I teach how to share news in medical school. My own unexpected pregnancy made it personal

As it turned out that the pregnancy was ectopic, my doctor’s tone shifted from joyful to empathetic

Some years ago I taught a class in medical school on “Breaking Bad News”. I never liked the title, but I inherited it and was not allowed to change it. So I used it to deconstruct what we meant by “breaking” and “bad”. We know that assumptions by a clinician on whether it is “good” or “bad” news impacts how it’s delivered to a patient. In turn, that delivery, along with the news itself and the patient’s own view on its value, influence a patient’s response.

To encourage students to consider the complexity around giving news a value, I used invented examples. These were: a) telling someone they had a particular diagnosis, which on the face of it appears to be bad news, but gives a name and the attendant social validity to a patient’s symptoms; and b) telling someone they were pregnant, which might seem like good news when that might not be the case.

Related: I'm so thankful for my daughter but I wish someone had prepared me for the physical toll of childbirth | Elicia O'Reilly

Related: As an oncologist I trade in bad news of the worst kind, but giving it is still stressful | Ranjana Srivastava

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War and peace both need art funding | Brief letters

Test and trace | Art | Signs of spring | Lecterns | Twins

Have others noted that if the £37bn that the government has committed to the outsourced test-and-trace scheme is spent over the planned two-year period, it will cost a little over £350m a week? Worth putting that on the side of a bus.
William Wallace
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords

• The irony of there being £2m for new art commissions depicting conflict (Imperial War Museums behind £2m project for new art on conflicts, 11 March) would not be lost on the Peace Museum in Bradford, where such a sum would enable a transformation in the creation and interpretation of peace art.
Peter Nias
Bradford

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From the archives: 88 days trapped in bed to save a pregnancy – podcast

We are raiding the Audio Long Reads archives and bringing you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2017: Months before she was due to give birth, disaster struck for Katherine Heiny. Doctors ordered her to lie on her side in bed and not move – and gave her a 1% chance of carrying her baby to term by Katherine Heiny.

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Medieval women 'put faith in birth girdles' to protect them during childbirth

New findings cement idea that ritual and religion was invoked using talismans to soothe nerves

With sky-high levels of maternal mortality, the science of obstetrics virtually nonexistent and the threat of infectious disease always around the corner, pregnant medieval women put their faith in talismans to bring them divine protection during childbirth.

From amulets to precious stones, the list of items that the church lent to pregnant women was substantial, but the most popular lucky charm was a “birthing girdle”.

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We read books to my daughter from birth, which enriched all our lives

A difficult pregnancy meant the only item I dared buy for my unborn child was a book. When she arrived we read it to her every day

Nine years ago, I gave birth to a little girl. And now that little girl has grown into a bookworm. It began, as all stories about books should really begin, in a bookshop. I was several months pregnant and I picked up an American picture book I had never come across before: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. It featured a poem that my husband and I would end up reading, oh, I don’t know, at least 900 times. The book became such a pillar of my daughter’s nightly routine that by the time she could talk, I realised she knew it by heart.

It also marked a turning point for me. I had been finding the pregnancy hard. Various complications meant it was high risk, and there was a good chance I would not manage to carry my baby to term. This knowledge weighed heavily in my heart while, in my womb, Flora was literally doing somersaults for the sonographers, happily oblivious to my concerns.

Reading books to my baby made me feel much closer to her

My top priority was choosing books that would be fun to read

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‘Mothers are livid. We’ve had enough!’ The pregnant women being forced out of the workplace

Joeli Brearley, founder of the charity Pregnant Then Screwed, says the pandemic has caused a surge of discrimination against pregnant women and mothers at work. She explains what needs to be done to fight back

Joeli Brearley was sacked by voicemail the day after she told her boss she was pregnant. It was 2013 and she was working for a charity. “I immediately thought: ‘The law will protect me,’” she recalls. “But I was also terrified, because I had bills to pay, and I thought: ‘Nobody’s going to employ me now.’”

Seething at the injustice, she wanted to take the company to court. But hers was a high-risk pregnancy and she had to pull out after doctors told her that stress would probably trigger an early labour. Instead, she set up the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed to fight for others who had experienced similar discrimination. Take the woman who was told her promotion was a done deal and she just had to do an interview as a formality. Just before the interview, she told her boss she was pregnant; suddenly, the new job wasn’t open to her. Or the woman who was bullied so mercilessly at work after she announced her pregnancy that she went into premature labour; as she sat in the neonatal clinic with her baby, who almost died, her boss called and made her role redundant.

I was left with the choice of accessing justice, or the health of my unborn child

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