The University Doctor Smellie
The GP at Liverpool University in C’s and my time there was a Doctor Smellie. He was one of the better GPs I’ve had and I’ve been lucky to have at least two good ones.
When C became pregnant with our first child, she went to see him and he suggested she have a home birth. Not something that she was thinking of and she wnt to Oxford Street Maternity Hospital instead.
If you research the name Smellie amongst doctors you’ll find an interesting history, including a William Smellie, who is sometimes called the father of British midwifery. So perhaps the good Dr. Smellie was just wanting to follow the family tradition.
Things I Have Never Done
Everybody has lists like these, which often include such things as making love in a hammock or aeroplane, which for most people are very unlikely. I won’t comment about the two I mention here, except to say that I did have my own plane for many years. But it didn’t feature a hammock!
Two things on my real list are learning to swim and having someone deliver a takeaway meal, which I then pay for at the door. As to the latter, I’ve never even had one delivered by the vendor. The learning to swim will stay forever, but as I have a branch of the Bombay Bicycle Club just round the corner, a takeaway will probably be delivered at some point in the near future.
Unusual things I have done include.
- Gone to Royal Ascot with someone else impersonating someone who had died many years before. The gateman said she looked well. She still did, when I saw her a couple of weeks ago.
- Crashed an aircraft and walked away from it. As did all my passengers! The plane was a right-off!
- Hunted three types of hare hounds; harriers, bassets and beagles in one day.
- Been extremely drunk on a Mersey Ferry.
- Seen the Beatles perform live.
- Piloted a light-aircraft all round Australia and even on to the Great Barrier Reef.
- Been present at the birth of all my three sons. For the first, my wife was three weeks late and she fooled the Middlesex Hospital into believing she was in labour. More…
- Won a National Championship at real tennis.
- Seen a Transit of Venus.
- Had dinner in Rick Stein’s restaurant with two widowed daughters of an heriditary peer. More…
- Came off best after a mugging in Naples. More…
- Hitched a Lift in the cab of a High Speed Train from Edinburgh to Inverness. More…
My late wife always said she married me because she knew life wouldn’t be boring. I intend to keep proving she was right. I must not let her down!
Miliband is Very Much Old Labour
Congratulations to Ed Miliband and his partner, Justine, on the birth of their son.
But the announcement of the birth with his weight in pound is very much in the past and well into Old Labour territory.
When our second son was born in the same hospital, forty years ago, his weight was given in kilograms.
So get into the present day, Mr. Miliband!
A Classic Analysis for Daisy
Daisy is my software for analysing databases. Some of the most successful analyses has always been to take a series of date/time based events and draw a Date and Time Daisy Chart of them. Patterns in the data are often immediately visible.
Some years ago, one of our clients, a UK county, analysed low birth weight babies, by month, day of the week and post code, to see if there were any patterns. We didn’t find anything immediately, but we did in the end find a peak of twins, nine months after Christmas and the New Year. As the type of twin, identical or fraternal was not known, we could not explain the pattern. I have since told this to an honest man, who used to run fertility clinics in the United States. He felt that there were some times of the year when it was better to have IVF. He left the fertility business, as he felt this was not the sort of service, you should give couples desperate for a child.
But to return to the reason, I have written this post. It is being reported that babies born outside of office hours are more likely to die.
I don’t think the researchers are using Daisy, but it is the classic type of analysis for which the software was designed. All you need to do, is get all the events in an Excel spreadsheet as a table and then run Daisy.
Do We Somehow Absorb The Events Happening As We Are Born?
I don’t mean in an astrological way, as that is a load of old rubbish. But surely the state, feelings and emotions of the mother, must be passed to the child!
When our first son was born in 1969, everybody was on edge for the first moon landing. But it all turned out well! Gayle Hunnicutt whose own son was born at the same time, said her son was placid. Was ours? Perhaps as a young child, but not like how Gayle described her son.
I was born on the 16th August 1947, just a day after India gained independence. I am a few hours late to be one of Midnight’s Children. Has it affected me? I love India and most things Indian. I’ve been twice and hopefully I’ll go again. I’ve just watched John Sergeant’s excellent documentary on Indian railways, which talked eloquently about the tragedy and violence of partition, when around a 1,000,000 people died. It must have been in the papers and on the radio around the time I was born. I’ve also heard of this violence from a man, who at the time was a young officer in the British Army trying to move civilians to safety in soft-skinned vehicles. He wouldn’t talk about it.
In Sergeant’s documentary, we saw how the tragedy still continues, with India and Pakistan refusing to forget the violence and emnity and try to build a better future.
Today London showed how bad that relationship has become, with Pakistan playing Australia at the neutral venue of Lords. Judging by the fact that Pakistan are on top, they will claim victory, when in truth they have been defeated by the terrorists, who have forced them to play in England.
We must learn to renounce violence and surely the Indian sub-continent has seen enough in the last seventy years.
Fathers at Their Children’s Births
I was present when all three of my children were born. And that was in the early 1970s. In fact most of the fathers I knew in those days had been present.
I think it helped everybody, even if it was just to hold hands at a stressful time. In fact, by the third my wife was getting to enjoy childbirth a lot more and it was a much better occasion.
I can’t father children any more, so it won’t happen, but would I do it again? Yes!
But then we have this article in The Times. It contains this.
Michel Odent, a leading French obstetrician and author, will argue that men should not be present in the delivery room when women give birth, as their anxiety can be catching and make labour longer, more painful or likely to result in a Caesarean section. Men now attend more than 90 per cent of births in the UK, a proportion that has grown significantly since the 1950s.
Dr Odent believes that the birth process had become too “masculinised” in recent years, and delivery of babies would be easier if women were left with only an experienced midwife to help them, as used to be the case.
“It is absolutely normal that men are not relaxed when their partners are giving birth, but their release of adrenaline can be contagious,” he said yesterday. “When a woman releases adrenaline she cannot release oxycytin, the main hormone involved in childbirth, which can make labour longer and more difficult.”
In my view he’s talking rubbish.
Female Fertility and Coeliac Disease
BBC Breakfast this morning is carrying a report saying that all women at thirty should have a fertility test. I sent them this e-mail.
I am a coeliac, which means I have low B12 and folate levels unless I’m on a gluten-free diet. In a man this does not matter with regards fertility, but with some women undiagnosed low B12 levels means that they don’t conceive or carry to full term. I know personally of three women diagnosed at coeliacs in their earlier thirties, who cut out gluten and then very easily had the children they wanted.
I doubt they’ll read it out.
But if I trace my family back a couple of generations to where I think I’ve enherited my coeliac gene, I can’t find any woman who has given birth. Was that due to low B12, due to that gene.
Apollo 11 Lands
Exactly forty years ago today, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
My wife was still in the Middlesex Hospital with our first son, who had been born on the 16th. There was no reason for them to stay that long, except that partly that was the way it was done in those days and also the hospital was rather short of clients. They were actually phoning round other hospitals and it appeared that everybody was holding back giving birth, as they were waiting for the landing.
My wife and everybody else in the maternity unit actually crowded round the television to watch the landing. I think that some of them actually watched the moonwalk later.
Immediately, the landing was over, the phones started ringing and all hell broke out in the unit and by the morning they had beds in corridors.
We’d also put his birth in The Times and I still have two copies of the paper for that day.
The Times - July 20th, 1969
He is still the only birth I have seen in The Times, out of alphabetical order.
The paper on the left is actually a 4 a.m. edition. Does The Times still have one now?
One little incident that a friend remembered was that they interviewed a mother, whose baby was born on the 21st and they asked her if she was calling her son, Apollo. She said she was going to call him Paul.
World’s Oldest Mother Dies
This is a sad tale of a lady who gave birth at 66 to twins and then died a couple of years later.
I would never want to be a father at my age of 62, let alone a mother. It’s just too much responsibility.
But you can’t impose laws on maximum ages to give birth as what would be law in say the UK, would be legal in a country that didn’t want to make it illegal. Also, there have been cases of natural conceptions of women in their late fifties. With people getting fitter and healthier, it will not be long before a healthy baby arrives to a woman over sixty, who felt that the need for contraception had passed.
It’s a difficult dilemma and it just goes to show how easy for some it is to get pregnant.
Waiting for Apollo 11 – Part 3
The Tuesday was a day of waiting. They broke the waters in mid-morning and nothing happened. And then in mid-afternoon, contractions started.
Now my late wife wasn’t a lady with a large frame. Although she was nearly 5ft 5in, she was really only a size 8, so getting the baby out, when he finally arrived after midnight, was a bit of a messy business. Our first son was also about 8lb 5oz, so he was not small and she had quite a few stitches. Luckily, the student doctor , who was nicknamed Smooth Hugh, was very very good.
So that night I got back to Barnet about three in the morning, with mother and son doing well.
In other words exactly forty years ago.
But the time in the hospital was not without tragedy. The lady in the next bed with the unusual ring, lost her baby. Her son was born with a hole in the diaphragm, which meant he was unable to breathe.
But in those days of no ultrasound, it was impossible to diagnose the condition. Six years ago, my granddaughter had the same condition. It was diagnosed before birth and she was operated on at two days old. She is now a bouncing ad very normal girl, with no after effects from her ordeal.
So medical science can solve our problems.
But just as my wife was helped through a difficult birth by Smooth Hugh, good surgery helped in a much worse case to enable my granddaughter to survive.
We must train our surgeons to be the best.
Later that day, Apollo 11 blasted off to the moon. My wife told me later that evening, that everyone was gripped as they watched the huge Saturn rocket take off from Florida.
And there was still a shortage of babies in the hospital. They’d even resorted to ringing round hospitals and the message was the same. Everybody must be waiting for the moon landing.
The Anonymous Widower 