I sat with my hands folded on my lap for a moment, and chewed this over. He looked up and around the office, his dark eyes landing on whatever took his attention away from me. He had other patients. I should leave.
I'll tell you what, I thought, tell him you're ill. Tell him you'll come back soon. Tell him you'll eat healthily and return in a few months and then he won't have to wait until you think of a question to ask and you'll have hundreds of days to come up with a perfectly worded query. It was pretty final. There's your problem.
He leaned forward. "There are options. Lots of options."
Well, how frustrating. Why couldn't there just be one option so that I didn't have to make another decision. One route, one path, and you have to take it or else you have to go backwards, and we all know that you can't actually go backwards, can you? Not when something like this has happened. Going backwards is impossible, because then it means erasing all the knowledge that's just been piled upon me. And although I'd have liked to, it was probably more effort than it was worth.
"I don't think it matters for the moment." I said. I had gone in a twenty year old and left a forty year old with more wisdom than I felt as though I had ever had.
"Do you want children?" he asked.
"Do I... want children?" I asked.
"Yes. Do you want to have babies?" he asked, again.
"You're asking me that, now?" I asked. Too much asking. Twenty years old and forced to answer a question I thought wouldn't come my way until I was thirty five and married. Yes I wanted children. In my head I had already picked out four names for the babies I would have with the man I didn't yet know. Noah, Agnes, Edie and Zachary. Should I tell the doctor? Should I say: 'Well, yes, but there's your problem. I didn't think anyone would ask me that until I was ready. Today, Dr Mann, I am not ready.' Perhaps in ten years something horrible will happen, or something magical will happen and I'll change my mine. Perhaps I'll fall in love with a woman and will it matter than my engine isn't working then? Perhaps I won't ever get married at all, and I'll take quarterly sabbaticals and decide that seeing the world in all its wonder is greater than reproducing. Maybe the man I marry, or don't for that matter, won't want children. Perhaps I won't want his anyway. What if he's a monster? What if I love him but I don't want to create little versions of him?
In the time it took me to establish questions that I could indeed ask the doctor, he had printed off six colour sheets on a black and white printer, all these options on various points of grayscale, and he continued to lay them all out in front of me. After a glance, I realised he had put them in order of severity, sheet one being 'who cares?' and sheet six being 'FREEZE YOUR EGGS NOW!'.
"I don't want to choose now." I said. He looked up at me, and paused. The sheets were retreated. I kept seeing the words 'options' and 'ovaries' and 'children'. Options, ovaries, children. Options, ovaries, children. I don't know. I don't understand. I don't know.
"What do you think?" I asked him.
"Me?"
"Yes, Dr Mann, you."
"I can't make that decision for you."
"I don't want you to."
"Perhaps you should take a little time to think about your options carefully. It doesn't have to be soon, you are after all, very young."
And he was old. Greying on top and around the eyebrows, skin wrinkling around the jaw and lagging and drooping. I was not the only woman he had ever seen with this problem. I guessed he had seen hundreds, maybe tens of hundreds. Maybe I misunderstood his tone. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Perhaps this wasn't awkward at all. Too many options. To the left of my pelvis there was a pain. Faint stabbing and then it went away. It was laughing at me. Or perhaps it had a headache because it was confused. The thought made me feel nauseous. Was I going to vomit? I didn't know. I was sweating, and I always sweat before I was sick, and my mouth dried up and then suddenly there was smooth, clear saliva flowing around my tongue. Then there was adrenalin, and the bile came up, and I swallowed hard and back it went.
He had other patients. He tried to hurry me alone.
"Take some time." He said. "Book an appointment. Come back when you're ready."
"There's your problem." I said. "When will I be ready?"
I took his grey sheets and I stuffed them inside my handbag, they had fallen out of order. Mixed in with the contents, when I reached down to push them in there was brown, stringy rolling tobacco in between the pages. I scraped it out, pulled out papers and filters and smoked for five minutes. There was a man bent over the bonnet of his Vauxhall Corsa on my walk home. It had slumped half on the curb, half off, given up. An RAC van had arrived to take it away. I rubbed my stomach. The car was old.
Jessica Wragg, 22.
0 comments:
Post a Comment