Life and Death

Why do I love surgery? Countless reasons. When life is overwhelming, it’s the gleaming order of the operating theatre I hanker for. Other times it might be the manual craft, the responsibility, the technical variety of the work that feel most valuable. The hardest reason to articulate is probably also the deepest though. I love the strange edge that surgery takes me to, the thrill I feel every time my knife tips me from outside to in. It’s a life and death thing, but that makes it sound scarier than I want it to. Because perhaps this desire for rawness isn’t so strange after all.

On the first day of the Easter holidays, my husband and I set off with our 12-year old twins in the campervan, our destination old friends with a farm on Dartmoor. Scenting the change in the air through the open window, we arrived in Devon hours later, where the landscape became hilly, buildings disappeared, aneurysmal widenings were all there was to squeeze past other cars in, the van’s tyres rumbled and an unbelievable green appeared all around us.

Then we were tipping down a rutted lane to our friends’ farm with all its magic. Chickens and ferrets and an aga full of food and children who mine later declared ‘the opposite of brain rot’, one son’s spinning wheel and another’s herbal medicine collection as far from our own family’s techno cul-de-sac as outer space.

R took us for a walk, past a field where the sheep were huddled waiting to give birth, with heavy bellies and inscrutable faces. The rain misted our hair flat and turned the fields even greener. As we picked our way along the bright river, he got a text saying the first lamb had been born and we all rushed back to where S already had the ewe and her newborn lamb cosy in the barn. In the dim light, on a bed of straw, there was the mother bleating softly with a sweetly proud look on her face, nosing a bundle of copperish wool in the straw, licking curls up out of its slick back and watching her lamb unfurl, its long legs opening out.

For the next hours, when we weren’t drinking tea by the aga we took turns to go out and learn. Saw S check the ewe was interacting with her lamb, feeling its abdomen to ensure it had taken enough colostrum. Watched their 9-year old son test that the ewe’s milk had come in and the teenagers bundling the afterbirth away in a mess of straw. That evening, there was always someone there, sitting in the lantern light watching. Knowing that the other 15 pregnant ewes might deliver anytime now that the first had got going. Anticipating from the experience of the previous year, that the births wouldn’t necessarily all be straightforward. That even if they were, there was a reconciling to do between these amazing beginnings and what must happen later.

We all sat round the table and ate a delicious meal of Hogget and curry and rice that night. Feasting on one of the previous year’s animals which had been brought into the world with, no doubt, the same great tenderness as that day’s lamb. And I thought how wonderful it was that our friends’ children had these lessons folded into their world: birth and the physicality of afterbirth and blood and milk and care never far from the inevitability of death. And I looked at the three of them sitting next to our urban two and thought of how much better equipped they were for what life would deliver - who knows when - by way of illness and death and beginnings and endings. And I realised that something right in the centre of this is what I love surgery for, and that most people don’t have it.

I wonder how early in life we need to witness stuff like this, if we want birth and death to be a bit less scary later. What were your first encounters?