Well, this is a rotten mess, is it not, my darling? Try not to worry ... It will be okay. I’m here ... I’m right here ...
Unsure how long she lay there, it was a surprise and a relief when a portly, balding doctor walked briskly through the swing doors, stethoscope dangling around his wide neck, white coat open and flapping. He reached for her chart. So preoccupied was he she genuinely wondered if he had seen her. Eventually, he looked up.
‘Right, let’s have a look at you,’ were his first words as he pulled on some rubber gloves, stretching them over his porky fingers before letting them snap on his wrists. He stared at her blood-soaked jeans. ‘We need to get these off. Nurse?’ he yelled over his shoulder. A different nurse, younger than Nurse Maddox, came into the room.
‘Yes, Dr Rudd?’
‘I can hardly examine the patient if she is fully dressed, can I?’
‘No, Dr Rudd.’ The young woman, quite flustered, rushed forward, and Lilly assisted as far as she was able, by unbuttoning her Levi’s and doing her best to ease her jeans and pants over her narrow hips. It was uncomfortable, embarrassing and awkward, lifting her bottom, resting on her elbows, as the nurse gripped the soggy, clinging denim and pulled.
Lilly’s thighs and bottom were sticky. She shivered with cold, watching as the nurse folded her jeans and placed them in a clear plastic bag that she set on a chair. The doctor produced spectacles from the top pocket of his white coat and placed them on the end of his nose. He pulled the metal stirrups that had been folded by the sides of the bed frame wide.
‘Lie back, please,’ he instructed with a certain detachment. Lilly did as she was told, and her embarrassment switched up a gearto complete mortification as he manhandled her feet and placed them into the stirrups. With her legs wide, naked from the waist down, his head disappeared out of view, and she felt the cold touch of something metal against her most delicate skin.
‘Deep breath,’ he instructed in a most matter-of-fact way. She did as he said before the sharp discomfort of something metal inside her. ‘Yes, as I thought.’ He withdrew the object, peeled the gloves from his hands and dropped them into the plastic wastebin before restoring his glasses to his pocket. ‘You are miscarrying. Do you know what that means?’
‘Yes.’ Lilly nodded, keeping her voice small. She had known what it meant when she started bleeding heavily the day before.
‘We will perform a D&C. Do you know whatthatis?’ He spoke to her as if she were stupid, which figured. How smart was she to have ended up here in this most dire of situations?
‘I don’t.’
‘Dilation and curettage, a procedure where we remove any tissue from the uterus. We’ll get you prepped.’
A procedure? Did he mean surgery? It was as questions formed on her tongue, and she gathered the courage to ask, that Dr Rudd left the room and the young nurse handed her a paper-type gown.
‘Slip out of your bra and top and put this on. They’ll wheel you down to theatre in a bit.’
‘Can I ...’ Lilly tried to sit up and pointed at her feet.
‘Oh, yes! Yes, of course!’ The young nurse eased her feet from the stirrups and Lilly coiled into a ball, trying to order her thoughts. She felt sad, scared, but also strangely hollow, empty, which was ironic, as she was far from empty. If she had been empty, there would be no need for the procedure that the doctor had made sound most ordinary. Lilly wondered when she might be able to go home, knowing her dad would only worry. Her dad who thought she was at the seaside, having a lovely time. It was almost morethan she could comprehend, the deceit, the procedure, the fact that Wilkie had left her,marriedWilkie.
After the nurse had left, Lilly sobbed into the thin pillow, realising the sister was wrong on at least one count, her assumption that tears did not help at all, as Lilly found them most cathartic.
It was a couple of hours later that two porters came and transferred her to a trolley before wheeling her along the corridors at what felt like speed. Pulling the blue blanket they had placed on her up to her chin, she stared up at the bright strip lights overhead. The occasional bump in the linoleum jolted her. All the while she was diverted by the whistling porters. She liked it, the whistling. It reminded her of her dad, who, if he wasn’t playing music, was whistling something.
The operating theatre smelled of bleach and chemicals, causing the instant rise of nausea in her throat.
‘Age?’
The question was asked over her head by a man in a blue mask that covered his mouth and nose and who wore a hat made out of J Cloth. A woman – a nurse, she assumed – gave the answers.
‘Eighteen.’
‘Weight?’
‘Nine stone two.’
‘Splendid!’ the man shouted, and this, too, made her jolt. ‘Here we are, Mrs Cooper ...’
Miss. It’s Miss.She looked up at him.
‘Dr Rudd is ready for you now. You will feel a sharp scratch on the back of your hand and, before you know it, you’ll be waking up in recovery. Right.’ He clapped, and she jolted for the third time. ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’ His jollity gave the whole experience a nightmarish quality.
I’m sorry ... I am so sorry ... We were not meant to be, you and I ...
And then the lights faded, and the voice echoed, ‘That’s a good girl. Count backwards from ten for me ...’
