I had operated on a young girl with a large brain tumour. The tumour was a mass of blood vessels, in the way that some brain tumours can be, and I had struggled desperately to stop the bleeding. The operation became a grim race between the blood pouring out of the child’s head and my poor anaesthetist Judith pouring blood back in through the intravenous lines as I tried, and failed, to stop the bleeding. The child, a very beautiful girl with long red hair, bled to death. She ‘died on the table’ – an exceptionally rare event in modern surgery.
