I scrubbed up and came over to the operating table. ‘I’ll have a look,’ I said. I picked up a pair of forceps and looked into the wound. A long shiny white thread, the thickness of a piece of string – four or five inches long – came up out of the wound in my forceps. ‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ!’ I burst out. ‘You’ve severed the nerve root!’ I threw the forceps onto the floor and flung myself away from the operating table to stand against the far wall of the theatre. I tried to calm myself down. I felt like bursting into tears.
