I don’t know that I expected a caesarean section to be a spontaneous or improvisational exercise, but the orderliness of the occasion in Homerton University Hospital’s delivery suite was still remarkable. I’m bad with numbers, but I seem to remember there being roughly 140 people in the room, all working at their tasks independently, in that unlikely way ice skaters have of bisecting each other’s paths without clattering into one another.
Through it all, my heart was trembling, facing for the first time the terror I’d held there for over a year. Shortly before Christmas 2020, my wife was rushed to hospital in Dublin with a suspected miscarriage. Covid protocols meant we were turned away on account of having been in Northern Ireland the previous week, before it became clear that what we’d thought was a miscarriage was actually an ectopic pregnancy.
