My war in the wards
Doctor on the horror he faced after family’s flat was firebombed during ice cream van battles
CHAOS OF WORKING IN A&E DURING THE 1980s
Hawkeye – Alan Alda – and entering my teens I imagined myself wearing greens stained with blood, cracking gags with the nurses. The reality was a long way off.
“I spent a couple of years at the Southern General but was predominantly at the Royal. At the time, directly across from A& E was the Manx Bar and you would get guys staggering across into the hospital and vomiting up blood or presenting with tuberculosis.
“A&E was, in many ways, like a Mike Leigh movie – starring some of the saddest dafties on the planet.
“We had a lot of drug addicts who would come in, who at that time would inject into their groin with temazepam.
“They would look down in appalled wonder at the mottled, marbled pregangrenous appearance of their leg and you would be really sorry to have to tell them they needed an amputation – but they’d just say, ‘ That’s fine doctor. Just lap it aff.’
“There were days trying to avoid being drenched in blood was nigh- on impossible. There were times you did a squelchy, sticky walk back to your flat to get changed – as someone else’s blood filled your pair of M&S brogues.
“If someone needed resuscitated, they were rushed to Room Nine. If you heard a nurse shouting, ‘ Physician to Room Nine,’ you knew someone was in real trouble and you had to get there pronto.
“The room became so notorious that even the writer William McIlvanney mentions it in his book The Papers Of Tony Veitch, part of his Laidlaw Trilogy.”
John, who grew up in East Kilbride, went on to become a specialist in diabetes and hormone-related illnesses.
He said one of the most unusual things about working as a doctor in Glasgow in the early 80s was the number of male patients who had a finger missing
– which a col league a d v i s e d wa s an occupational hazard of working in the shipyards.
His own life was saved by a friend and colleague at the Royal who advised him to get a dark spot on his arm properly checked out.
He said: “I’d done the classic doctor thing of ignoring something that I would have made sure any of my patients didn’t ignore.
I ended up being diagnosed with a skin cancer that had to be cut out.”
The darkest day of John’s career was witnessing a psychotic breakdown of a young doctor on duty who, hours into his A&E shift, had to be admitted to the psychiatric ward as a patient.
He said: “I got an earlymorning cal l from a colleague to say one of the new doctors I was working with that day was running about the place screaming his head off.
“When I got to work, he was wearing a camouflage jacket instead of a white coat and he was talking about guns – not patients.
“I asked him if he had seen anyone in A&E yet, had he clerked him or her in yet, had he written anything down? He nodded and showed me a piece of paper with some squiggles on it. It looked like abstract art.”
John sought the help of a psychiatrist on duty, who believed the young medic to be acutely schizophrenic.
A year later he was heartbroken to hear the young doctor had taken his own life – shooting himself – two weeks after returning to work at the hospital.
John, who is married to Maureen, a former midwife at Glasgow’s Rottenrow Maternity Hospital , retired from medicine four years ago but returned to help out during the first coronavirus lockdown.
He said: “Being a doctor is like no other job in the world and where no one day is like the next. There can be a lot of excitement, a lot of trauma, a lot of fun stuff and a lot sadness, which can be a challenge. But you have the wonderful support of colleagues – and that’s been so important this year more than ever.”
John hopes the stories in his book will inspire others to pursue a career in medicine.
Happy Mother’s Day to all those fabulous mums out there… and, may I say, you don’t half deserve a bit of pampering this year.
Some will be lucky enough to receive breakfast in bed. Others will pull the duvet over their heads and stay hidden there for an extra couple of hours.
Whatever makes you happy, mums. This year it’s about self-care as much as soggy toast on a plastic tray and crumbs on the sheets.
Let’s take a breather to really appreciate what mothers have been through – and what they have achieved – over the past 12 excruciating months.
And yes, I know, dads and grandads have suffered too but it’s not your moment, is it? Wind your neck in till Father’s Day on June 20 when we’ll all be enjoying relative freedom and the air will be heavy with barbecue smoke and conversation with people outwith your immediate household. Lucky blokes.
It’s exactly a year since we plummeted into the hell of lockdown. Mother’s Day cards and gifts lay undelivered for months after we lost visitation rights to Covid restrictions. It’s probably just as well we didn’t know then that many mums and grans would be deprived of hugs and kisses all this time, tantamount to torture.
Some mothers wouldn’t make it. Which means a great many people will be experiencing a Mother’s Day like no other this year, without the person who should be the focus of their love and attention. Our hearts go out to all of them.
What we have seen between last Mother’s Day and this, what we have experienced over an unimaginable year, has likely changed us for ever. It’s certainly made us rather more appreciative of the people we may previously have taken for granted and more grateful than ever before for “motherly” love in its countless manifestations.
We don’t have to look far to see it. There are women like Cathie Russell, from Glasgow, and Natasha Hamilton, from Edinburgh, whose love for their respective mums fired their fight for care home residents to be allowed designated visitors under Covid-safe arrangements.
Everyone who gets a face-to-face visit with their mother today – instead of an inadequate and upsetting meeting through a window – can be grateful for the lobbying of these women and for the powerful, inspiring mother-child bond that drives them.
Just look what it can do. Under the most awful of circumstances, it prevails.
Then there are mothers like Victoria Connolly, manager of the Isobel Fraser Care Home in Inverness, who – along with 13 of her staff – voluntarily gave up her private family life at the start of the pandemic and moved into a campervan in the home’s car park.
That way they could avoid travelling back and forth between the outside world and the elderly residents, reducing the risk of virus transmission.
Victoria sacrificed time with her own two young children to keep other people’s mothers safe. Some of her staff would be doing exactly the same, missing their own kids to look after the more vulnerable.
Selflessness and compassion, the very best of motherly traits, work miracles when they’re shared around.
Then, of course, there are all the mothers – with or without partners – who have carried the burden of homeschooling, some while attempting to work full-time or juggle zero-hours contracts or coping with illness, grief, depression or domestic abuse or simply trying to put food on the table.
The Office for National Statistics last week revealed that women are shouldering much more of the domestic and educational burden during the current lockdown, with more than half of them reporting a negative impact on their wellbeing.
Our kids will likely learn more from their mother’s experience of the Covid crisis than they’ll ever learn via Google classroom.
After all, Melanie Maynard, the mum of Manchester United ace Marcus Rashford, didn’t specifically teach her boy about food poverty. In fact, she tried her best to shield her kids from the struggles she faced raising them.
But as a child Marcus saw what was going on and it stayed with him. As an influential adult – who forced a Government U-turn on free school meals during holidays – he paid tribute to his mum’s determination. “This is her moment,” he posted, with a love heart. Which makes any mother want to bubble with pride.
We’ve been through the mill, mums. And we may yet be ground down a bit further before the virus horror-show is finally over. But a day in bed and some lovingly prepared soggy toast goes a long way to nourish the spirit and set us back on our feet.
So here’s to all the mothers... those we have, those we’ve lost, those we are and those we know. Where would the world be without them?