 What was Desperate Debra originally made of?
I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market. The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving. To understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity. "Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route," says Tydeman, "that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy." As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.
 A neoprene wetsuit over a plastic tube scaffolding
 Ballistics gel over a plastic tube scaffolding  Silicone over a plastic tube scaffolding  Latex over a plastic tube scaffolding  A neoprene wetsuit over a plastic tube scaffolding