Susie Ferguson on becoming a 25-year-old war correspondent: ‘There was no reason to say no so I said yes’

Saturday Morning presenter Susie Ferguson now marvels that at 25 she began a six-year stint as a war correspondent.

"You have a different sense of your own mortality when you're young … I didn't have anything holding me back, I didn't have any particular responsibilities or there was no reason to say no so I said yes."

In the new book Bloody Minded, Ferguson reflects on how a "stubborn" Scottish child became an award-winning international journalist despite the crippling pain of endometriosis.

Although Ferguson completed 'hostile environment' training before flying into Iraq in 2003, she told Perlina Lau that she could not prepare for what a war zone was really like.

"There were times when rockets were coming in or some kind of bullets being fired or missiles coming at you."

In Iraq, Ferguson never knew what sights she might witness in a day or where she would be sleeping that night.

"You are living 24/7 on your wits. There is downtime, there's there is an awful lot of time where not very much happens and then there are bursts where everything happens."

After seven weeks in Iraq, returning to her previous life in the United Kingdom was "a really hard landing" for Ferguson.

"You think 'I'll get home and everything will be great because I get to see my family and my friends again and I'm back in my home' but in some ways, you're torn.

"You're living at a really high, really intense, in some ways really exciting level. And then you come back, and then you've got to decide which bag of frozen peas you're going to buy like none of this matters anymore."

Ferguson said a little piece of her heart remained in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where she popped 15 painkillers a day to stave off pain from undiagnosed endometriosis.

After having "really sore" periods since the age of 15, Ferguson was 28 when she was diagnosed with endometriosis.

"The endo pain when it gets really bad [feels like you're] six centimetres dilated in childbirth. That's the point where I start sweating."

In the UK at the time, laparoscopic surgery was the typical yet expensive route to a diagnosis, she says.

"That is one of the big barriers with endo is that it's not easily diagnosed, apart from with a surgeon getting their eyes on it."

A diagnosis of endometriosis often brought with it a lot of emotional pain, Ferguson said, and she did not seek medical treatment for the condition until after having her first child at 31.

While tolerating years of extreme pain may have toughened her up, she said it was not a badge of honour.

"I shouldn't have to go through 15 years of a 'six centimetres dilated in childbirth sensation' to decide whether I've got any grit or not."

She was already "pretty stubborn" as a child growing up with her anatomy lecturer mother and family doctor father.

Before becoming a journalist, she did four years of drama training at London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which was good preparation for picking up a microphone later.

"Working in radio, which I love, it has an awful lot of resonance I think with theatre and with drama."

To bring to life the scenes in Bloody Minded, she drew on an archive of hand-written notes and a bit of "method acting" to recall and describe specific sensations.

"The dust of the desert in your mouth is not really like sand because it's really fine. It's more like flour. What is it like to live in that? What is it like trying to run your fingers through your hair but you can't because it's clogged with this really fine dust?

"We are all trapped in our bodies and it felt to me like, to some extent, that was the story I was telling. It wasn't about the gun battles or the bombings that I'd been in. It was about 'Well, what was it like for a 25-year-old woman being there?'"