Bumped into my old obstetrician at our regular Thursday night dinner at the club last week.
It was lovely to see him; the last I’d heard of him he was at death’s door in ICU after being struck down with a serious illness while on holiday. He was walking with a stick, but apart from that he looked very well, and was having dinner with three women, so was clearly back up to his old tricks.
He came to our table as he was leaving to ask after the twins. They are twenty five years old now, I told him, and are both still students but doing very well. I added that Simon still remembers missing the All Blacks game when they were born, and he said he remembers it too! Well, I’ve felt vaguely guilty about that for the last quarter century, but really, I don’t think I (or the twins) should take the blame. If his office had managed to track me down sooner after getting my blood test results which suggested my body was in the process of catastrophically shutting down as a result of my pregnancy, we could have got to the hospital sooner, and they would have been delivered way before the 7:30 kick off. I suppose I should be grateful he and Simon didn’t just cook up a sneaky cesarean section between them, to free up their evening. Paranoid, moi? No, no: I have full confidence in the ethics of our medical profession…It was quite an important game, though…