Page 26 of One Day at a Time

Now it was Orla who was stunned into some kind of frozen state on the outside, while fireworks, world-shattering explosions and horrific screams went off inside her head.

This had to be a mistake. Had to be. But… Underneath all the noise, she already knew that it wasn’t. She had a soul-crushing feeling that this was another one of those wild coincidences, like the twists of fate that had led to many of the wonderful things in her life. Only this time, the sliding doors moment wasn’t taking her anywhere good. That’s why she had what felt like an out-of-body experience, where both her brain and her heart were melting down, but somehow her voice was calm and even.

‘Kyle, do you want to tell me about Demi?’

AUGUST

13

SHEENA

Sheena followed the doctor along the corridor towards the consultation room, thinking that this woman had won the life lottery. She was obviously super smart, because she was a consultant gynaecologist in Glasgow Central, the busiest hospital in the city, but she could also be walking down a catwalk instead of an NHS hospital, because she was at least five foot ten, willowy, with huge brown eyes, perfect skin and cheekbones that you could balance a handbag on. She was like Amal Clooney, but without the Dolce and Gabbana frock.

‘Thank you so much for squeezing me in,’ Sheena said, making conversation and meaning it at the same time. Her appointment was supposed to have been in the middle of the month, but after a double bill ofMamma Miaon the night she’d moved into her new place, Chanel had gone to work like a travel agent on E-numbers the following morning, and by the afternoon, she’d landed a brilliant deal on a five-day break to Crete. Unfortunately, the trip spanned the date of her HRT appointment, so Sheena had made what she thought would be a futile call to the appointment line. Somehow, by the grace of the holyThomas Cook, patron saint of mini-breaks and flip-flops, she’d discovered that there had just been a cancellation for an appointment today, the first of August. She’d snapped it up and now here she was, ready to get on HRT, get her pep back and embrace her new life.

‘Please, have a seat,’ Dr Diallo beckoned her, her soft voice open and immediately putting Sheena at ease, a handy attribute to have considering she was about to tell this woman about her innermost thoughts and body parts.

The doctor checked her screen, clicking her mouse a few times.

‘Okay, so I see the referral from your GP here, and she’s sent you to me to discuss perimenopause and the potential for HRT.’

‘Actually, I think I’m in full menopause now because my periods stopped altogether a few months ago.’

‘Okay, well we can talk about that – we consider full menopause to be one year after your last period.’

Sheena’s heart fell. Did that mean they wouldn’t give her HRT, because she was a woman on the edge right now, feeling massively crap, and she’d done tons of research and truly felt that HRT could help her. To her absolute mortification, she felt herself begin to tear up and she had to blink furiously to head off a full-scale wail in front of this calm, lovely paragon of perfection.

‘Let me get some background information and we can take it from there,’ the doctor went on. She ran through a fairly rigorous set of questions about Sheena’s medical history and cycle. She had to climb right over the large lump in her throat when the doctor asked the inevitable: ‘Have you had any previous pregnancies?’

Sheena had kept her voice as steady as possible as she’ddelivered the facts, dates, details, then moved right on before it could have an effect on her already pendulous emotions.

As soon as Dr Diallo was satisfied that she had everything she needed from the past, she moved swiftly on to the present. ‘Okay, so tell me exactly what you’ve been experiencing…’

At which point, Sheena was getting so overwhelmed and weirdly anxious that she blurted, ‘Well, I left my husband…’ She then bit her bottom lip in the pause that followed, before offering a weak, ‘That wasn’t the kind of experiences you were asking for, was it?’

She added patience of a saint and sense of humour to Dr Diallo’s qualities, as the medical professional responded with a non-plussed, ‘Not necessarily, but I appreciate your openness.’ The sympathy in her voice and the wide smile told Sheena that this was someone who was well used to dealing with overwrought patients.

‘Okay, let me start again. So…’ And she was off, listing all her symptoms, her concerns, her hopes for treatment and her opinions about her gynaecological state, based on those two crucial bastions of information: exhaustive internet research and anecdotes from her pals of a similar age and older.

Dr Diallo listened, took notes and then rose from her chair. ‘Okay, before we talk about where we should go from here, let’s get some basics. Height, weight, blood pressure.’

Sheena did everything she was directed, before sitting back down, ready to get to the stage where she was issued a prescription for patches, gels, pills or whatever concoction of medical magnificence was going to get rid of this middle-age spread and exhaustion.

Dr Diallo wasn’t quite at that stage yet. ‘Now, can I just confirm again, the date of your last period.’

Sheena rhymed it off. She remembered it exactly, because ithad been when she and Gregor had gone to his company’s annual dance at a swanky hotel the month before their anniversary. Her periods had been irregular over the last year, so she’d been gutted that her cycle was going to potentially deprive her of a bit of wild bendy passion on the overnight stay afterwards. However, she’d discovered that she needn’t have worried because he’d fallen asleep without so much as an attempt at a fumble. It had been yet another nail in the coffin of their fumble-free marriage.

‘And can I just check if there’s any chance you could be pregnant?’

Sheena’s anxiety was momentarily relieved by a soft chuckle. ‘Indeed not. I’m forty-four…’

‘Natural conception is not impossible at forty-four,’ the doctor said breezily. ‘Unusual, but not impossible.’

‘I think it definitely would be for me. We tried to start a family for a decade in my thirties, but it just didn’t happen. I think my ovaries gave up a long time ago.’ She tried to play that off as a flippant joke, but the stress in her voice probably meant that it didn’t quite land that way. ‘Besides, it’s a long time since my husband and I – the one I left,’ she added, probably unnecessarily, ‘have been intimate, so…’ She stopped. Frowned. ‘Actually, that’s not true. There was once. About three months ago. But that was all.’

This felt totally ridiculous and embarrassing to say it out loud, but she wanted to answer the questions truthfully. Of course, it was irrelevant. She’d been experiencing perimenopausal symptoms long before that, so of course she was already in the midst of gynaecological shutdown. Ovaries closed for business. Fallopian tubes redundant. Cervix there for spectator purposes only.

Dr Diallo noted all this down and then nodded sagely. ‘Iunderstand. I think what we’ll do is ask you to take a quick pregnancy test just to rule that out, before we go any further. It’s just a formality, but we like to cover all the bases.’