uterus, and I wanted him to land in this world in the same healthy condition. The short journey from uterus to life outside can be fraught with error. I wanted all possible mistakes eliminated, not just minimised.