Black Pig - Part 2

This is the second chapter of Reflections of a Neurosurgeon, the book I am writing in public.

This chapter explores race in the Britain and the NHS.

I was conflicted about even writing this chapter. It felt like I was jumping into murky waters. But once I started writing, I knew there was treasure to be found in the depths.

If you missed the first part of this chapter, you can find it here.

Hazel's story began three months before our paths crossed, with a seemingly innocuous encounter between skull and kitchen cabinet. She belonged to a generation that viewed stoicism as a virtue and medical attention as a last resort. The bleeding scalp wound was dismissed with a self-applied bandage, filed away in that category of life's small injuries that one simply endures. But the brain holds its own counsel, and time can transform minor trauma into major crisis.

A week before I met her, headaches began their insistent percussion. When her left leg began to betray her balance, a visiting friend recognised the choreography of a potential stroke and called an ambulance - much to Hazel's British embarrassment at "causing such a fuss." The CT scan revealed the slow-motion crisis: a chronic subdural haematoma, that peculiar phenomenon where time transforms solid blood into liquid threat.

The ageing brain, like a shy guest, retreats from the walls of its skull, leaving space that nature abhors. This gap, filled with compensatory fluid, creates the perfect conditions for trauma to seed slow-growing catastrophe. Blood that might have clotted and resolved instead enters a cycle of liquefaction and re-bleeding, expanding like a dark tide against the shores of consciousness. Hazel's kitchen cabinet had unknowingly initiated this cascade, and now, three months later, the pressure on her brain demanded surgical intervention.

It was Wednesday night when Craig, one of the senior trainees, texted about an emergency case. Exhaustion pulled at my eyelids as I glanced from my cheap desk to the spartan comfort of my single bed. But opportunity rarely arrives at convenient hours. I packed water and snacks - surgical time operates in its own dimension - and headed once more toward The Obelisk, unaware that Hazel's case would challenge more than my fledgling surgical skills.