PART 1 — DON’T ANSWER IT
I booked that appointment from a library computer.
Not because I suspected anything. Because by then I did not book anything from my own phone, and I had not for about two years, and I could no longer remember deciding that.
My husband is Roland Vessey and he is an obstetrician at Marchcroft General.
For four years he had called every rule protection.
The driver was protection. Not seeing my mother for eleven months was protection, because she upset me and stress is bad for a pregnancy. The shared calendar was protection. My own doctor being a colleague of his at his own hospital was, obviously, protection.
I was thirty-two and seven months pregnant and I had been dizzy since about the fourth month and so tired that I had fallen asleep sitting up on a Tuesday afternoon in the good chair.
He had run bloods himself. Twice. Both came back, he told me, unremarkable.
So on a Thursday in the September I told him I was going to church with the driver at nine, and at twenty past nine I got out of that car at the corner and walked three blocks to the Aldergrove Women’s Clinic, which is not affiliated with Marchcroft and which he had never once mentioned.
Dr. Halima Osei is forty-seven and she has a way of asking questions that does not sound like anything.
She did the ordinary ones. Then, still looking at her screen, she said:
“And the dizziness — is it worse after the injections?”
I said, “What injections?”
She looked up.
That is the moment. Everything in my life is on one side or the other of that look.
She did not say anything for about two seconds. Then she said, “Let’s get you on the table,” in exactly the same voice.
She ran the probe for a long time. Longer than anybody ever had. She took images and she did not talk while she did it, and then she reached over and dimmed the screen so I could not see it.
