TAHMIMA ANAM

on giving birth, and finding hope in an overcrowded London hospital

Six months into my first pregnancy, I nearly died. Before it happened, I was like any other woman, cramming in as much pre-mothering life as possible, both eagerly anticipating the arrival of this much-wanted baby while also worrying about how profoundly my life would change. My husband and I debated the merits of one buggy over another; chose a name; signed up for NCT classes. Then suddenly one day, my blood pressure shot up and I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. On June 28, 2013, at 30-weeks gestation – 10 weeks before he was due – our son was delivered via emergency Caesarean section. My husband and I were given mere seconds to glance at him before he was whisked away to the neonatal intensive care unit, where he would remain for almost two months.

Up until that point, my knowledge of hospitals was blissfully minimal. I was born in Bangladesh, but I’d lived in the UK for over a decade and become a British citizen two years earlier. Neither I nor anyone in my family had had any major illnesses, so while I was familiar with the NHS, I rarely had occasion to use it. When I got pregnant, I started to become aware of what an amazing thing I was being offered. Cate, the midwife from the Hackney home-birth team came to my house every few weeks to check me over. She was the one who raised the alarm over my blood pressure and rushed me to the Homerton, my local NHS hospital.

I stayed on the postnatal ward at the Homerton for 10 days while the doctors worked to get my blood pressure down. In the meantime, I had to adjust to having a premature baby. After a few days in the NICU, Rumi was breathing on his own and was transferred to a lower-dependency-room. But he was tiny – just over a kilo – and he needed to gain weight, maintain his temperature, and learn to feed before they would consider sending him home. This took him two months – two months of spending 14 hours a day at the hospital, taking him out of his incubator and laying him against my chest, and measuring every breath, every ounce he ate, every gram he gained.

Those eight weeks felt like years, but as the fog lifted and I became used to the routine, the hospital became a microcosm of everything I love about this country.

At no point in my treatment was I ever asked for proof of who I was or where I lived or how much money I made. I shared a ward with recent immigrants and others whose families had lived in east London for generations. About a month into our stay, Prince George was born, and although a small part of me was in despair when I saw the Duchess of Cambridge come out of her hospital with a blow-dry and wearing high heels, I couldn’t help but feel moved when the entire ward erupted in cheers. The nurses and midwives were almost all immigrants; Sylvie, the first midwife I met, was Spanish; Sister Kate, the lactation nurse who stood over my shoulder and talked me through each drop of milk I laboured to make, was from Ghana. I saw the staff struggle under the pressure of a chronically underfunded system, but there was something about the way they just always got on with things – no matter how stretched – that felt particularly British.

The system wasn’t perfect: it was a particularly hot summer that year, and, according to rumours circulating there, it was also the busiest the maternity services had ever seen. They crammed beds into the ward, the nurses did double shifts, and the doctors were often harried and brusque. I was seen by a different duty doctor every day, so there was no one who knew my history and often I felt alone and anonymous in a vast, impregnable bureaucracy.

Yet I credit my survival to the NHS. If I had not signed up for a home birth in Hackney, I would not have had a midwife who intuited that I might be at risk for pre-eclampsia. If the NHS had not decided to tackle pre-eclampsia as a matter of public health, I might have ended up like one of the 100 women a day who do not live to see their children. If I’d been American, I might have left hospital with a debilitating medical bill. None of this happened to me. Instead, sometime in the middle of August, we packed our little boy into his car seat and sailed down the corridors of the Homerton with Sister Kate, who danced a Ghanaian dance all the way to the parking lot, sending our little family on its way.

‘The Bones of Grace’ (£8.99, Canongate), the final installment of Tahmima Anam’s Bengal Trilogy, is out now.