For the past two years, I have mostly taken pictures of my granddaughters and grandsons, but I have also taken pictures of destroyed and rusty Russian tanks in Ukranian, where I taught surgery for 30 years.
There are pictures from the workshop at the bottom of my garden where I am building a doll's house for my granddaughter. I hope to complete it by Christmas. I retired more than two years ago but I still teach and lecture.
I don't put together detailed plans for things I make because a rough sketch is all I have. The doll's house started out as a castle with battlements, but was later modernized with a kitchen and bathroom. The dolls' world version of English Heritage wouldn't approve of the Velux-like roof lights cut into the burr elm and ebony. Everything is held together with rare earth magnets so it opens up and several children can play with it at the same time.
I like to make things with my hands. When I first came across it over 40 years ago, I found it to be very serious and the way in which it is done with a microscope appealing. I like fiddling, but the similarities end there.
If the operation is dangerous, you live intensely. The world outside the operating theatre disappears when you live completely in the present. You are always happy. You can't afford to make a mistake. It's extremely rare to make a mistake with your hands. You don't need "steady hands" if you have steady nerves and intense focus.
In surgery, mistakes happen all the time, but they are almost always mistakes in decision making. Whether to operate, how to operate, how hard to pull on a fragile blood vessel.
In my workshop, I work on the doll's house. If the work is repetitive, like making multiple bannisters for a miniature staircase, I struggle against boredom. When operating, you don't have the luxury of having to see up a new piece of wood and start all over again. When I was a surgeon, no one died when I made a mistake.
If an operation went well, I would experience a huge sense of satisfaction. As the years went by, the sense of triumph was replaced by a sense of relief. I would say that we were fortunate to work with me.
I wanted to care for patients when I was a doctor. I wanted to do it more when it was more difficult. In retirement I don't miss the operating at all. My appetite for stress and danger has waned as I get older.
Over the past 12 years, being a consultant surgeon in the National Health Service has changed a lot. Twelve years of austerity, with more and more "management" and "efficiency savings" substituting for investment, has led to surgeons losing much of the autonomy that my generation of surgeons had. My colleagues tell me that they have a hard time getting major operations done because of the lack of intensive care beds. Patients get the blame if operations have to be stopped.
As I fiddle with small pieces of wood in my workshop, I don't miss the operating even though I miss my colleagues. When the doll's house is finished, all I will see are the small flaws. There is a lot of joy in making things.
The book is called And Finally: Matters of Life and Death.
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