Darkside of Medicine

It was an ordinary summer afternoon.  My mother was sitting in the front garden holding my baby brother, whilst talking to a friend.   My sisters and I were playing in the front garden with the children fr of mums friend.   Nearby, my mother and her friend were sitting together quietly talking.

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Children have a habit of listening without appearing to listen, and I was no different. We were playing ‘it’ and I was running past them when I caught their conversation.

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I heard them talking about a woman they knew whose baby had been born with severe disabilities. They said that during pregnancy she had been given a medicine because she was so ill during pregnancy.

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I stopped and listened.

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I didn't really understand what they meant, so I wandered over and asked.

"Why?"

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How could a medicine make a baby disabled

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Surely medicines were supposed to make people better.

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My mother and her friend explained, as gently as they could, doctors had prescribed a medicine  called thalidomide that was later found to have caused serious harm to babies when taken during pregnancy.

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I remember feeling completely shocked.

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I simply couldn't understand it.

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As a child, doctors were my heroes.

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My mother had been very ill when I was growing up, and the local cottage hospital felt almost like part of our family. I remember on the way to school every day we would stop off and see our mother who would then brush all our hair before we went off to school. We knew the nurses, we knew the doctors, and they knew us. Looking back, hospitals were very different places then. They were smaller, more familiar and much more personal.

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Our dog even used to visit my mother there and curl up underneath her hospital bed.

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That was the world I knew.

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To me, doctors were people who helped.

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They healed people.

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The idea that a medicine prescribed by a doctor could unintentionally harm a baby was something I simply couldn't reconcile.

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Life moved on, and as a young child I didn't understand the science or the history behind thalidomide.

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But that conversation stayed with me.

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Many years later, when I began asking questions about medicines, pregnancy and patient safety, I often found myself thinking back to that afternoon in the front garden.​

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• Only then did I realise that it had been the first tiny crack in my childhood belief that medicine always had the answers. At the time, though, I simply couldn't accept it. I tucked the thought away somewhere deep in the back of my mind and got on with being a child.