Today we hear from Maddie McMahon. Maddie has been a doula for 17 years and she runs her own doula training business, Developing Doulas.

Last year Maddie was diagnosed with a rare cancer, ocular melanoma, which affects less than 5 in a million people. Maddie talks about the need for holistic care, good communication and the nuances around positive thinking.

We discuss the benefits of wild swimming in cold water and how that was something that helped to bring her out of a deep depression during her treatment. Maddie says that, “her biggest tip for anyone dealing with a crisis, physical or emotional, to get out and start wild swimming.”

Maddie has written several books and we talk about her latest book “why mothering matters."

“The motherhood experience has been mostly overlooked by feminism, and women are still the ‘social skivvys’ ”

We talk about the fallacy of equality when we now live in a world where women work full time, as men have always done, and we also still do all or most of the traditional female roles of childcare and running a household.

You can find Maddie on facebook @maddiemcmahon and the developing doulas website is: https://developingdoulas.co.uk/