Undoctored, page 21
‘Thank you for referring this anxious lady/gentleman’ – this will be a triple-length appointment.
The letter in my hands started with the words: ‘Thank you for referring this apparently well-regarded author.’ Never read your own reviews.
Chapter 26
In a life that’s had its fair share of whiplash moments, one of the oddest turns has been finding myself somehow in the orbit of people who spend their lives being bundled in and out of blacked-out Range Rovers. People who can only eat out at restaurants with private areas to avoid their dinners turning into an endless conga-line of selfie-seekers. People who’ve become public property. Fame is the unfortunate but inevitable side effect of any kind of success – I’m very much Pluto to their Jupiter/Mickey, but it’s fascinating and slightly terrifying to watch.
Having previously done a job that took over every single aspect of my life, I’ve been extremely keen that this doesn’t happen to me again in a slightly different way. I’ve chiefly managed to achieve this by being nowhere near successful enough for it to become an issue. If I’m ever spotted in the wild, it’s almost invariably because a library-dwelling super-recogniser has identified me on the basis of a ten-year-old, Opal Fruit-sized, black-and-white author photo from the back of one of my books.* This happens roughly once a month, which I think is a fair taxation on the luck I’ve had.
I tend to avoid TV appearances because they can radically increase the frequency of being accosted in Ryman’s. For me, the downsides of featuring on a panel show far outweigh the appearance fee and the opportunity to sit between Josh Widdicombe and Romesh Ranganathan for two hours and pretend to make spontaneous jokes, despite having been sent the topics to prepare three days earlier.*
I have to break my own rule whenever I have a new book coming out, though, because publishers insist on a decent slug of publicity to minimise the percentage of copies being turned into garden mulch. Most of the publicity will be breakfast-sofa-based chat rather than panel shows, which is good, because that means – unless I say something disastrous and become immortalised in a TV’s Most Epic Fails clip show – my appearance will quickly disappear. It’s not like there’s a channel called Maeve showing repeats of Lorraine and GMB every evening until the sun explodes.
But, like panel shows, these ones still have a tiny element of cheating, known as the ‘researcher chat’. This is a half an hour phone call where the interviewee gets a handy heads-up about the questions they’ll have chucked at them on camera. It’s also an excellent opportunity for the production company to find out whether there’s any chance at all that the interviewee is an absolute headcase who’ll get the TV station taken off air because of some extreme rant about immigrants.
Because I had a new book out, I was on my fifth researcher chat for my fifth TV show. ‘And why did you leave medicine?’ ‘And do you miss it?’ ‘And do you think you’d ever go back?’ ‘And why did you start writing?’ So far, so tedious.
‘And do you think you’ll ever have children yourself?’ I flinched. This felt strangely intrusive – somewhere beyond the level of public property I’m happy for my life to become. Was I being overly sensitive? I did the maths in my head. Was any question fair game if they were allowing me to come on their TV show? Surely not – I wouldn’t let them quiz me on my cock size or how long it takes me to orgasm.* In the final analysis, I just didn’t feel comfortable with the question.
‘Would you ask this question if I were a woman?!’ I shot back.
‘Umm, yeah, probably?’ replied the researcher.
They probably would actually – this is daytime telly after all. But that still didn’t mean I had to feel comfortable about it. So I politely explained that I wouldn’t be appearing on their show the next day after all, although they would probably describe this move as a strop.
I walked – OK, fine, stropped – into the living room and immediately told J about this ridiculous overreach into my private life, only to be greeted by a crashing silence instead of his undying support and abject indignation. I frequently accuse J of siding against me. (‘Maybe they had a reason to steal your phone, Adam? What if they had to call their terminally ill mother? What if they needed to sell it to buy baby formula?’) But on this issue, I was absolutely certain he’d have been on Team Adam. Instead, Dr Freud leaned back in his chair and slowly brought the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in front of his face. ‘And why do you suppose this makes you so upset?’ he wondered.
I was pretty sure I wanted kids. If life had played out differently, I would already have a twelve-year-old. We’d talked about having kids dozens of times. He sent me articles about the various different routes available for two men who love each other very much, each generally accompanied with a note saying, ‘Well, this looks like a fucking nightmare.’ The only option that didn’t require hellish logistics, several years of planning and the huge altruism of others was child-napping, and even that wasn’t without its potential pitfalls. How homophobic of god – all it takes for the straights is a five-minute drunken pump ’n’ squirt in a Morrisons car park.
The reason I reacted so badly to the phone call was that it lit up something I’d been burying: that I was probably never going to have the children I wanted. I was forty, with a heart hollower than the north transept of Durham cathedral. I didn’t particularly like the idea of being one of those dads who was too old to play football with their kids.* Worse still, what if I just keeled over and died on them when they were still young? Or even if not directly on them, dying near them is still pretty bad. What kind of start in life is that? And say I do hit some kind of traditional life expectancy, I’d still be long dead before the kid was my age now – grief on top of mid-life crisis. This poor child is already fucked and it doesn’t even exist.
All of this, of course, supposed that a baby immediately materialised in front of us, which clearly isn’t how this stuff works.* Aside from the practical considerations of achieving a pregnancy in the first place, both my job and personal experience has taught me that not everything goes to plan. No wonder it’s a process that we’d already dipped our toes into then abandoned more times than Mad Men.
‘Right,’ said J. ‘Kettle on, mobile phones away – let’s talk this through.’ Different coloured pens were produced, Post-its went up on walls. There was a determination in his eyes, an executive confidence – I was getting a glimpse into the skillset of the producer of some of the UK’s least successful TV shows. So – what are the pros and cons of having children?
On all pragmatic levels, children are almost exclusively cons. They spell the end of lie-ins, holidays and nights out. They require mucking out, constant attention and enormous unremitting expense. And on the basis of other parents we know, your personality immediately and entirely disintegrates until your once-celebrated conversational pizazz is reduced to wittering on interminably about your offspring. You lose rational perspective, describing your child as a genius after they manage to daub a handprint on a piece of paper, or successfully (although let’s be frank, very approximately) imitate the noise of a cow. Plus the world is hurtling hellward in almost every respect, so you’re subjecting your child, who you love more than anyone else in the universe and wish a life better than yours, to a future where the only certainty is that it’s going to be much, much worse.
The pros are quite nebulous and don’t reflect particularly well on you when written down. The joy that they bring you as soon as you make eye contact is quite a big one but it’s a slightly selfish arrangement. The idea of passing down your DNA so that you achieve immortality of your genetic material on earth is award-winningly arrogant, and the kind of thing you’d expect from comic book villains or people who lock other people up in cellars. The notion that I’d be a ‘good dad’ was a nice idea but it wasn’t necessarily true. And also, so what? I’d probably make a decent postman but that didn’t mean I should devote myself to 5 a.m. starts and and getting savaged by Cockapoos. To have someone to care for you when you deteriorate into a bed-shaped mess or to supply a selection of compatible solid organs when yours give up the ghost is honest, but not necessarily in the spirit of things.
But then again, so much human behaviour would seem like a very bad idea if boiled down to a list of pros and cons. Getting married, for example. Gym membership. The government. A quick drink after work. But despite what medicine may have taught me, not everything can come down to a logical list of benefits and risks. It’s all outweighed by a strange intangible – call it love if you want, call it your brainstem, call it a primal urge – but it’s big and it’s unknowable and it’s real. I wanted to have kids, and J felt the same.
J nervously handed over to me for the science bit. I explained that it obviously depended which route we took, but if we were even considering having kids which were genetically ours, then the first step would be to see if we had sperm which were up to the task. ‘We might as well get it frozen at the same time to save money,’ I added. J asked why it would cost money, and I said that gay fertility wasn’t really covered on the NHS, so he asked if that was homophobic, and I said it probably was, so he asked if we should sue the NHS, and I said that’s probably the last thing we should do and googled some private fertility clinics.
We booked in to make our deposits and J marked it in the diary as ‘spunk clinic’, forgetting that my agent also has access to the calendar.
There’s a surprising amount of paperwork involved with jizzing into a cup. One of the forms asked the question of what should happen to our sperm samples if we died. J said that he wanted his to be stored in the freezer, for me to use in the future should I want his children. I said that I wanted mine poured down Chris Hemsworth’s throat but the nurse wasn’t happy with this answer, so I just copied J’s.
And then into the clinic room: a lot fancier than the NHS ones I’d sent patients off to in my fertility days. Rather than a blue plastic waiting room chair, there was a swish red sofa in wipe-clean pleather. And rather than a stack of Caxton-era magazines, the internet. J went into the room next door.
‘You’ve got twenty minutes,’ said the receptionist. It’s pretty stressful being told that you have to ejaculate within a certain period of time. Whether you’re a bewildered sperm donor or a pre-fluffed pornstar, imposing a deadline of any description is never conducive to a nice, relaxed orgasm. Neither was the thought of how many other men had used the same wankbooth. I noticed that a poster informing guests to put their completed samples in the lockable cabinet was dated March 2005. Yikes. Let’s say a sample every twenty minutes each working day, five days a week for sixteen years – that’s got to be close to a hundred thousand ejaculations in this room. A hundred thousand men, all jerking away on the same couch, all ejaculating in a room the size of a lift. I briefly wondered what a blacklight would reveal, but the resultant mental image wasn’t particularly conducive to a rapid orgasm (not personally, anyway – you do you), then I became the 100,001st person to pull down their CKs.
I clicked the remote control’s ‘on’ button – it was linked to internet pornucopia PornHub, which was a relief: it meant at least I could find something to my taste and hopefully get this over with, within the allotted time. As it happened, some quite niche porn was already playing when the screen blinked to life. I watched for a moment as a five-foot skeletal twink (Alejandro, according to the description) was being jackhammered by a much older, seven-foot hairy wardrobe of a man (Gonzalo). It was somehow nice that my predecessor in the room was gay but also unnerving that the telly doesn’t reset to some homepage once you’re done. I made a mental note to manually close the video when I was done. As Alejandro and his dad were about as likely to do the job for me as an episode of Bargain Hunt, I grabbed the remote and started pressing buttons.
No dice. I imagine the insides of the remote control were irredeemably gunked up by hundreds of poorly aimed emissions, amounting to untold quadrillions of doomed, wayward sperm and almost certainly invalidating Panasonic’s normally excellent warranty. I turned the TV off and pulled out my phone – no reception. I heard next door’s lock click – J was already finished. Bastard. I checked the time. Fuck, only twelve minutes left. Right – me, Alejandro and Gonzalo would have to sort it out between us. It wasn’t going to be easy, but where there’s a willy, there’s a way – and by looking down when there was a touch too much of Gonzalo’s hairy back on display and muting the volume so I wasn’t put off by his strange, low wheezing sounds, we got there eventually. Into the locked cabinet it went, just shy of twenty minutes.*
As I left the protein pod, the next jizzer was already waiting outside. The correct protocol here is of course to totally avoid any form of eye contact, which I did, marching straight ahead towards the stairs. Unfortunately this chap hadn’t read the protocol. ‘Alright,’ he said, spunking all over the Geneva Convention. I offered him a weak smile in return. ‘I loved your book, by the way. This Might Hurt?’
Of course today had to be the day, my once a month. Torn between thanking him, breaking into a sprint and politely correcting him on the title, I obviously plumped for the former. It was only when I was out of the building that I realised I should have actually explained that the remote control was broken when I picked it up … But no. Now there will always be a group of people who, if ever my name happens to come up, will think: ‘Oh, he’s that doctor, right? Friend of mine followed him into a wanking room. Apparently he gets off to weird Little and Large fetish porn.’
I surprised myself with how nervous I was when the lab emailed with our results.
Our samples were OK, although mine contained a lot of ‘sediment’, which sounds pretty disgusting and probably means that a spider fell in the pot while I was on the sofa. J sat me down to have the next stage of the conversation – should we move ahead, and in which direction?
I suddenly realised the speed of the train I was on and pulled the emergency lever. I found myself saying I wasn’t sure, that it wasn’t quite the right moment, what with how busy we both were with work. What I didn’t say was how panicked I was that I might not be cut out for this.
I would love this child with all my heart but children from loving families can still end up massively fucked up. How could I be sure that some small, apparently insignificant thing I did wouldn’t be the source of untold trauma? What if my idea of getting it right was actually getting it all irretrievably wrong? What if they didn’t want to learn the saxophone? What if, instead of ending up like their affable, social dad who can walk into any room and have everyone eating out of his hand within minutes, they ended up like their awkward dad, the one who hides behind humour and never really speaks his heart?* How can I teach others how to find peace and joy in this world when my attempt at it has been so shitbad?
J sat down next to me, put his hand over mine, smiled, looked into my eyes and decoded all my insecurities. He told me he understood – it needed to be 100 per cent right for both of us, because there were no rehearsals and no rewind buttons – once we were in this, we were in it forever, and we both had to want it as much as each other.
I definitely want kids, and not just to have someone to dedicate my books to, or to stop my mum banging on about grandchildren. And J will be a fantastic dad, I’ve got no doubt about that – if only to make our children like him the best. I can learn from my mistakes. I can continue to unlearn what I was taught as a doctor, to be open about my feelings, rather than pushing them away or hiding them behind jokes. I’ve already switched from one act to another – surely I can manage a third?
But not today. At time of press, our sedimentary spunk is sitting in a freezer compartment, awaiting further instructions. There will be a right time, one day. And what a time we’re going to have.
* * *
* Giving a talk to some kids about my book Kay’s Anatomy, the Q&A session at the end bounced between the usual topics of poo, snot and vomit. Last question – front row, Iron Man jumper, face of an angel. ‘Hi Mr Adam. Why do you look so much older than the photo of you in the back of your book?’
* I realise this is the ‘Santa Claus’ bombshell for middle-aged men. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
* Longer than you’d think, in answer to one or the other.
* ‘Well, I definitely don’t believe that you’d play football,’ said my friend Justin.
* Unless you go for the child-napping option.
* In answer to the earlier question.
* I’ll leave you to calculate which one is which.
Afterword
While I was writing this book, I heard that Mike Schachter had died. He hadn’t turned up for his seventieth birthday party and was found shortly afterwards. It was devastating, unexpected and, to anyone who’d known him, an almost incomprehensible end to a life that had been dedicated to improving the lives of others, seemingly at the expense of his own.
As I scrolled through the scores of online tributes to this wonderful man, I was brimming with tears and pride reading how he’d helped hundreds of medical students over the decades. The stories were often exact echoes of my own: he’d been the only one to notice they’d been struggling; he’d been the only person who not just offered to help but came good on his promise.
As with so many doctors, though, he was clearly better at helping others than seeking help himself. Or perhaps no one took that metaphorical walk across the canteen to ask him how he was doing. The best you can hope for in life is that you leave behind a legacy that makes this world a better place for someone, somewhere, in whatever small way you can. Mike did that. I hope that some of his students have paid that forward as doctors themselves. I hope that I’m able to do something similar.
But what would I say if, in some unfortunate time machine incident, I found myself the one talking to an eighteen-year-old Adam?* Would I tell him to give medicine a go, say that he was here now so he may as well make the best of it? Or would I encourage him to bail out while he still had a few last shreds of nerve, pick up his saxophone and teach people a new way to drive their neighbours up the wall? Maybe I’d give him a gentle nudge to be a GP like his father, with a few coded warnings that it wouldn’t be easy but it might be a slightly less chaotic ride than obs and gynae. Maybe I’d be brutally honest – it’s a job that means he’ll see some really fucked up stuff be utterly normalised, in a health service kept running by the superhuman efforts of the people who work within it, at incalculable cost to themselves.
