Emergency: Wife Lost and Found by Carol Marinelli Page B

from?’
    ‘Er, endometriosis.’
    ‘Which is relevant to her treatment because?’
    She felt sorry for the student, more sorry for herself, but, still, she felt sorry for him as his brain frantically tried to scramble as to how an ectopic pregnancy ten years ago and endometriosis now might be relevant to the injuries she had sustained in the accident.
    ‘Dr McClelland is scheduled to have a hysterectomy early in the new year,’ the consultant pushed. ‘Why would a thirty-two-year-old woman with no children consider such a radical procedure?’
    ‘For the pain?’ the student answered, and let out a relieved breath when Mr Braun nodded. A long discussion ensued as to how hard it had been to get her pain under control when she’d first come out of ICU. She was on particularly strong pain killers now because her tolerance was high as a result of the strong painkillers she had to take to get through her normal life.
    ‘Thank you.’ The student gave the familiar apologetic smile as the team drifted out of the room and Lorna gave a rather wobbly one back. She tried not to feel like a thirty-two-year-old childless woman who was electing for a radical procedure. She tried not to think that though on paper she was childless, there had once been a baby, a little heartbeat on the screen, that had meant the world to her—had meant the world to James too.
    She could remember the excitement of going for her antenatal appointment. Newly married, she had alsobeen new to London, having transferred her studies. She had just squeezed onto the full list of the obstetrician at the new teaching hospital, where James had been working and she studying. Pregnancy had suited her. For the first time in her life she’d had if not cleavage then definitely a bust, and her hair had been the shiniest it had ever been. It had even made the morning, noon and night sickness bearable, and there had been this sense of freedom too—away from her parents, married to James, life had seemed pretty much perfect.
    Until the registrar had examined her.
    Lorna knew she’d been concerned. One minute they had been chatting away about how Lorna was settling into her new medical school, how she would combine finishing off her studies with a new baby, and then as the registrar had probed her stomach, a long silence had fallen.
    ‘I’ll just get Mr Arnold in to have a feel.’
    Lorna lay there, trying not to panic, trying to tell herself that everything was okay, only she knew that it wasn’t. Still, there would be no quick answer. Mr Arnold was in Theatre and the previously chatty registrar was now rather more aloof, filling in forms at her large desk and ringing the ultrasound department.
    ‘We’ll take some blood and then I want you to go down and have an ultrasound.’
    ‘Is there something wrong?’
    ‘Your uterus isn’t the size I’d expect.’ She gave a poor attempt at a reassuring smile. ‘Let’s just get the ultrasound.’
    Lorna rang James at that point. She was sitting in the corridor, drinking a litre of water as instructed to pushup her uterus when he arrived. She could tell he was worried and trying not to show it. He asked her a few times what exactly the registrar had said and was a touch on edge at her lack of answers.
    ‘I know I’m pregnant.’ She was desperate to go to the loo now, and angry with the doctor for putting them through all this, because she knew that she was. Morning sickness was a good sign of hormone levels according to her textbook and her breasts had almost doubled in size this week alone. ‘I was sick this morning,’ Lorna said defiantly. She stood when the radiologist called her name.
    Kind, polite but business like she asked Lorna to lie down and tucked paper sheets into the top of her panties, poured warm gel over her abdomen. James squeezed Lorna’s hand a fraction tighter as the probe moved over and over her stomach. Then there it was, a moment of relief as she heard the sound of her baby, its heart