May #6
His name was Doctor Day, and he was a consultant gynaecologist and sub-specialist in reproductive medicine.
I don’t know why, but I’d assumed I would be seen by a woman.
Still, once I got over my initial surprise, I realised that, for me, it didn’t make much of a difference.
He had icy blue eyes beneath eyebrows as thick and dark as Noah’s.
His face and hands, though, were more creased.
Together with his receding hairline, they told me he was closer to his sixties.
As he talked, he smoothed down his silky tie, which was already lying flat against his shirt, white with lilac stripes.
Noah would have hated it, and I wasn’t a fan either.
‘So,’ he said, after introductions had been made, ‘you’re in for a Fertility MOT.’
I curled my lip.
‘Don’t worry, you’re not the only one to take umbrage at the name.’
I was about to ask whether his patients’ displeasure at being made to feel like vehicles was a good enough reason for him to suggest the clinic considered changing it, when – without further chitchat – he started talking about the transvaginal ultrasound.
‘The scan will give us a clear image of your uterus and ovaries, as well as your antral follicle count.’
Unlike the receptionist, his signature scent was body odour. I switched from breathing through my nose to breathing through my mouth.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not overly invasive,’ he added.
Interesting : my respiratory tack had come across as trepidation.
He asked me to remove the bottom half of my clothing and lie on the bed beneath the flimsy paper sheet provided. ‘I’ll give you some privacy.’
As he slipped outside, and I slipped off my skirt and knickers, I tried to imagine that I was in for a bikini wax.
I’d pictured stirrups, but the bed – on the spongy side – was designed to separate and support your legs.
Even so, when I was in position, my modesty loosely preserved, I had to try to keep my knees from instinctively clamping together.
A couple of minutes later, Doctor Day knocked on the door and asked if I was ready.
I squeaked an affirmative.
With him was a young, unsmiling woman, whom he introduced as his assistant.
This time, I stuck to nasal breathing – even his body odour was a welcome distraction from the slim probe scanning my womb and ovaries.
As he slid it inside me, cold and wet with gel, he commented on the warm weather we’d been having.
Then he started moving it around, his eyes on the screen, counting.
Before pulling out the probe and peeling off his Latex gloves, he said my uterus was in good shape. His tone was congratulatory.
The scan only took about ten minutes, and after a short hiatus back in the waiting room, it was time for my blood test with the nurse.
Though I’d somehow managed to shrug off the thought like an unwanted layer, I’ve never been good with needles.
The few times I’d managed to get myself through the door of the donor centre to give blood over the years, I’d almost needed pinning down and felt faint for the rest of the day.
It didn’t help that, more than once, the person doing it had poked and prodded and been unable to find a vein.
‘With the blood test, we’ll measure the levels of AMH and that will give us a good indication of your ovarian reserve,’ Doctor Day had told me, stroking his tie as he’d explained that AMH – anti-müllerian hormone – is given off by growing follicles.
‘Measuring the levels of it in your blood will suggest how many eggs you have left and help us to predict how your ovaries might react to stimulation.’
‘Stimulation?’ I’d asked.
‘If you decide to go down the egg-freezing route.’
‘The egg-freezing route.’
‘Exactly.’
As the nurse readied the needle, I thought back to what Anna had said about her single friend, and looked down at my fingers, tightly interlaced in my lap.
The glint of my wedding ring.
Noah.
‘Ready?’
When I looked back up, she was brandishing a needle.
‘I think I need a minute.’
Noah and I knew from the moment he proposed that we wanted a small wedding.
Neither of us come from big families and he’d always had a tight-knit group of friends.
Although my own friendships are slightly more scattered, I was aware that, if we ended up going over a certain number, I would invite people because I felt I had to rather than because I wanted them there.
A distant second cousin. A friend of a friend who’d invited me to her own wedding.
So, we made a decision : we’d have a total of forty guests.
We got married at Hackney Town Hall. It was a cold but clear afternoon in October, the autumn leaves a mix of copper and saffron, curled and crisp on the trees.
There was a small fete on that day, something to do with raising funds for the local fire station, and the pavements were filled with people and face-painted children, and makeshift stalls selling helium balloons, homemade jams, and cakes.
I wore my mother’s going-away outfit from the eighties, a belted oversized blazer and a knee-length skirt, both a warm ivory that looked soft to the touch.
I did my own make-up and Anna helped with my hair, twirling a few strands around her fingers and loosely pinning them back behind my ears.
My mother had picked a handful of creamy white anemones and greenery from the garden in Norfolk that morning, and she and my father brought the lot to London in glass jars of water carefully cradled in the boot of the car.
While I finished getting ready, she tied a silk ribbon around my bouquet and sweetly helped Noah, who didn’t really need help but went along with it as if he did, with his buttonhole.
Moments before the service, my heart started thumping hard against my chest. Noah must have sensed a change inside me.
He dipped his head towards mine, kissed me and asked, with a smile, Need me to rub your feet warm?
In an instant, my heartbeat steadied. I had zero doubts and I said so as I interlinked my fingers with his : No cold feet here.
After some wrangling back and forth, I’d agreed to us writing our own vows on the proviso that we keep them short, and when I turned to face him and he told me, simply, that he loved me and always would, I felt the happiest I’d ever been.
A week after my initial tests I was booked in for my follow-up consultation.
By the time I got home it was growing dark outside and Noah was cooking something spicy.
As soon as I opened the door my nostrils began to tingle.
Tom was splayed across the entrance to the kitchen, and when he saw me, he started purring, the sound coming from deep within his soft white belly.
‘How was work?’ asked Noah, leaning over to kiss me mid-stir. He tasted of chilli.
I didn’t tell him I’d left early to find out if having a baby was an option for us, for me.
That this was my second visit to the clinic in the space of ten days.
That I wanted to be told it wasn’t possible.
That I wanted my confusion stamped out. That even so, there was something unsettling about seeing my womb vacant on a screen, black and white, no noise.
A snowstorm at the start of summer. I’d only ever seen pictures of wombs with babies in them – in comparison, mine looked faulty, like it was missing something.
‘Cathy?’
‘It was good, thanks. And you?’ I gave Tom a stroke, then unbuttoned my coat and folded it over the back of a chair.
On the table in a glass vase was a bunch of daffodils he must have bought, their petals open wide and buttery yellow.
Beside it, a bottle of our favourite red.
I’d discovered it at our local wine shop not long after we’d moved in ; I’d admitted to Noah that I’d chosen it because I liked the label, which was cream coloured with a classical-looking sketch of three women bathing in a fountain, and it turned out it was more than drinkable.
I turned to him and asked, ‘Are we celebrating?’
He looked at me and smiled. ‘A publisher wants to buy my book.’
‘Oh, Noah, that’s wonderful!’ I walked towards him and hugged him from behind. ‘When did you hear?’
‘My agent rang when I was walking back from the Tube.’
‘I’m so happy for you.’
He thanked me and told me he was happy, too. ‘I wouldn’t have done it without you.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that.’
‘Truly, Cathy.’
I was about to run upstairs and grab some champagne when I realised I hadn’t bought another bottle. Instead, I found the corkscrew and started opening the red. ‘Tell me about it?’
As he talked me through the ins and outs of the deal, including the editor’s suggestion of structuring the book in three parts, all I could think was : normal.
I had a normal uterus for a woman of thirty-five.
Normal ovaries. An AMH level slightly on the lower side of normal.
You might not want to wait much longer before trying to have a baby, said Doctor Day.
As he shuffled some papers into a file – my file – he added, If you’re not ready, you could consider egg freezing.
‘What do you think?’ asked Noah.
It was the question I’d been asking myself.
What did I think, now that I knew having a baby was an option?
What did I think, now that I knew, deep inside me, that I wanted to cling onto it?
To hold it tight and keep it safe. To make up for tossing it aside so easily before.
The scientific part of my brain knows there’s no such thing as karma, but in that moment, it was muted.
‘Cathy?’
I buried my face between his shoulder blades. ‘Brilliant.’
He kissed my hands.
‘Right, this is about ready. Could you just grab some cutlery and napkins?’
‘Course.’
We ate and we drank, and that night I barely slept, consumed by pattering thoughts of my body’s betrayal of both my mind and my marriage.