We meant to wake up in time to catch the all-day bus tour, honestly we did. But the next thing we knew there was a knock at the door and a voice, all jasmine and sing-song, the Phillipino cleaner.

“Gute morneeng? Housekeepeeng?”

“We’re all still in bed.”

Silence, then receding footsteps.

We all fell back to sleep, waking up twenty minutes before Nina was due to be picked up by Gus, the head of operations for the team.

Both Tom and I had received text messages the day before from Kev, one of the SAR (Search and Rescue) crewmen, letting us know that he’d pick us up at our hotel in the evening and drive us the hour’s journey across to Abu Dhabi. This left the two of us the whole afternoon to explore/

“No question,” stated Nina, an old hand in this part of the world. “You want a cab down to the marina, then catch a dhow over the creek to the gold souk.”

That’s an afternoon full of words that I don’t often use - splendid!

The cabbie dumped us by the side of the creek and we looked up and down the banks for one of these famous dhows. Nothing. Just row upon row of luxury yachts. Mad dogs that we were, the sun was at its highest and we were the only people walking outside, all the locals were sleeping in the shade. Under every tree lay labourers, their hard hats balanced on their noses to block out the sun.

We slathered on the sunscreen, trying to think of the most painful places to get burned (ears, toes, heels) and spreading it thick as butter on the conclusions we came up with.

A little way down the marina we started to spot motorised dhows cruising back and forth across the water.

“Figure we should get the one the locals are catching?”

Sure enough, just around the bend there was an entire water-bus station, three or four pontoons with dhows bumping and pushing to dock, their drivers leaning on horns, pushing their competitors away from the pontoons to get themselves in.

One boatman caught my eye, waved his hand in a circle.

“Tourist trip? Half hour?”

“How much to go across?”

“Tourist trip. One hundred twenty dirham”

“And to go across?”

“One hundred twenty dirham.”

That’s twenty four quid to you and I. That’s a lot of money.

Behind us another dhow was rapidly being filled with locals, the occasional tourist awkwardly stepping way onto the benches, Western health and safety concerns present in their outstretched hands, reaching for barriers and handrails that weren’t there.

The seating arrangements on these vessels are basic, between a dozen and twenty people sit back to back on benches down the spine of the craft, their feet resting on gunwhales, nothing to stop you slipping into the depths but your own lack of stupidity. You wanna stay on the boat? Simple. Don’t fall off.

I approached the second captain, he was too busy packing passengers on to worry about haggling, he waved his hand in my face when I spoke to him, pushing me onto the boat

“How much?”
“One dirham.”

That’s twenty pence, folks.

This didn’t go down well with the first captain, who started yelling at us - “Ok, ok, one dirham, ok? Ok.”

Don’t think so mate, not with an original mark-up like that, we rode with his competitor.

As an aside, it’s unfortunate that the government body responsible for these water buses and the city’s taxis is called the Roads and Transport Authority - I don’t WANT to ride in a taxi with “RTA” written on the side, thanks.

The dhow putt-putted us down and over the river and, on disembarking, we found ourselves on a quay side, plain harled buildings beyond us, claustrophobic vennels vanishing between them. We stopped to ask directions and I was entertained when the stall holder we were talking to referred to me as “boss.”

Allow me to expain. In Edinburgh’s Saughton prison the inmates refer to the screws as “boss”. And like sagging jeans in American prisons, the slang and styles slide outwards as people are released back into society. I’m used to being called “boss” at work, but its usually delivered in the nasal drawl of a smackhead, obsequious and whiningly compliant, hoping I’ll go away and the police won’t follow. “Boss” is a title I’m familiar with on the eighth floor concrete balcony of a highrise, litter and pushchairs jumbled in the stairwells. I wonder if this trader, with his leather sandals and bright cotton shirt would appreciate knowing how close his speech is to the heroin dealers of Wester Hailes?

We wandered into tight, tiny alleyways with stalls pouring out onto the pavement, smiling men in the doorways - “Pashmina? Cashmere? Scarves? Carpets?”
“No thankyou.”
“Just looking?”
“Just looking.”

This was the Dubai I’d been searching for, a city full of real people, going about their daily business. We wandered without destination for hours, turning left now, right then. We found ourselves in some seedy little places, a watch and jewellery shop - “Sir? OmegaTagPatekPhillipeRolex? Very good copies. All real fakes. “

In one store we were ushered into a cupboard under the stairs where the shopkeeper showed us an endless stream of shoeboxes filled with blinging fake watches. He was very proud of his wares and, for some reason, a lurid yellow plastic bunny. He insisted I take a photo of him with it. I did so and we left otherwise empty handed.

As we walked fabric gave way to spices, then gold jewellery and watches and finally knock-off designer labels - “Size how? Colour how? You come see. You like, you buy, you no like, ok, no problem. You like Adidas? Calvin Klein? Dee and Gee?”.

I loved the spice souk; the baskets of turmeric and cinnamon sticks, coriander, both seeds and ground and inside the shop vast buckets of saffron, frankincense and myrrh. Seeing the last two was bizarre, they’re words I know from school but have never seen or smelled them in real life, it was like coming across a gingerbread cottage.

All too soon our trip came to an end and we grabbed a taxi back to the hotel to meet Kev-The-Engineer who ran us to Abu Dhabi.

The event had put us up in the Crowne Plaza for our first night, our desert boots and enormous rucksacks raising eyebrows amongst the other guests, eliciting nothing more than a fully professional “Good evening, sir, ma’am.” from the staff.

The Scotland/England and Wales/Ireland rugby matches gave us a perfect excuse to get pissed together as a team building on old friendships and, in my case, meeting my new workmates; a better ice breaker than some national hatred, I can’t think of. Slightly sozzled and still utterly exhausted, I hit my room at about one in the morning, sneaking over to my twin bed so as not to wake up Rolf, the Swedish anaesthesiologist I was sharing with. I’d met him on our arrival in the lobby and he seemed friendly, yet slightly stern in that Northern Periphery way. Tiptoeing drunkenly around the room, I slumped into bed to prepare for the next day’s work.

Day 1 - Dubai -

Sitting in Heathrow, eating nachos and beer with Nina and her uni-mate Tom. Have never met Tom before, but he seems a sold enough bloke, smiley and bespectacled, endlessly bouncy. Think Tigger in a poloshirt; the very image of the young orthopaedic surgeion.

Nina fed Tom and I anti-histamines “Just the thing, knock you right out for the flight.” Certainly knocked her out, she was asleep in minutes. I only discovered that my headrest was adjustable six and a half hours into a seven hour journey, so spent the entire flight with my head lolling back wards and groggy as hell. On the few minutes when I did doze, I slumped left onto Nina’s shoulder and was woken by her comatose elbows in my ribs.

We landed at 7am and grabbed a taxi out to our hotel, the driver insisting on loading our bags for us.

“Holiday Inn”.

The taxi driver was insistent - “Just Holiday Inn?”
“Yes.”
“Holiday Inn and nothing else?”

Bizarre - sure, just our destination, we’re not going anywhere else.

He drove us down Sheik Zayed road to the wrong version of the two Holiday Inns in Dubai. Turns out we’re staying at the Holiday Inn Express, near Safa Park.

Over the next few days I will become exceptionally good at saying “Holiday Inn Express, Safa Park, near Gulf News, NOT Al Bharsha.” This is handy, as several of the taxi drivers speak almost as much english as I do arabic.

At first viewing, Dubai is a baffling city; I’m not used to settlements that don’t have hills or sea around them. The place has no horizon, everything just fades out into a layer of smog and sky scrapers. It feels like being in a video game, where the details are only rendered once you get close enough. The size and opulence of the buildings around us doesn’t help my disbelief. It’s difficult to get an objective head around the concept of a building that’s nearly a kilometre tall. The town has money, that’s clear, but it’s like a high class zombie movie. The only people we’ve seen so far are service staff or construction workers. Where are the people who live and work in all this luxury? They’re not on the street, because there ARE no streets that we’ve seen. You can’t walk anywhere, because the highways have no pavements.

What are you meant to do here if you can’t afford a Bentley to drive around in?

Blacked out cars cruise along the five lanes of baffling highways, changing lanes on the bends, taking the racing line through traffic. The drivers gesture angrily at each other, thumb to four fingers, shaking their hands through the windscreen. I learn later on that what I’d taken to be a middle eastern version of the middle finger in fact translates to “Have patience”.

According to British friends here, flipping people the bird is enough to get you deported.

We toured the Dubai Mall, stared with wide eyes at diamonds and gold, silks, Porsches and an aquarium that was comfortably bigger than my flat.

Tired and hungry, we wound up sitting on a restaurant’s terrace in the baking sunshine , it was slightly too hot for al fresco dining, but the novelty of searing heat was enough to keep us out there. Linguine chicken al fredo; an unusual breakfast, I’ll grant you, but just the job for a jetlagged stomach.

Come the afternoon, Nina had friends to visit and Tom and I were plotting an afternoon’s sight seeing. Secretly, I was feeling a little too knackered for marching around town, or even riding a tour bus. The thought of lying in an air conditioned hotel room and sleeping for hours seemed very attractive. Tom sent some texts to an old friend and then sat upright.

“Right - Darryl’s invited us over to his place, he lives on the Palm. How’s about we go and say hello, have a snooze on his beach and then get dinner?”

HIS beach? Yeah, alright.

We rode a taxi out to Darryl’s place, an apartment building on the Palm Jumeirah, a huge reclaimed arc of sand running out into the sea . The concierge let us through the back door onto the beach where Darryl, a friend of Tom and Nina’s, but a stranger to me, was entertaining. He broke away from the group to welcome us:

“Make yourselves at home, I’ve got some friends over, so you’ll maybe excuse me for a few hours?”

“We were thinking of sleeping off our flight.”

“No problem, there’s loungers over there - take some water. See you in a bit.”

I slept for a couple of hours, drifting in and out, listening to Darryl’s friends and their kids playing loud cricket and rugby on the beach, fretting over whether I’d wake up red, peeling and carcinogenic.

I was woken at one point by my bank phoning me, alarmed at the sudden relocation of my card. Could I confirm who I was, where I was and for how long? A short conversation later and I was good to use any ATM I pleased, handy, since I’d been faced with an alarming “Your request has been denied” at every attempt to draw cash up until this point.

On waking, a crowd of us were heading back to Darryl’s for beers when one of the kids in the party rolled over on his foot, scraping the skin off a five pence piece sized circle on his ankle. Ten minutes later he was still howling, so I took a look.

Wet abrasions full of beach sand must sting like hell, no wonder the kid wasn’t calming down. Half a bottle of mineral water and a bit of a rub with a thumb (perhaps not the gold class of wound irrigation, but it did in a pinch) and he was right as rain. He even managed a sniffley “Thankyou” before leaving. If only all my patients were so grateful and appreciative. I hadn’t anticipated treating anybody until we hit the desert; this guy’s sandy wound was a fitting aperitif.

We spent the evening with beer, tapas and good company, Darryl’s ex-pat friends entertaining us with the UAE’s foibles. Telling us tales of camel racing just outside the city, since labour laws came in, they can’t employ child jockeys anymore. The camels are apparently ridden by little robots; you’re not even allowed to gamble on them. I ask you, what’s the point of a day at the races if you can’t have a flutter?

The night ran all too fast and Tom and I found ourselves nodding sitting up at the dinner table. A taxi back to the hotel and we turned in, Tom on a fold-away sofa-bed and Nina and I sharing the double as a result of an earlier conversation.

“Right boys, I’m not sleeping on the sofa, so we’ll have to work this out…I don’t care who I share with, but I expect you to keep your hands to yourself.”

“Safest with the gay one, then?”

“Probably.”

Really, when Nina phoned me back in February to ask me along to this, I didn’t realise it was just an elaborate proposition to get me into bed!

I’ve been back for 24 hours now, I’ve slept in the afternoons and woken up - *BING* - a perfect five hours early. Jetlag doesn’t leave me knackered, but my body clock is still firmly in the desert.

Thanks again to my talented and hard working guest posters, I’m thrilled to see how well entertained they all kept you guys in my absence. You’re all amazing.

I wrote posts or notes on each day I was away, I’ll be uploading a day per day breakdown of my time in UAE. Stay tuned.

Twenty five years forward or back – you choose.

I was in an Ambulance that one other time. It was shite.

I hated it, and I was miserable. No fun whatsoever, just survival, just getting through the next few minutes, and the next few, and the few after that until I hoped that a hospital bed, some powerful drugs and a surgeons needle would go some small way to sorting my immediate problems.

And the promise of the company of Ruth, back in Inverness, that’s what kept me going.

I wasn’t looking any further than that. I didn’t think I was going to die, but I wasn’t looking forward to the X Rays.

Blood, pain, ripped flesh, some very worrying vision problems. Chest pain and head pain – lots of head pain. This was way worse than any hangover. Different league to anything I’d ever had before, and I was a long way from anywhere.

The story?

Well - the A9 in December, the major trunk road that links the Highlands with the Central belt. The middle of nowhere, the highest point of any A road in the UK.

Bad bad weather, an RTA, and me.

Or to put it another way, the Drumochter pass, snow, ice, serious sub zero temperatures, glowering mountains, a wrecked car. A story familiar to regular travellers, and listeners to Radio Scotland’s travel bulletins in winter. Me – with what turned out to be fairly serious head injuries. (I was actually reported as dead on a Glasgow Radio station, causing a few friends what they said was a difficult 24 hours before they found out that reports of my demise were greatly exaggerated).

So a long ambulance ride back to Inverness, and the previously mentioned Raigmore Hospital. This was just before Choppers were introduced exactly for just this kind of event, and of course I’d managed to get injured in about as remote a spot as possible on a Major road in the
UK. It took the ambulance at least an hour to get there, from a local depot, as I sat miserable and suffering in the back of a Police Car. Even the Bobbies took thirty mins to get there from the nearest town after answering the 999.I remember the event clearly, the crash, the aftermath, the policemen, but not the physical details of the ambulance man. I do remember his kindly manner, (I’m pretty sure he was alone – a common practice in the Highlands in the Mid 80’s), his professional checking of my physical self, and a quick confident confab with the Bobbies just before we set of back North. I’ve no idea what his van looked like, or whether he was milkman or a star wars pilot. Or even a melange of the two.

Head injuries do that to you, you know. (Yes I know you know, but you know what I mean……….)

It was an hour and half back to Inverness. An hour and a half of broken blood vessels bleeding into my sinuses, nostrils blocked with crusted blood, just endless bleeding throughout my whole nose and throat system. The kind of bleeding that pours down the back of your throat no matter how you sit or lie. Misery, head injuries, shock, lots of pain, nausea, you get the picture.

But I was young, and trying very hard to be brave, and when the gauze I had been given to stanche the blood flow quickly gave up the very soggy ghost, I just sniffed and swallowed.

Blood. Lots of it.

I was far too polite to ask for a new hanky, and far too polite to spit blood on the floor of the nice man’s ambulance. So the inevitable happened, just as we pulled of the main A9, on the last half mile to the A&E doors.

A serious Technicolor yawn. Explosive vomiting. I brought up what seemed to the contents of a butcher shop’s worth of German blood sausages. I comprehensively proved the point that a little blood goes a long way. Or in my case a lot of blood, goes a long long way.

After a horrified glance over his shoulder my man drove the last 500 yards at a speed that even I thought was a little bit excessive, (and remember that one thing in the world I wanted was to get out of this rolling, smelly, uncomfortable ambulance and into a nice cool hospital bed, hopefully with some seriously good painkillers, where I could sleep all this pain and trauma away, and wake up and it all have never happened.)

So we pulled up at the A&E, and he ran back to open the doors. He picked me up, ( I was at the hopeless, drooling, blood covered stage, almost past it) checked me out, as the nurses and doctors came out with the trolley, and I saw three quite different emotions cross his eyes in quick succession.

Firstly,

“Shit, he’s vomiting blood, mmmmm not serious though - I think “

And then,

“I’m glad we are at A&E now, if there is a problem, he’s their problem.”

And to his eternal credit, this was third and last thing that I saw in his eyes.

“Oh and Fuck – he’s just puked blood all over my ambulance.”

Calum

Two score and five years on

The last time I was in an Ambulance?

Fun?

You bet!

Probably the second most exiting thing I’ve ever done with my clothes on.

You see I’d blagged a shot in the Air Ambulance, and I got to ride with my pal Pete the Pilot, (as he is known in the small Highland town where we both live. Highland folk do “literal” in a big way). He needed to do some training type things, and asked if I would like a little trip.

Is the pontiff of the catholic persuasion?

Pete’s a neighbour and a pal, and the victim to whom K helped sing Happy Birthday at his recent 50^th Birthday bash. He also knows that I like to fly (I fly a lot in my day job, but the smaller the aircraft the better, IMHO).

So I said yes.

And we buzzed around the Black Isle, I snapped photos of our house, my wife’s school, oil rigs, old forts just above our town, and then Pete did a blind instrument approach to Inverness Airport .

When I say blind I mean blind – he put on special glasses that only allowed him to see the instruments. Now I’ve drunk and partied with Pete for years – he is a seriously fun guy much given to practical jokes - so when he asked me to scan the skies for aircraft on a collision course with us, I though he was taking the piss. It very quickly became clear that he was quite serious, and I never knew that my neck was so supple as I scanned the skies franticly mentally rehearsing “Bandits 12 O Clock High”. 

Luckily it was all clear, and I relaxed until he then cut the engine at 4,000 feet for a practise “autorotation”, ie an emergency landing where you have no engine.  

Think sycamore seed falling from a tree.

Just a lot lot quicker.

My stomach hit my heart so fast………

I think he enjoyed that bit.

Now the Scottish Ambulance services fleet of air ambulances are as far away from family holiday vehicles as you are likely to get. Bright Yellow, fast, fully equipped for their job, and able to get anywhere in the Highlands in ninety mins or so. So a sick baby in Thurso these days is straight on the nearest chopper, and is down in Inverness in 30 mins max – including take off and landing.

I see them all from my office window, as it sit’s under the flight path for Raigmore Hospital. The Yellow Air Ambulance Squirrels, the RAF Sea Kings, the white Coast Guard mega choppers from Stornoway and Sumburgh, and the very occasional Navy Aircraft from the far South West of Scotland. All flying sick and injured people to the very best medical attention that a pretty good Hospital such as Raigmore can provide.

And when it can’t?

Well they just stick them back in the Chopper – or a fast fixed wing - and fly them to a big big city, with specialist wards. Head Trauma, chest injury, sick kids, you name it, Scotland’s got it. And the great thing is most people get better, and then go home. And that’s what is supposed to happen. Progress is a great thing. And my pal Pete, and his crew, looking like a Star wars V wing pilot in his flight suit and helmet, oozing professionalism and cool, even though I know all about his weakness for wearing tights and tutu skirts at Cromarty’s fancy dress ceildh’s, sorts it for sick and hurt people.

At face value a long way from a Milkman driving a camper van.

Nahhh – it’s still all about trust. And I trust Pete – at least when he’s flying the chopper. But as Pete stresses he’s only the driver - the real folk, the important folk, the paramedics – they sit quietly in the back, listening to the pilots banter. At least until their skills are needed. Then the roles are reversed. A bad RTA, a lost climber with exposure, sick babies, heart attacks, strokes….

They save lives. Pete just gets them to Hospital just as quickly as he can.

Calum

My first time in an ambulance?

No memory of the event all. I’ve been told that I was there physically, by totally reliable witnesses, but I’ve a very good reason for a total lack of recollection.

Honestly.

I was very young at the time, very young indeed.

Just 48 Hours old.

You see I was born just a fortnight short of fifty years ago in the back bedroom of a wonderful three hundred year old house high above the beach in the Highland town of Thurso. A house with a dramatic view across the surf of the beach, to the Atlantic Ocean and the southern isles of Orkney.

A surfer’s paradise these days, if you have a full body wetsuit.

Obviously I was a wee bit young to enjoy the view, or indeed surf, as I was a very sick little baby boy. Bright yellow – newborn Jaundice, apparently a severe case – showing no signs of getting better, and we were a long way from a hospital that could give me a blood transfusion.  A hundred miles to be exact.

A hundred miles to Inverness, and in 1959 a hundred miles was a long long way on single track roads. Through mountains, along the shores of sea lochs, past cliffs, along the main streets of small Highland towns, over bridges. A long way.  (for non Highland readers a single track road is exactly that – one carriage way that is shared by all traffic, with passing places to let opposing cars and lorries pass. You’d be staggered how many roads in the Highlands are still single track in 2009).

So on day three of my life an ambulance was summonsed to our house in Durness Street, for a very yellow little baby with a liver that refused to work as intended, and my poor Mum and I were taken on the five hour trip to Inverness, and deposited in Raigmore - the Highlands main hospital then and now.

Where of course my liver kicked in, I immediately became better, so then the whole journey had to be reversed.

In writing this I was curious about two things, firstly to see what an ambulance in 1959 looked like, so on googling I was delighted to discover that 50’s Scottish ambulances were simply Bedford Camper Vans without the fancy roof. The concept of an ambulance as a very slightly modified version of a family holiday vehicle is one that I think has fallen out of favour in the half century of my life (with good reason, I suspect).

For most non UK readers, and anyone under forty, a Bedford Camper Van is the seriously sad cousin of the VW Camper van. You know the camper van that always got picked last at Camper Van sports days?  That was the Bedford.

It was the clumsy, chubby, awkward Camper Van of the 50’s and 60’s.  All the cool kids were split windscreen VW’s.

Secondly what did an ambulance man in 1959 wear? Google again, and unfortunately he would have looked like a Milkman. A British Milkman. Peaked cap, serge trousers and brown jacket, minus the milk bottles. 

So - would you trust your wife and very ill new born son to a Milkman driving a seriously un-cool Camper Van? Well my Dad did, standing at the door of our house, holding the hands of my two older sisters, waving us off. Of course he did. He just knew that he’d put two very precious family members in the hands of people he could trust.

An ambulance crew.

Now that’s something that’s not changed in 50 years.

Calum

I hadn’t meant to talk to him.

He’d called and I thought it best to anwer.

In the hours before, I’d organised my belongings, such as they were. I lived in a tiny room in the back of someone’s house: who knows who. I lived in a bad part of town, wrong side of the river, but it was mine and I loved it.

My chest of drawers was screwed to the wall at the end of my single bed because there was no space for it on the floor; I had a wardrobe and a shelf otherwise and very little to put in them, and I liked it that way.

I was 17 and trying to be independent, trying to deal with my failures and the early crumbling of a plan which seemed sound. Monday to Friday I went to work as a clerical assistant in the office where my mum was a manager, trying to quietly complete my SYS qualifications after my early excision from school where I never really belonged, but desperately longed to. I had been banished, like a deeply disappointing Scottish ghoul, to the inner reaches of the North East, where my negative influence could be safely surrounded and buffered by middle-aged women with smiles and children and harmless chatter.

In the evenings I met with other angst-ridden, goth-dressed, dog-collared adolescents: we drank coffee, got drunk, had ill-advised relationships and blurred the boundaries of friendship on an almost nightly basis.

Everyone was “bisexual” for one reason or another - to piss their folks off; to piss their friends off; to get to the person they really wanted to fuck, perhaps. We had fun, in a fucked-up sort of way, almost competing to be the most bonkers, or the least succesful. Fortunately, comparing the percentage of your youth spent getting pissed in the Market Bar, pissing off the staff in Costa Coffee, or engaging in mostly-harmless street wars with Invernesian neds is an excellent way to judge your success in life or lack of it.

I’d walk home, alone, through areas I knew from my work: ill-advised places for a seventeen year-old girl in a bright blue studded dog-collar and a variety of outfits from that season’s most haute couture goth range of clothing (black baggy jeans with a black, ripped vest top, preferably made of lace and showing bra) to be.

I probably deserved the kickings I was anticipating but never received. I never had so much as a sideways glance from the people who could see a mile-off I didn’t belong in their territory. I think, no, I know I wanted that kicking. I desperately wanted them to jump me; punch me; kick me to the ground and finish the job.

After my evenings of coffee and group-misery, I went home begging for a kicking and when I didn’t receive it found myself having to improvise cut-off tights for sleeves to cover the scars on my arms.

I saw a psychologist: I expect she was very expensive- she did house-calls and everything.

I had a prescription: I never took it. It sat on my shelf and looked at me strangely until I was forced to hide myself away from its sight.

I had friends, family, stability and freedom of a sort: I was very lucky, very cared-for, but very unhappy and I couldn’t understand why.

In the end I had blood on my walls, on my sheets, on my razorblades, on my arms. Pills in my stomach.

I hadn’t intended to answer when he phoned to chat, but I did and I must have sounded strange.

“How are you doing” he asked. He was older, a good friend, more aware than most.

“I’m ok”

“Good, why’s that? What’s happened”

“Nothing, it doesn’t matter any more”

“… I don’t understand. Are you alright”

“It’s ok, none of it matters any more”

“What have you taken? I’m calling an ambulance. Stay there”

I cried, and begged and in the end accepted it was coming, and I must have wanted it to come or I would have pretended better. I sat on my bed, looked at the piles of belongings I had made, names and notes and explanations I wouldn’t need. I looked at the dishes I had washed, the bed I had stripped and the sheets I’d laundered.

I put the notes away and went outside to wait for the ambulance.

As if the indignity of being deposited in the ambulance in the Old Person’s Chair weren’t enough, I then had to get wheeled around in public in one.

Oh I know I was in a hospital, and really, where else is it more normal to be wheeled around in an Old Person’s Chair, but when you feel absolutely fine then surely you should be walking from the ambulance to the Scary Room for Tests on your own two feet?

Well, maybe not if they tell you that you’ve got placenta praevia, your baby’s not supposed to arrive for another fortnight, and there’s a good chance you could haemmorhage to death unless they hack you wide open and get him out pretty damn pronto.  But still. That Old Person’s Chair was just … unpleasant.

At about 10.30 am or so on the Tuesday you eventually get to the Scary Room for Tests. Your visions of having probes stuck under your fingernails and your eyelids peeled back and strobe lights shone into them by Dr Mengele were surprisingly inaccurate.  So far.  You get settled into a bed by a nice nurse, a wee monitor thingy is placed on your stomach to see what activity’s going on there with regard to the imminent expulsion of your temporary guest and this sanitary, sanitary … thing, which felt like a king-size double duvet I swear, never mind a pillow … is  wedged between your legs to catch the aforementioned seepage. Which by the way, still hadn’t stopped.

(You did demand gore. Don’t back out on me now.)

You know they say when you have a baby all your modesty goes out the window? And that you don’t care? Well, let me tell you something. “They” are both right and wrong on those counts.

I did care. I cared very much that every fifteen minutes a nurse would come in and INSPECT THE RATE OF SEEPAGE.

“That’s it dear, just open your legs and I’ll take a wee look.” Every fifteen minutes from about 11.00 am on the Tuesday through to the next morning, my seepage was inspected. No modesty, and hell I cared alright.  The nurses were so matter-of-fact and lovely - you couldn’t fault them - but I just Do Not Like having the effluence of my nether regions inspected.

And it wasn’t just inspected visually. It was WEIGHED! The seepage and the king-size duvet was weighed! Every fifteen minutes! They had to weigh it to see what that bad boy, that low-lying placenta was playing at, and how much of it was seeping out of me in a rather liquid form. Because they had to stave off an explosion, see, and if that bad boy, that low lying placenta, was planning on making its way out to the world naturally then that would severely compromise the safety of my little inhabitant. Because my little inhabitant was tucked behind it, not in front of it like he should have been. Oh, and I’d have haemmorhaged to death.

Every fifteen minutes … open yer legs dear, inspect the seepage, whip it out for weighing, shove another king-size double quilt in there, repeat.  Drift off to sleep, open yer legs dear …

“Whaaaaatthefuck you can’t say that to me in this condition, that’s just rude, but hey, any other time … Oh yes, aweigh we go…” And again. And afuckingGAIN, MAN can I not get any sleep in this place? Gerroff! Leave me alone!

I may have been bed-bound with a duvet between my legs and a monitor strapped to my stomach, but there was no catheter involved so around 5.00 am the natural conclusion of drinking several cups of weak hospital tea over the evening struck me.

Yep, toilet break.

(You wanted gore! Don’t give up yet!)

It was a relief in more ways than one to get up and stretch my legs and go to the wee bathroom in the Scary Tests Room. Lying in bed for so long is great when you’re a student, but really, the novelty wears off.

“Please miss, can I go to the toilet?” I got unhooked from the gadgetry by the nurse and told to leave the toilet door open. “Errr ..?” I inquired politely. “I need to see you’re okay” she replied kindly. I cared about this further demolition of modesty, hell I cared alright! I pulled the door to, but didn’t lock it. She was just trying to help, after all.

The cups of tea having a bit of an urgent effect now, I went and did what you normally do.

And as I finished, there was the most horrible, vile, peculiar weird sensation in my nether regions. Not the bits the cups of tea leave your body from, I must say, but the bit that bad boy was trying to make its exit from.

SOMETHING FELL OUT OF MY BODY.

Now normally when you go to the toilet, you go because you would like either one or both of two substances to leave your body. If you’re a lady then every few weeks it might be joined by other detritus, and if you’re either a lady or a bloke and you’ve just been At It and not used condoms, well, the main event(s) might have a slight by-product. Y’know.

But the SOMETHING THAT FELL OUT OF MY BODY was none of these four things. This SOMETHING slithered solidly out of my body at great speed where nothing has ever slithered solidly or speedily before.

The sensation was so peculiar and I got such a fright that I yelled out loud and the nurse flew into the bathroom before I could turn and inspect the damage.

“DON’T FLUSH!” she ordered me, and as I stood back against the wall in horror, gawping aghast, she plunged her bare hand into a toiletful of pish “processed” cups of tea and pulled out a blood clot the size of a tennis ball.

I still gawped, still aghast. I, who had felt absolutely fine up till now, felt my legs shoogle and my face go pale. Another nurse led me over to the bed and sat me down on it, while I stared at the first nurse’s hand, covered in … well … pish and blood. Holding this THING.

“Thank. Fuck. It’s. Not. Alive.” I thought. “Thank fuck it wasn’t what I thought it was.”

Then “AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH! She just stuck her hand into a toiletful of pee and pulled out a massive blood clot WITH HER BARE HAND AND HER HAND’S DRIPPING! AAAAARRRRGGHH!”

I came nearer to puking then than I ever did in my completely puke-free eight and a half month pregnancy. Please understand, I’m so squeamish I need to wear Marigolds for handling raw meat when I’m cooking, so this act of stunning heroism from the nurse utterly appalled me. I couldn’t even speak, I was so horrified. This was my modesty gone utterly, utterly to fuck. AWOL. In a galaxy far, far away.

“I’m just away to weigh this, but I think it’s safe to say …”

“I’ll be getting a sun-roof job in the morning? Because that’s actually part of the placenta?” I croaked.

“Yes, but you’ll be okay” she smiled at me.

The last thing I remember clearly that morning was screaming my head off on the operating table with terror before they knocked me out to perform the sun-roof job.  General anaesthetic then a blood transfusion. A stay in the HDU, then a conking out which apparently necessitated some crash team or something to come running - “it was like something out of Casualty” said my brother gleefully after I’d regained consciousness.

A couple of days off my heid on morphine.

No matter though. The end result was perfect. My 6lb 13oz, long and scrawny, healthy boy with little bright shiny eyes like little round currants.

Oh and don’t even get me started on my boy’s other grandmother turning up to meet me for the first time ever just hours after I had had major surgery and a blood transfusion, and I was in quite a mess. That old cow showed up like a spectre at the fucking feast, the evil fairy godmother.  Like mother, like son. (And hers was a shit to me.)

A strange experience, all said. Most women I know who’ve had children do, contrary to popular myth, remember all the details of the birth process. I’m exceedingly glad I knew nothing about it. I didn’t go into labour thank god so in a way it feels as though things were rather incomplete. I kind of missed out, but actually, I’m really glad I did - I wouldn’t have had it any other way.  I’ve got nothing TO remember, not really. Nothing to remember of the expulsion process anyway. No, my memories of that hospital visit are a bit different.

I swear, I will never ever till the day I die forget the sensation of THAT THING sliding out of my body, and that gem of a nurse who shot over to the toilet and stuck her bare hand down the u-bend to retrieve it.

Love from
Croila

I was just worried they’d think me a fraud.

A big, fat fraud.  Sitting there in the back with the nee-naws and the blue light. Feeling absolutely fine. I was just having a wee hurl to hospital.

When you have placenta praevia, you see, you DO feel fine. The nice doctors at the hospital tell you that the baby you’re expecting isn’t going to be born naturally because its exit is blocked, and because of this blockage you could potentially haemorrhage to death within eight minutes. So yes, that possibly fucks your head up a teensy bit, but physically? You feel fine. You may go about your daily business thinking, god I hope I don’t explode in Tescos, that would be sooooo embarrassing, but … you feel fine and you just get on with things.

The next time you go for a check-up at the hospital, they take the pictures of the temporary inhabitant inside your body and pronounce the need for you to go and live in the New Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for the remaining six weeks of this habitation period as there’s a good chance you WILL explode in Tescos, and really, it would be better if you exploded in hospital instead. Maybe it’s because they’re more used to mess in there, I dunno.

The idea of living in the New Edinburgh Royal Infirmary for six weeks doesn’t delight you. Really, that place is too hot and stuffy. And it smells bad. And it’s noisy. And you have minor things like maternity leave and pay to fret about, which is always slightly worrying when the other progenitor of your body’s temporary guest is being a complete and utter shit to you giving you absolutely no support, financial or practical, and you’re on your own.

The idea of six weeks’ incarceration induces waterworks of great magnitude in the nice doctor’s office. She relents, then tells you that as long as you promise to get the fuck to hospital the very split second you see any signs of blood emanating from the nether regions, she won’t lock you up for six weeks.

The promise is made.

And the promise is broken. Kind of.

Two weeks before my temporary guest is due to depart his accommodation in my innards, said signs of blood emanate. You wake up in the morning, see the signs, and then think uh-oh, I’ve not missed THIS in the last seven and a half months.

Your next thought is “ohhhhhhhhhhhhhmigawdfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckwhat’llIdo”. Oh, and you’re on your own so you’ve not really got anyone there and then on hand to help you either. Your head’s birling around and you can’t think straight. (But hey. At least you’re not in Tescos, right?)

Then the stupidity sets in. Because your next thought is “better fling some clothes in a bag and jump in the shower before dialling 999, and bloody hell I’m starving, better get my breakfast, an oh, I could really do with a cup of tea before leaving the house, might be the last decent one I get for a while”. The wee voice of reason at the back of your head says “do what they told you, do what they told you, getthefucktohospital, getthefucktohospital”.

Then “I know the nice doctor told me to dial 999 and getthefucktohospital if this happens, but really? It’s not sooooo bad. This does not constitute an explosion, eggzackly. This is just more like … seepage. Okay, it’s seepage that really, really should not be happening, but hey, we’re not talking roadkill here.  It’s not sooooo bad.”

Is it?

So you get in the shower, have your breakfast, have that absolutely vital cup of tea, get your shit together and then phone the doctor, just to double-check that you DO have to actually do something about this seepage. Which, by the way, hasn’t stopped.

The doctor practically screams down the phone at you to phone 999 and getthefucktohospital immediately.

You comply. Reluctantly. I mean, we’re not talking roadkill here.

The nice ambulance people come up the stairs, make you sit on some Old Person’s Chair, and insist on hefting you down the stairs on it.

GOD the embarrassment. You feel fine! You can walk no problem! You may be eight and a half months expecting but you’re perfectly fit, completely mobile! Certainly not incapacitated. Oh come on now, the Old Person’s Chair really isn’t necessary is it? Jeezus, why are they not letting you walk down one flight of stairs yourself?! I can manage perfectly well by myself thank you!

So I thought. The nice ambulance people thought otherwise. I got deposited in the ambulance and, er, tied down. They must have known I’d rather have got straight back out of that ambulance and got the bus down to the hospital.

As if to dispel any more stupidity on my part, the nee-naws and blue light then went on.

“Whaaaaaaatthefuck? I feel fine I feel fine I feel fine whaaaaaaathefuck?”

I started feeling not quite so fine, because this ambulance was hurtling down Minto Street at quite some speed. And I felt a complete fraud because, really, I was fine! As I wasn’t exactly lying there dying I was fascinated by all the shiny gadgets and weird contraptions around me. The nice ambulance lady got busy telling me what all the machines do and why they need them. Really, it was most interesting, and I was kind of sorry when we got to the hospital.

Ambulance ride over. Pity. It was actually rather enjoyable once I got past the being mortified and feeling like a sham  stage.  I thanked the nice ambulance people and said cheerio to them. They did give me a bit of a bollocking about not phoning them right away but all I could plead was hormone-induced stupidity. It’s a common thing, apparently.

End of ambulance episode. Onwards to the departure of my temporary guest from my innards.

Now this is a medical blog, right? You can’t have guest posts on a medical blog without a bit of gore, hmmm? And Kal being a bloke an’ all can’t give you first-hand childbirth gore can he? Oh he does really well in the gore stakes overall, but it’s not generally his own gore.

Would you like to come back here tomorrow for the gore, or should I just stop right now?

My first ride in an ambulance was back when I was a pup;  boots still black, barely broken in. 

Multiple burgs in progress blasted out of the radio.  All caused by the same man, smashing his way into houses, destroying what lay at hand, only to race out the back door through the back yard into the next house repeating his intrusion and havoc in a line of destruction ten blocks long. 

My old coach said,”Head five blocks ahead of the last call.  We’ll find him there.”  

We did.  

Half naked, stripped shirtless, screaming,”I’m Satan! You’ll all burn!”  he charged the patrol car.  

My coach coated Satan in a stream of pepper spray.  ”I’m melting! I’m melting,” screamed Satan as he threw his hands in front of his face.  

Without thinking, without pause,  I lowered my shoulder and charged.  Satan collapsed as I hit him square in the stomach and tackled him to the ground.  A blue tide of arriving officers followed,  forming a pig pile of hands and feet and heavy officers.  

When Satan was cuffed,  my coached looked for me,  but couldn’t find me.  Relieved to find me at the bottom of the pile,  he said, “You’ll do alright.  Now, get in the ambulance and guard Satan.  I’ll follow you in the patrol car.”  

The ride was unremarkable.  Satan kept his eyes shut,  insisting he was dead.    

Guest Post by Raindog