The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth Page A

withdrew her hand, and covered Lil again with the blanket.
    “You can put your legs down now, Lil, but stay where you are, please, because we will want to examine you again in a minute. Come with me to the desk, will you, nurse?”
    At the desk, which was at the other end of the room, she said to me very quietly: “I think the lump is a syphilitic chancre. I am going to ring Dr Turner straight away and ask him if he can come to examine her while she is still here. If we send her away with instructions to go to a doctor, there is a high chance that she will not go. The spirochaeta pallida of syphilis can cross the placenta and infect the foetus. However, the chancre is the first stage of syphilis, and with early diagnosis and treatment there is a good chance of cure, and the baby will be spared.”
    I nearly fainted, in fact I remember having to grip the table before I could sit down. I had been touching her - the revolting creature - and her syphilitic chancre. I couldn’t speak, but Novice Ruth said to me kindly, “Don’t worry. You were wearing gloves. You won’t have caught anything.”
    She left to go to Nonnatus House to ring the doctor. I couldn’t move. I sat at the table for a full five minutes, fighting down wave after wave of nausea, and shuddering. The children were playing all around me, perfectly happy. There was no movement from behind the screen, until the low, steady sound of contented snoring penetrated my ears. Lil was asleep.
    The doctor arrived about fifteen minutes later, and Novice Ruth asked me to accompany him. I must have looked pale, because she asked, “Are you all right? Will you manage?”
    I nodded dumbly. I couldn’t say no. After all, I was a trained nurse, accustomed to all sorts of frightful situations. Yet even after five years of hospital work - casualty, theatre, cancer patients, amputations, dying, death - nothing and no one had caused such profound revulsion in me as that woman Lil.
    The doctor examined her and took a scrape of tissue from the chancre for the pathology lab. He also took a sample of blood for a Wassermann’s test. Then he said to Lil, “I think you have a very early infection of venereal disease. We ... ”
    Before he had finished speaking she gave a great baying laugh. “Oh Gawd! Not again! That’s a laugh, that is!”
    The doctor’s face was stony. He said, “We have caught it early. I am going to give you penicillin now, and you must have another injection each day for ten days. We must protect your baby.”
    “Please yourself,” she giggled, “I’m easy,” and winked at him.
    His face was expressionless as he drew up a massive dose of penicillin and injected it into her thigh. We left her to get dressed, and went over to the desk.
    “We will get the results from pathology on the blood and serum,” he said to Novice Ruth, “but I don’t think there is any doubt about diagnosis. Would you Sisters arrange to visit daily for the injections? I think if we ask her to come to surgery she won’t bother, or will forget. If the foetus is still alive, we must do our best.”
    It was well after seven o’clock. Lil was dressed, and yelling to the children to come with her. She lit another fag, and called out gaily, “Well, tara all.”
    She looked knowingly at Novice Ruth, and said, with a leer - “Be good” - and shrieked with laughter.
    I told her that we would call each day to give her another injection. “Please yerself,” she said with a shrug, and left.
    I still had all my cleaning up to do. I felt so tired my legs could hardly move. The moral and emotional shock must have contributed to the fatigue.
    Novice Ruth grinned at me kindly. “You have to get used to all sorts in this life. Now, do you have any evening visits?”
    I nodded. “Three post-natal. One of them up in Bow.”
    “Then you go and do them. I will clean up here.”
    As I left the clinic, I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. The fresh air revived me, and the cycle ride