Call The Midwife’s Heidi Thomas remembers how gangrene ‘brush with death’ changed her entire life

Call The Midwife’s creator Heidi Thomas recalled how coming close to death made her become her best self.

The playwright and screenwriter developed gangrene of the bowel and sepsis and had to have emergency surgery.

Heidi, 57, told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: ‘Not realising what the symptoms were I sort of soldiered on at home thinking I had a touch of food poisoning, and in actual fact, I developed gangrene of the bowel and sepsis.

‘I had to have emergency surgery and a very large piece of my bowel was removed, and then, of course, I had to deal with the sepsis, so I was very, very poorly.

‘It was a brush with death that I do think changes your perspective.’

The star said the thought of dying while her son was still young made her ‘shudder’ for a long time as she couldn’t bear to think about her actor husband Stephen McGann having to raise the baby by himself.

‘It gave me a sense of how much there was to lose,’ she continued. ‘My son was 14-months-old at the time and for years and years afterwards, I would have this sort of shudder at the idea of Steve being left alone with a baby, and the idea that certainly Dominic would never have remembered me at all.

‘Not that that’s the most important thing, that’s an egocentric thing to say, but I look at what I’ve done since.

‘I didn’t even really begin my best work as a writer until I was recovering from that illness.’

Heidi began her writing career with Shamrocks And Crocodiles and Indigo and believes her newer works might have never happened without the illness.