“I have Mrs. Vanderwal’s labs.”
They both step out of the room, and when Dr. Leemont returns, holding the papers, she walks over to the desk and leans against it. She shifts her eyes from the papers to me, saying in a hushed voice, “You’re pregnant.”
The deflating of my lungs turns me cold in incredulity. “What did you say?”
“According to the urine and blood sample, you’re pregnant.”
Disbelief—that’s all that courses through me right now as I can’t seem to generate any other thought or feeling. I sit here and stare at the doctor for a moment when fear and confusion start to filter in.
“How?” I ask while each thump of my heart pumps bursts of anxiety through my blood. “I mean, there has to be a mistake because I can’t have kids. I can’t get pregnant.” My voice is almost unrecognizable as the words fall out of me in a trembling stagger.
Dr. Leemont hands me a tissue, and it’s then that I realize I’m crying. She takes a seat on her stool and rolls over next to me, placing her hand on my knee. “I can’t imagine the shock you must be feeling right now,” she says as I look at her, utterly confused, shaking my head. “Sometimes these things have a way of happening. Is it rare and typically unheard of without having to undergo surgery to remove the lesions? Yes.”
“But I haven’t even had a period.”
“Well, the first ovulation you must have had probably ended up being the time you got pregnant, resulting in the missed period and the absence of one since,” she explains, and then the realization that I’ve been having sex with three different men sends me into a complete panic as I go completely numb and freeze up inside.
Holy fuck! What have I gotten myself into?
“I want to be upfront with you though,” she says, her voice remaining calm and soothing, a perfect contradiction of the chaos running through my entire being right now. “Because of the lesions on your uterus, the likelihood of you carrying this baby to term might be lower. This will be a high-risk pregnancy because of that.”
Another wave of confusion hits me when her words spark a swell of sadness in me.
What the hell is wrong with me? This should make me happy, right? I can’t have a baby, so if my body naturally expels it, then problem solved. So why does the thought of that happening make me sad?
When I don’t respond, she asks, “Do you need a moment?”
“A moment?”
She gives me a nod, saying, “Yes. I’d like to go ahead and run an ultrasound to see how far along you are and get a few measurements of the baby.”
“Baby,” I whisper, repeating her foreign word.
“But if you need a moment—”
“No. I’m fine,” I say, interrupting her.
“Okay then. I’ll have my nurse call one of the ultrasound techs. She has a mobile station, so you won’t have to switch rooms.”
Dr. Leemont adjusts the table, allowing me to lie down while we wait. My heart pounds hard against my chest and the sound is all I can hear as I try to sort this all out in my head. I can’t grasp on to a single coherent thought as they all tumble into each other in a maniacal collision, aside from the one piece that remains untouched and clear as day: I’m pregnant.
The door opens and a young tech wheels in the large machine. She introduces herself, but I remain quiet as I watch her set everything up while she and Dr. Leemont go over my labs.
Once she’s set up and I lie down, she opens the front of my gown and squirts a warm blob of gel on my stomach. Pressing the wand down, she tells me, “Since we don’t know how far along you are, I’d like to see if we can get a good view of the baby externally. Normally we do an internal exam, but I’d like to try this out first.”
“Okay,” I breathe as I keep my eyes glued to the monitor screen.
She begins clicking away on her keyboard while she presses the wand firmly onto my lower abdomen, almost painfully, but then she says, “There we go,” and my heart stops. “See that?” she asks as she points to the white peanut on the screen, and as soon as she makes the slightest adjustment to the wand, she freezes the screen.
“Oh my God.”
“Let me get a couple measurements to see how far along you are,” she says, but holy shit, I can clearly see a head and a belly. Not a tiny blip you often hear about that doesn’t look like anything. I clearly see a baby: head, belly, and four tiny nubs for its arms and legs. She doesn’t even need to dissect the image for me because it’s unmistakable. Never has reality hit me so hard with a truth that’s undeniable.
“Nine weeks, five days,” she says, and then looks at me with a smile before she turns to look at her conception calendar on the monitor. “New Year’s baby, it looks like.”