Pulse(5)

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I shouted.

‘You were busy,’ he said rather sheepishly. ‘And we received the results of his blood tests back from the lab.’

‘And?’ I demanded.

‘He’d taken a massive cocaine overdose. There was nothing anyone could have done to save him.’

I felt the tingling reappear in my fingertips and my right leg again began to tremble.

There must be worse places to have a full-blown panic attack than in the emergency department of a hospital. However, I was determined that none of my medical colleagues should be aware of it.

Thankfully, after the departures of the female motorcyclist to Bristol and her male companion to the operating theatre to have a broken leg set, there was a brief respite of major activity. But I knew it was only the lull before the storm. That would occur later in the evening, when the pubs and bars closed, and the half-drunk, and worse, would turn up at our door with injuries caused by anything from vicious street brawls to simply falling over in the gutter. But our job wasn’t to police the public’s drinking habits, just to patch them up and send them on their wobbly way.

The tingling migrated up through my hands and into my arms and I just about managed to tell Jeremy Cook to cover for me for a few minutes before sneaking off and locking myself into the department linen store.

The shaking that had started in my right knee gradually spread all over my body and the tingling rolled right up my arms and into my throat.

It’s OK, I said to myself as I crouched in the dark. Keep breathing. This will pass. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time.

But this was not the first occasion.

I had been a doctor now for over eighteen years and had been a specialist in emergency medicine for the past ten. Hence I believed I knew the workings and failings of the human body pretty thoroughly, but I had little idea what was happening to my own.

About a year ago, I’d been to see a gynaecologist.

‘Onset of the menopause,’ he had said with a knowing nod.

‘Surely not,’ I’d replied, emitting a hollow laugh. ‘I’m only forty.’

‘Slightly early, I’ll admit, but that’s what it is. No doubt about it. But it’s nothing to worry about. Quite normal.’

I had given him very low marks for patient sensitivity as he’d ushered me out the door of his consulting rooms. He was a busy man, he explained unapologetically. Lots of patients waiting.

Menopause.

I’d sat outside in my car and cried.

I cried for my lost youth and also for the lost future my husband and I had been planning.

We had twin boys, now aged fourteen, and we had recently been trying for another baby – maybe even the daughter that both of us so craved.

My husband, Grant, had been a soldier when I’d met him, my eye caught initially by the uniform rather than the man inside it. We’d been at a wedding where my female cousin was marrying his male one. We had spent the whole evening together, and then the night too, sans uniform.

He’d been a combat engineer and had remained in the army for the first twelve years of our marriage. Hence he’d had frequent postings to Iraq and Afghanistan when the boys were small and he’d missed out on many of the things most fathers would take for granted. He’d been on deployment, building bridges in Basra when the twins took their first steps. He’d also been away when they started school, for their nativity plays and concerts, and had been absent at too many sports days to remember.

But now Grant was back in civvy street and working nine-to-five as head of the product-research team of a local aerospace-instrument company. He’d been looking forward to helping at bath time and reading bedtime stories, to being the hands-on dad he’d been unable to be with the twins.

But I’d had trouble conceiving. I’d put it down to my age. But plenty of other women have babies after the age of forty. If Madonna and Meryl Streep could do it, why couldn’t I? That’s why I’d gone to see the gynaecologist in the first place.

Menopause.

How could it be? I wasn’t having hot flushes or night sweats. True, my periods were a bit erratic but they always had been. Everything else appeared normal. But the doctor had arranged for me to have a blood test, and he’d just given me the result.

No oestrogen.

No eggs.

No fertility.

No baby.

Menopause.

I had sat in the car and cried for more than an hour.

But here I was holed up in the linen store, twelve months down the line, and things were worse than I could possibly have imagined. Much worse. Not being able to have another baby was now the least of my problems.

Initially, Grant had taken the news pretty well, but I felt that I’d let him down badly.

I began to imagine that he would look elsewhere for a fertile woman to be the mother of his daughter and I became intensely and irrationally suspicious of his young unmarried secretary, all the more so when she started showing signs of being pregnant.

I even confronted Grant and accused him of being the father.

He just laughed and told me not to be so silly, but I couldn’t throw the thought from my head. So obsessed was I that I later went to see the secretary in the maternity wing after she’d given birth. I was convinced the child would look just like Grant.

The secretary was there with her boyfriend, a large Afro-Caribbean man called Leroy, and the baby cradled in his arms had dark skin.