“I see you’ve already had your blood taken?” she questions and I nod, my fingers drifting on the small bandage in the crook of my arm.
“I don’t know why it was necessary.” I didn’t ask the nurse when she told me. I was too busy talking to Bethany who looked like she wanted to pry, but didn’t.
“So, I had a look at your charts,” she begins as she’s closing the door and before I’ve even had a moment to sit.
“Yes, I know we’re getting more tests done today concerning my heart condition and I--” I try to speak confidently, remembering that I am a nurse and a grown woman. I can handle this. Before my ass even hits the exam table, she cuts me off.
“I can tell you right now that I can make a firm diagnosis with what we have. More tests will only tell me if your condition has gotten worse in the last week, and quite frankly, I don’t see how it can get much worse.”
All the blood in my body seems to go to my toes. It makes them heavy and numb while my body turns cold. As I swallow, my fingers grip the edge of the exam table and the white paper crinkles under me.
“I see.” It’s all I can say. I suppose sometimes when you get a second opinion, the doctor can be blunt if it’s the same as the first. Even as I try to embrace it and somewhere deep down I already knew, I still want to deny the truth. “So, I’ll need surgery then?”
“A transplant would be best. The walls of your heart are far too thin for a repair. I’m afraid it would tear.”
“Is there another doctor—”
“I am the best heart surgeon there is on the East Coast. I’m confident I can perform a transplant. I’m also confident that there is no other doctor who would agree to attempt to repair your heart knowing very well the damage to the walls of your heart.” She takes a moment and I can hear her swallow before she rests the chart on her lap and adds, “I’m sorry to lay this all on you. I realize it can be a shock, but I assure you, the donor list is your best option.”
“If someone dies and I happen to be a match.” The reality is brutal and it picks at me, bit by bit. The chill spreads, the pain sinks in deeper. I’m really dying.
With her lips pressed in a thin line, the doctor informs me, “Organ transplants happen every day. You are not the first and you won’t be the last. It’s scary and not a guarantee, but we can work on other ways to keep you healthy in the meantime.”
I don’t want to die. It’s all I can think as I sit there. It’s what I’ve been thinking since the first doctor told me. I’m not ready to die. I just got Seth back. And now all of this?
“One thing we need to discuss…” She pauses to clear her throat then continues, “You are high on the list due to the severity of your condition, and how likely you are to accept a donor heart given the rest of your health. However, if a viable heart is selected in the next few months, you have to know there’s a risk to your pregnancy.”
Pregnancy? My head spins at the word.
The doctor continues speaking even though I’m stuck on one word. She’s talking about term and risks and I don’t understand.
“I would know. I would know if I were pregnant.” I can’t remember my last period but I’m on the shot. I’m not at all pregnant. She has it wrong. My head is dizzy trying to process what she’s saying.
“I’m not pregnant.” My statement comes out weaker than it sounded in my head.
Pursing her lips, the doctor picks the chart back up from her lap, flipping over a page, and then she looks back up at me. “Blood was taken at your most recent visit. The hormone levels were indicative of pregnancy. You are in fact pregnant, Miss Roth.”
I can’t breathe. “No, I’m on birth control. I’m not...” My head spins. “When did I last… My gynecologist administers them. I’m on the shot.” I don’t have words.
“Looking at your history, you missed your last appointment for the shot with Dr. Gaffner. You never rescheduled.” Closing the chart, the doctor looks up at me with nothing but an expectant, professional look.
I imagine I look like I’m going to pass out to her. Because that’s exactly how I feel.
I’m pregnant? My hand slips to my stomach, smoothing over my belly. I have a little extra weight on me, but I thought that was only because of stress. I haven’t been working out in weeks and…
Oh my God, I’m pregnant. My eyes widen and all I see is a doctor who’d rather be anywhere else staring back at me.
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” I tell her with my bottom lip quivering. “I’m having a baby,” I say out loud and somehow that makes it all the more real.
“There are risks,” she informs me, as if breaking the little bit of a happy bubble I’m in. “I’d like to discuss your options for the pregnancy.”
I never imagined I’d be a mother. How could I know how to be one when my own left me the first chance she got?
As the doctor rattles off statistics and possibilities, I ignore everything she has to say. I only have a year but that’s enough time for a baby. Before I left I’d make sure that baby would know it’s because I had no choice.
I cut off the doctor, unable to focus on anything she’s saying. “I can’t decide anything right now, I’m sorry. Would you give me some time?” I’m polite and the doctor although hesitant, complies, leaving me for a moment to simply wrap my head around the fact that I’m pregnant.
Seth is going to be a father. That’s even more shocking than me being a mother.
What would he say? What will he do?
I lied. That promise I made when I walked in here is bullshit. I can’t tell Seth. I can’t tell Seth any of this.
It’s been so long since I’ve been inside a church. I sure as hell won’t be going today either. It’s not too cold in my car as I sit here with the heat on, staring at the stained glass windows. The moment that doctor left the room, so did I.
I got the hell out of there to think. All the white sterile walls and carts… I just couldn’t process it in there. Let alone have a conversation about whether or not to accept a heart when it’s available and risk endangering this baby. At the thought, my hand lifts from my lap to my belly.
“You sure do know how to fuck with someone,” I whisper as I watch a woman enter the church. I’m all the way on the far right side of the parking lot and it may only be six at night, but service is long over and the early evenings of autumn have made the sky turn dark.
My grandmother used to pray. She didn’t do it often, but if she lost something, she’d pray to Saint Anthony, I think it was. I’m pretty sure. She said Saint Anthony helped you find what you’d lost. I don’t even know if that’s a Catholic thing or Baptist. I simply wasn’t raised to be religious.
Yet, when times get hard, I always find myself at a church. Maybe it’s because the graves are in their backyards, or that a church can always be found near a hospital. I don’t know why but I drove here eight years ago when I first arrived on the East Coast and I couldn’t stop thinking about Cami and Seth. The two came together, different kinds of pain. If one left, the other appeared. So I came here, to this church.