29. Emma
29
EMMA
L .A. was not kind to me. California dreaming was simply a big, horrible joke at my expense. I had such great hopes of finding a new future here. But instead, it was nothing more than one struggle after another.
I had been lied to about the job, and I had been left questioning what I was really doing at St. Cedar’s and what was really going on. I had been hired under less-than-honest circumstances, and that was starting to really get on my nerves. Even after speaking with Sylvia, who I had come to find always had that same smile on her face—she must have thought it made her look friendly, but I was starting to think it just made her look manic—I spent more time doing jobs outside my field of expertise, or what I had even been hired to do.
I was a trauma surgeon with a focus on streamlining procedures, not a generalist to be shuffled from department to department filling in gaps when other doctors weren’t available. In the grand scheme of things, this was strike one against my move to L.A.
And that was a pretty big strike, considering that within a week of purchasing my first car—the only car I had ever owned—it had been stolen.
I was second-guessing every choice I made. Even if the cops were able to find my car intact—which everybody doubted—I wasn’t sure I even wanted it back. How was I supposed to know I had bought the most stolen car? Shouldn’t the insurance company or the car salesman have said something about that? And until the police recovered the car or the insurance made up their mind, I was stuck making payments on something I didn’t even have possession of.
It was a mess, and everything was just getting messier.
The stress threw my body off schedule. Not only was I not working the job I had been promised, but I was also still relegated to taking an Uber to work, and now my skin took this as a good time to reenact being a teenager. I had zits breaking out on my chin and my period had gone rogue.
Not that I actually missed it—I wasn’t a fan of that particular biological feature of being a woman. When I was first hitting puberty as a teen, it had taken almost two years for my body to settle into a routine. Once established, that cycle had never wavered, even when I changed up my birth control. I had to be under a lot of stress to throw it off schedule. I didn’t know anyone who would take that as a good sign.
I really didn’t put much thought into my missing period—my focus was all on trying to limit the other stressors in my life—until I had to do a shift in the maternity ward. I was the hospitalist for any patient who came into labor and delivery without their own physician on call. I knew how to deliver a baby, but it felt so far out of my specialty that I spent most of the day in a bit of a mood.
Since I only had one patient at the moment, I was reviewing other patients’ records and listening to the nurses talking. It wasn’t that I wasn’t busy. I felt more like I was stuck in one of those nightmares where I had less than five minutes to cram for an exam everyone else knew was happening but I had just learned about. The only thing worse than the unexpected test dreams were the dreams of showing up to classes completely naked. Both dream meanings were indicators of extreme stress. Not only was I having those dreams, but it also felt like I was living them. Case in point, I was expected to deliver someone’s baby in the next few hours.
A woman was sent to us from the emergency department. She had presented with severe abdominal pain and cramping. She didn’t have other symptoms like vomiting and had already lost her gallbladder. To her great dismay, she was sent to us because she was pregnant and about to deliver a baby.
“I don’t understand how somebody can be pregnant and not notice,” a young nurse said to her colleagues at the nurses’ station.
“Well, not everybody has a regular period,” another nurse said.
“But what about gaining weight and the baby bump?” the younger nurse asked.
“Not everybody gains a lot of weight, and not everybody gains it in the middle,” the older nurse explained. “Not everyone develops a baby bump. It all depends on their body shape.”
“What do you mean, not everybody develops a baby bump?” I asked.
“A taller woman isn’t going to develop as much of a pregnant belly as a shorter woman might. Some women tend to put all their weight in their hips and ass. Their middle only fills out a bit. They look like they’ve gained weight and are not pregnant. And if she already has an irregular period, or depending on the kind of birth control she used, she might not realize she’s pregnant at all.”
By this time, I had picked up the woman’s chart. If she didn’t have her own obstetrician, she was technically my patient now.
“Has Dr. Moore already been called?” I asked as I read her doctor’s name.
“Yeah, she’s been called. Apparently, she’s just as surprised as the patient, who thought she was in menopause.”
The patient was in her early forties and had only gained a little weight around the same time she stopped having a period. That all made perfect sense—she thought she was menopausal, not pregnant.
“That would do it,” the older nurse said with a knowing nod.
“You mean you can get pregnant when you’re in menopause?” the younger one asked.
“That first year of menopause can be tricky. If you just think it’s menopause but aren’t certain, of course, you can get pregnant.”
That made sense to me. The patient, not realizing she wasn’t in menopause, probably hadn’t been as careful as she would have otherwise. As the two nurses discussed the nuances of unexpected, later-in-life pregnancies, I began wondering if there was any way my missed period wasn’t just from stress—but something more intense.
Such as my being unexpectedly pregnant.
This was not something I had planned for. This was not a surprise I would take kindly to. But considering how my life had been playing out recently, I could very well be pregnant.
The thought would not leave me alone all day. Being around all those pregnant women didn’t ease my mind at all and only convinced me more and more that I was knocked up. At the first opportunity, I went to a drugstore and picked up an at-home pregnancy test.
I stared at the pastel and white piece of plastic that looked like a magic marker, followed the instructions, and waited as the test developed.
A positive result.
I hummed a small sound of acceptance as the test confirmed what I already suspected. Of course I was pregnant. Nothing was easy these days.
This was definitely going to change a few things. The first being whether or not I was going to continue at this job. If I was pregnant, I wanted to be near my family. And that meant my grandmother in New York.
But if I was in New York, that also meant I had to figure out how to let Marcus know. ‘Surprise. You’re going to be a father, again.’ That was a conversation I didn’t look forward to.
The first step was to develop an exit strategy for L.A. I wasn’t sticking around. Not with this change in my life. Considering how the job I had at the hospital wasn’t the job I had agreed to, I didn’t think I would have any problems leaving—no breach of contract or anything along those lines. After all, if St. Cedar’s wanted to proceed along that line, they were the ones who went out of contractual bounds first.
Now, I just needed to figure out what my insurance company wanted to do about the car I no longer needed. I had never needed to own a car in New York before, and I wasn’t about to now. The only question left was where would I live?
Only, I realized my leasing agent hadn’t found a tenant yet. I still had my apartment.
I let out a sigh of relief. I had a place to live, and that seemed to make the rest of this not feel so overwhelming. And then I remembered James Collins had been disappointed that I quit. Maybe he would be willing to hire me back at Manhattan Memorial.
I wouldn’t know until I asked. I glanced at the time on my phone. It was too late to expect James to be in his office right now. I did quick time zone math and realized he would be back in his office before I left for work in the morning.
I set my alarm so that I could get up early and make a few calls. I needed to cancel Kathleen Jansen’s services and make contact with James at Manhattan Memorial.