Chapter Ten
“What do you mean?” Max said.
He had come straight from practice and was wearing his official professional arm wrestler shirt, which read “WAL,” which stood for World Armwrestling League and made me crazy because whatever else you want to say about arm wrestling, it’s two words. Hyphenated at the very least.
“Pregnant,” Dr. Kim repeated.
So I was grateful for the shirt. It was good to have something to be upset about that actually made sense.
Once they overreacted and took away my license, my children, at least one of them, had to accompany me to the doctor’s.
Usually whoever drove sat in the waiting room—I wasn’t a toddler—but Dr. Kim had suggested all three of them attend this appointment.
“You’re fine,” she told me over the phone when she called to say test results had come back, “but I think you’ll all have questions. ”
Dr. Kim’s office had only two chairs. She’d dragged in a rolling stool and was perched on that. Max sat next to me and held my hand. Darcy and Alice stood behind us like sentinels, but I could see Darcy’s pinched face without actually seeing it.
“But like … pregnant how?” she said. I appreciated her point. You could be pregnant with possibility. You could take a pregnant pause. It didn’t seem likely as a medical diagnosis, but on the other hand, likelihood seemed to have ceased to apply. Likelihood or even, really, plausibility.
That’s where it all started.
“The usual way,” Dr. Kim replied. “At least at some level—”
“What level?” Darcy interrupted. Shrilly.
But Alice leapt right to cross-examination. No matter the situation, cross-examination is Alice’s favorite part. “Isn’t it true that my mother is—conservatively—three decades too old to be pregnant?”
“Certainly this is anomalous,” Dr. Kim allowed.
“Anomalous?” Alice repeated. “That seems quite an understatement. Is it precedented? Have you ever seen a seventy-seven-year-old pregnant patient?”
“I have not.”
“A colleague then? Another doctor you know?”
“No.”
“Have you ever heard of a pregnant septuagenarian?”
“Not naturally occurring,” Dr. Kim admitted.
“Naturally occurring?” Max looked pale, lips dry, grammatically offensive shirt lined with sweat. I wondered if a mint would make him feel better.
“There are some rare cases of patients in extremely advanced age achieving viable pregnancies using donor eggs which they are then able to carry to term.”
Alice crossed her arms. “That seems like a different thing.”
“I agree. I haven’t treated more than a handful of women pregnant at forty-seven who weren’t using some kind of ART.”
She said each letter, A-R-T, but my mind still went to dark arts. Witchcraft, sorcery, some kind of curse gone awry all seemed as likely an explanation as any for what she was telling us.
“Assisted reproductive technology,” Dr. Kim revised when she saw she’d lost me.
“What is the oldest you’ve known a woman to conceive without the aid of these technologies?” Alice said.
“There are documented cases of women getting pregnant without medical intervention into their sixties, if only extremely rarely.”
“Does it not then seem more likely,” Alice suggested, “that the tests you ran last week are wrong?”
“I had them run repeatedly. And then I ran them myself.”
“In some other way compromised, then. Mixed up with another patient’s? Misread?”
“Think of it this way,” Dr. Kim said. “Most women are able to conceive into their thirties, many into their forties, some into their fifties, especially with the help of drugs and fertility treatments. It’s a bell curve; there are outliers on either end.
There’s a documented case of a five-and-a-half-year-old giving birth in Peru in 1939, several six-year-old mothers, more than a handful of eight-year-olds. ”
“How awful,” I murmured. The room was spinning. Or my head was.
“It is awful,” Dr. Kim agreed. “These are impossible pregnancies, but they happened anyway. Yours too is an impossible pregnancy. At least yours is seeded in love.”
Darcy made a noise in the back of her throat.
“Or consider it from the other end,” Dr. Kim went on. “Most girls have begun to menstruate by the time they’re sixteen. Many start at thirteen. Some at eleven. But a few? A few start when they’re six.”
“How many years”—Alice called me to the stand—“since your last period?”
“I’m not … sure.” Back when I used to menstruate, it had not been something one discussed in front of one’s children, especially one’s son.
The form I’d filled out in the waiting room had asked for the date of my last period, but since it had spots for only the month and day, how many decades it had been hadn’t come up.
I’d left it blank anyway. “Almost thirty years, probably?”
“Think of women you’ve known with irregular periods who still got pregnant,” Dr. Kim said patiently.
“Irregular periods,” Alice repeated. “Is that really what you’re claiming happened here?”
“I don’t know what happened here,” Dr. Kim confessed. “I have never seen anything like this. It doesn’t seem possible, I agree, but it is nonetheless the case that you, Pepper Mills, are about six weeks pregnant.”
“About?” I said.
“Well, it’s complicated—”
Darcy snorted. “I bet.”
“—because we start counting from the date of your last menstrual period. So women who are six weeks pregnant have only been pregnant for about four weeks.”
“So what you’re saying”—Alice raised her eyebrows into her hair—“is that my mother is fifteen hundred weeks pregnant?”
“Surely I’m not pregnant pregnant,” I interrupted. Waiting for the end of Alice’s cross-examinations is like waiting for the end of the sky.
“What do you mean, Pepper?” Dr. Kim said in her usual gentle way.
“I’m not about-to-have-a-baby pregnant. Not even about to have a baby in nine months. At most I must be … what’s the term when it’s a false positive?”
“False positive,” Dr. Kim answered, “but this positive isn’t false. We took multiple samples. I’ve run and rerun—”
“Not like the test is wrong. That’s not what I mean. Like when the test is right but the test is wrong?”
“Mom?” Max looked worried.
I waved him off. “I’m not addled. I just don’t know the medical terminology. Like when you have enough of the virus to test positive but you’re not sick.”
“Asymptomatic,” Dr. Kim supplied.
I shook my head. “Like when you’re not even contagious. Maybe I’m technically testing positive for pregnancy, but surely my body’s not making a baby.”
Dr. Kim brightened. “That’s exactly how I think we should be looking at this.
Of course you’re not making a baby. This pregnancy will terminate itself quickly—within days, I expect.
I’m surprised, obviously, that it’s occurred at all, but even for women of …
let’s call it traditional reproductive age, even for patients who are trying to get pregnant, it’s unusual to catch a pregnancy this early.
At six weeks, most people have no inkling.
You’re only here because you felt unwell.
You’re right not to think of this as a viable pregnancy. It’s not, and it won’t be.”
“Just a fluke, one of those weird things …” Alice was saying, though to whom wasn’t clear. Herself maybe.
“Over before we know it …” Darcy was adding, to the same no one.
Max was moving his lips too, but nothing was coming out.
“And beyond not being a viable pregnancy,” Dr. Kim continued, “it’s also very good news.
We thought this could be the first signs of something like Alzheimer’s.
We thought some kind of cancer recurrence that hadn’t shown up on the scans yet.
We thought encephalitis, delirium, TIA, hypoxia.
It’s none of these. It’s nothing incurable or untreatable.
Aside from the how and who of it, there’s nothing terribly mysterious here. This is good news.”
Hard as it is to believe—because of how hard it was to believe—my first reaction was relief.
Maybe Alice wanted to litigate reality. Maybe Darcy wanted to put her fingers in her ears rather than consider her mother as a sexually active human being.
Maybe Max needed a little bit of sugar and a new shirt.
But they were uncomfortable because they were young.
They expected ailments to have clear causes and clear paths forward.
Darcy went to the ER last year with stomach pain.
They investigated and determined she had gallstones.
They took out her gallbladder, and then she was fine.
Or, if you like, Max seemed down last summer.
We (mostly Alice) investigated and determined he had broken up with his boyfriend.
We gave him wine, gentle ribbing, and time and space for his heart to mend.
Now he’s back on a dating app I don’t understand, which he seems to be enjoying very much.
But the older you get, the less clear the path at every point.
Even your symptoms gray. Does it hurt more after eating or only after eating in the Vista View dining room or only because it’s the end of the day?
Is the pain caused by whatever you’ve tested positive for or by something for which they haven’t thought to run a test or by something for which no test exists?
Do your pains require treatment or acceptance?
Do answers help or just lead to more questions?
As you age, you need doctors more and more, and they’re able to tell you less and less.
So to have an answer, even an absurd one, was good news.
Shit happened, now more than ever. I was a medical miracle.
Fine. It would make a good story to tell over dinner.
(Good stories were a sort of cigarettes-in-prison currency at Vista View, in the first place because our lives were quiet now and our grandchildren fascinating only to ourselves.
And in the second place because good stories over dinner distracted from the eating of it.) When Moth heard this news, he would laugh in wonder.
And I loved his laugh, and I loved his wonder.
But best of all, the most miraculous part of the miracle was that it required no intervention. No surgery, no drug regimen with untold side effects, no some-patients-find-relief approaches that might or might not work. This one would take care of itself.
“At the moment,” said Dr. Kim, “what I can best prescribe is what doctors so often prescribe, which is time, and in this case not very much of it. I am confident this problem will resolve on its own and quickly. Go home. Rest. Watch a movie or take a long bath. I know it’s hard, but try to think about other things.
And call me when something changes. There’s likely to be some blood and cramping, but both should be relatively minor, especially since it’s so early, like a heavy and uncomfortable period. ”
I tried but found I couldn’t quite remember the feeling.
“However,” she went on, “given your age and the unusual nature of this situation, we’ll want to monitor you closely when the time comes.
So keep me posted. In the meantime, I’m going to look into this some more.
It’s an interesting case, certainly. I’d like to run some more tests while you’re here.
I’m going to talk to some colleagues, see if any of them has ever heard of anything remotely like this before. And then I’ll see you soon.”
No one had ever heard of anything remotely like this before.
Soon came and went, and I was still pregnant.