‘They entrusted me with their daughter’s memory’: Women’s prize winner Rachel Clarke on her story of a life-saving transplant | Women’s prize for nonfiction

R.Rachel Clark has read the story of the heart, which won the Women’s Award for this year for fictional stories, is an experience of an attack of competing emotions often. There is a lack of skill and dedication to the nine -year -old medical teams that have been killed in a traffic collision in Max’s body, a young boy facing almost a certain death of rapidly deteriorating heart muscle. There is great admiration for the inexhaustible sympathy of the teams that cared about both children and their families, and wonder in a series of medical developments, every boom that represents determination, inspiration, strict work and the exact navigation of the newly emerging ethical lands. Most of the floors ever are the tremendous courage of two families, one destroyed by the sudden loss of a precious child, and the other faces a diagnosis threatening to tear their lives.

To write such a story requires special preparation. “I was filled with fear when I approached the Keira family for the first time,” Clark told me this morning after she was awarded the award. “I knew that I was asking them to help me with the most precious thing, the story of their beloved daughter Keira, her memory.” The former journalist was trained as a doctor in the late twenties, and spent most of her medical career working in tilted care. After that, she also became a famous writer and committed activist, and I published three notes: your life in my hands, my dear life, Impressive. She turned to her medical training training when writing the story of the heart. “I said to myself, my framework will be my medical framework, so I would like to act in a way, in the hope that they trust me in the same way that someone may trust as a doctor. And if they at any time change their opinion, they can stay away from the project.”

Each family has read the entire manuscript, as Clark decided that it would not publish if they had any concerns. In the morning in which we were talking, she was in contact with them, and I read a message from Luana’s mother, Keira. “Keira really caused this difference to many people. It is incredible,” he says. For us, you continue to tell me, now schools visit children to tell children about Keira; Max’s mother, Emma, ​​Ambassador “Infinitely” for the NHS organ donation program. Nobody reads the book can forget Keira’s father almost the atmosphere, or her sisters, and all of them not only agreed forward while donating her members, even when the brother of Luana and Keira was seriously injured. There, also, the courage of Max’s father, Paul, supports his despair with the pain and shock of treatment; And the brother of Max, Harry, who is now finished his second year at the Faculty of Medicine. Because of these people who entered in 2020, the Maeira and Keira law entered into the articles of association, where adults would be supposed to have been granted approval to donate organs, instead of having to subscribe, a very important step in dealing with the scarcity of donor organs.

For Clark, it was also important to shed light on the care of medical teams, those who give, in death, another opportunity for life; From the “moment of honor” that precedes all surgery to recover donor members, in which everyone is silent to look at the patient, to the last offices of washing and wearing clothes performed by nurses. “It is the patient’s important person,” explains. “And I think this says something very deep about us as a type, right?”

Clark, who is the mother of two teenagers, spends half of her time working with patients, and half on “other things”; Not only writing books, but highlighting the challenges that her profession faces – and therefore we all – we are facing. At the present time, it is angry at the government’s recent decision to stop issuing visas to foreign care workers, because what they do is an unskilled work. With a shortage of 100,000 care workers, the result is that patients are unable to get out of the hospital: “Direct result is that I will see more patients on cars who die outside the A & E so that they cannot even get enough care workers. Dignity.”

She says, she says, she has always been torn between art and science, but this drug is “the ideal marriage for difficult, beautiful and chaotic sciences. I try to write books representing medicine precisely in this sense. You are not a good doctor if you are just a scientist and you are not a good doctor if you suffer from emotion and feeling: you must marry the two.”