Confessions of a Bad Mother Read Online Free PDF Page A

I say.
    ‘Ah!’ she says, the smile widening. ‘You want to get
pregnant?’
    ‘I already am,’ I say. ‘It only took five
weeks.’
    ‘Goodness! So much for the polycystic ovaries!’
    ‘So much indeed. They told me here I probably couldn’t get
pregnant.’
    ‘Oh, what do they know? Well, you know you can’t come and
see me any more? I’m only Family Planning.’
    ‘And I’ve Planned. But I need your help. What do you do
…’ I say, ‘if you sort of do want to have a baby – but
are too scared to actually have one?’
    ‘Well …’
    ‘I’m petrified . What am I going to do?!’
    ‘Do you want to know,’ she says soothingly, ‘who all
my doctor friends go to?’
    Do I ?
    ‘Mr Silverstone. Like the racetrack. He’s The
One.’
    ‘Is it – is he – you know, really
expensive?’
    ‘NHS. Get your GP to refer you. You won’t get a free
Caesarean out of him, though.’
    ‘Never mind. I’ll save up. Thank you! How many children do
you have, by the way? I’ve never asked.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t have children,’ she says. ‘I have
cats.’ And she does that smile again.
    To celebrate our last few months of Freedom, we book a holiday in
Tobago. While I’m combing through my wardrobe for something to pose in on
the beach, Peter is doing research amongst his female acquaintance.
    ‘Hey, look, I’ve finally got a reason not to wear a bikini.
I’ve always had a wobbly tummy and now it’s OK!’
    ‘Excellent. Definitely worth getting pregnant for.’
    ‘Yeah! Isn’t it great? Look at this.’ I try to swan
across the room, but tie my sarong too tight, so that I walk like a bad
imitation of a penguin.
    ‘Marie says we have to get a Nuchal Fold Scan.’ Marie is his
deputy at work, mother of two girls.
    ‘What is that ?’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    ‘Very useful.’
    ‘Hang on, I’ve got something else here, from
Julia.’
    Julia, one of his old school friends, is about to have baby number four.
She combines immense efficiency with a kind of vague breeziness, a cross
between Joyce Grenfell and Annie Hall.
    ‘She says go to Kypros Nicolaides.’
    ‘And that would be where?’
    ‘I dunno. Wait, yes I do.’ He fiddles around with his yellow
stickies. ‘The Fetal Medicine Centre.’
    From being completely in the dark – the obstetric equivalent of a
remote tribe who’ve never seen a camera – we suddenly become
experts.
    The Nuchal Fold Scan is £80. Apparently there are two types of
test: the scary, needle-in-the tummy kind which include CVS and amniocentesis,
and the easy-peasy, blood test plus ultrasound scan, which this one is. The
blood tests have funny names: the Double Test, The Barts, the Leeds, the
Triple. And they offer odds: 1 in 1000; 1 in 200; 1 in 10.
    ‘They sound like horse races,’ says Peter. ‘What does
it all mean?’
    ‘It means your risk factor of having a Down’s syndrome
baby,’ explains the rational but friendly female doctor at the Centre.
‘We measure the fold of skin at the back of the baby’s neck;
it’s the best indicator we’ve yet found for
Down’s.’
    ‘But it’s not an absolute Yes or No?’
    ‘No, but the blood test is very accurate, and we don’t do
one without the other. You’ll know a lot more than with the NHS tests,
and far sooner.’
    ‘So we could be out of the woods, as it were, by—’
    ‘Thirteen weeks.’
    ‘What, no amnio? No potentially bad news at twenty
weeks?’
    ‘Hopefully not. If you do get a high risk factor, we can
offer you the CVS, or Chorionic Villus Sampling which, unlike the amnio, tests
the actual cells in the placenta, as opposed to the fluid.’
    ‘So if you do terminate—’
    ‘It’s much earlier.’
    ‘And therefore much less horrible. So why don’t all the
hospitals offer this?’
    ‘It’s quite specialized. You can’t just bung in a
machine and let them get on with it.’
    ‘And when can we do this?’
    ‘Eleven weeks. Obviously, we discuss it with you