Doctor Dearest

I don’t bore Lindsey with these inane details. They’re irrelevant because I’m not pregnant. After the nausea dies down, I give Lindsey an earful. I can’t believe she’d even suggest such a thing. It’s reckless! It’s obvious why she came to that conclusion—she spends her days in obstetrics so she has babies on the brain, whereas I would have never in a million years come up with such a ludicrous diagnosis.

“I’m not pregnant. It’s a stomach bug. A nausea thing. Whatever. I’m fine. Are we done here?”

She’s watching me with an indulgent smile.

“Come over to my office and let’s do a dipstick,” she says, all cool and calm. “I don’t have another patient until 2:00 PM.”

“Absolutely not.”

I tug open the door and all but sprint out into the hall.

Screw her. Screw her big time.

How am I supposed to focus on work now? How could I possibly think about anything other than pregnancy and gestating women and newborn babies and—okay, I know what’s happening here. It’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as the frequency illusion. It’s a syndrome in which a concept or obscure piece of information you just learned about starts cropping up everywhere. Here’s an example: you decide you want to buy a white Jeep. You hop in your car to drive somewhere and you notice a dozen white Jeeps on the way. Suddenly, you can’t escape them. Did a Jeep convention just roll into town? Possibly, but no. It’s all thanks to the phenomenon, and it’s happening to me right now.

After I leave the call room, I see what has to be a thousand pregnant women in the hospital. A nurse passes me in the hall and her big round belly is like a blinking neon sign. I ride the elevator with a man beaming ear to ear as he holds an It’s a boy balloon. What the hell? I turn down a different hall than usual so I can take a unique route back to the BICU, and bam, there I am, standing in front of the freaking nursery!

I nearly scream in horror at all the adorable freshly born babies.

They’re horrifying, all swaddled up in their snuggly duck blankets and little striped hospital-issued hats. There’s not an ugly one in the bunch, which is mildly distressing. One gremlin would surely dissuade me from pressing my hand to the glass and smiling down at them while my heart does a Grinch-style expansion in my chest. Children were not part of my future. I thought I was coming to terms with that. Now, here I am, potentially pregnant, losing my mind in front of a nursery window, tapping the glass and cooing along with the little baby girl closest to me until one of the nurses gives me side-eye and I straighten quickly, pretending I was just cleaning a smudge off the glass.It’s surprisingly easy to avoid Connor the rest of the afternoon. I just sort of walk-run from one task to the next. Post-op checks for my two cases from this morning, done. Afternoon rounds, done. Quick lecture about hypermetabolism in burn patients delivered to a group of medical students, done. A handful of outpatient appointments, done. Goodbye, hospital!

I grab my stuff and haul ass out of the building around 6:30 PM.

A few steps into my walk home I realize I’m covering my stomach with my bag as if trying to protect it. From what? Traffic noise?

I release a shaky laugh (that likely looks crazed to anyone brushing past me on the sidewalk) and finish my walk home like I normally do: without caring about or focusing on my womb.

Connor is in the kitchen at the townhouse when I close the door and hang up my bag. He’s rifling through a brown paper bag on the counter. From inside, he tugs out a container of warm soup and some fluffy bread.

He smiles at me when he sees me stroll in. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

I act like I have no idea what he’s talking about. “What? Oh. Yeah, no—I’m way better now.”

Then I spot the anti-nausea remedies on the counter beside the brown bag: ginger and peppermint lozenges sitting beside a small bottle of vitamin B6.

He follows my gaze. “I picked some stuff up just in case.”

I stand absolutely silent, trying to beat back the rush of emotions hitting me full force. Is he trying to kill me with his kindness?

He clears his throat and turns around to grab two bowls from the kitchen cabinet so he can dole out our soup.

“Hungry?” he asks.

I nod mutely.

I’m not really, but if I deny food, he’ll think something is still wrong with me.

Right now, it feels absolutely imperative to continue on with Connor as if nothing has changed. Guilt tries to persuade me that it’s unethical to keep him in the dark, but it also feels slightly immature and selfish to rock his world with a potential pregnancy scare given that I have no solid data to back it up. Nausea is a symptom caused by a thousand different viruses and syndromes. It feels reckless to immediately jump to the conclusion that I have a growing fetus inside me. It would cause a lot of undue drama if I told Connor about it now and then I turned out to be wrong.