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The nurse snorts and then seems to stifle it, trying to be professional. “Delivery of the baby. Your baby is growing rapidly right now, so that can lead to exhaustion, fatigue. Even fainting spells.”
I stop hearing anything after she said “baby.”
She’s saying something else when suddenly, she stops and reaches for the blood pressure cuff hanging on the wall. “Your heart rate is climbing a little quick for my liking. Are you feeling okay?”
No.
I’m not okay.
Nothing about this is okay.
This woman just told me I’m pregnant.
She wraps the cuff around my arm and blows it up until it’s uncomfortably tight. Then she releases it, her eyes pinned on the clock on the wall.
“Blood pressure is a little high, but that’s to be expected.” She pulls out the paper tracking my heart rate. “You’re in a bit of a spike right now. Can you take a few deep breaths for me, Piper?”
“Easy for you to say.” I inhale and exhale slowly. “You didn’t just find out you’re pregnant.”
Now, it’s the nurse’s turn to freeze. She turns to me, eyes wide. I have a feeling if her heart rate was being tracked, it would spike right now, too.
“What?” I ask, suddenly worried. “Am I okay? Is something else wrong?”
“You didn’t know?”
I shake my head. “I guess we didn’t use… But I was on birth control. I have been. There were a few days I missed, here or there. That happens, though. I just double up the next day and everything works out. I… shit, I don’t know.”
She closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead. “I’m so sorry, Piper. I thought you knew.”
“Are you sure? Maybe we should take another test. Those little stick tests can be wrong. Can’t they? Maybe this one is wrong.”
I try to think back to the only other time I’ve taken a pregnancy test. The booklet of information inside the box said something about false negatives or false positives. One of them is more common than the other, and now, I can’t remember which one.
“It was a blood test. They are ninety-nine percent accurate.”
Scratch that then.
The nurse drags a hand across her head, smoothing down her ponytail. “The doctor wrote the results down on your chart, but there was no date. Blood tests usually take a few days, but if it was rushed because of your—I just assumed it was a known pregnancy.”
It’s strange to be on the verge of an emotional meltdown myself and still be worried about someone else, but I reach out and touch the woman’s arm. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“Neither did you, apparently!” She manages a shaky laugh, her face flushed several shades of sheepish. “I’m so sorry. This is not how anyone should find out.”
I briefly try to imagine what the alternative would look like. Maybe I would have experienced symptoms. Nausea, cravings, heartburn. I would have run to the store for a test and then crowded myself into the cramped bathroom of wherever I was staying.
Would I have anxiously counted down the minutes before revealing the test? Or maybe I would have stared at it for every single one of the passing seconds, waiting for the lines to reveal themselves.
And when they did…what then?
Excitement? Relief?
No. Definitely not.
“Believe me,” I tell her, “there is no way discovering this news would have been easy. Maybe this was for the best. You ripped the bandage off.”
She ripped it off, alright. Tearing off all the hairs and a good bit of skin from what I thought my future would look like.
A baby.
