What’s at the heart of Thoughtful Content?
The photo I took outside Great Ormond Street (I wasn’t treated in this wing though as it was only built in 2006)
A few weeks ago I happened to be walking past Great Ormond Street Hospital and I took a quick snap. When I was 8 I was a patient at this hospital and had heart surgery there.
I was born with an atrial septal defect: which means I had a hole in the wall (septum) that divides the upper chambers of the heart. Otherwise known as a hole in the heart.
Since the age of about 2 or 3 I went to hospital for regular check-ups. When I was a bit bigger I needed surgery to close the hole.
I’ve got copies of my old medical notes. I requested them as an adult to try and understand what happened to me as a child!
Having a heart operation
I can still remember being in hospital and recovering after: I even have a vague memory of coming round in ICU and pulling at my drips and tubes. I didn’t like the food they served or being woken up at night for observations. But I liked going to the education room and making crafts, and the presents I got from friends and family!
Me aged about 8
The impact
I am not sure how much I totally understood what was going on, but I definitely picked up that it was a serious thing. It’s only as an adult that realised the impact of being aware as a child that there was something wrong with my heart. I have struggled with health anxiety for years.
A positive is that the experience piqued my interest in health and health conditions. Plus my mum gave me a notebook to write in while I was in hospital. It’s about this time I started writing poems and short stories.
What happened next
The good news is that little girl who wrote stories to make sense of things, grew up with a fully repaired heart! Nowadays, I’m happy to be able to write content and work on projects that will help people understand their health conditions. And I think that it helps that I have had some experience of being a patient and having a ‘big’ medical procedure.
At the heart of Thoughtful Content is empathy and understanding for people and families impacted by serious health conditions.
PS - About 25 years later I went for a scan of my first baby’s heart: they can scan them pre-birth now.
The doctor I saw was Dr Sullivan: amazingly he was the cardiologist who had treated me in 1989! It felt like a truly full-circle moment.