I’ll Wait For You

Chapter 10

Life ground to a halt. Elinor lay in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling, the white washed walls, taking in the scent of a sterile, clean atmosphere, and the slow, pervasive nimbus of death that seemed to go along with every hospital she’d seen. There was something about it that teased into her soul and weighed it down with the gravity of all the lives that must have passed through, all the deaths that had occurred. Perhaps, in the very bed she lay in itself, someone had slept here, sighed out their last breath, and died.

The graveyard in her mind had returned in full force, festered through her dreams and transitioned them into nightmares. The soft ground that bubbled up mud and crimson, became a little more saturated than before, and a new voice joined the thin wails that broke her heart when she endured them.

They shouldn’t effect this much. They weren’t fully formed, they weren’t even living in two cases, just on their way to become living things. They don’t have voices. These voices are my own guilt, my sense of failure. Nothing more.

Her stomach, or rather, the area where the pain had exploded left nothing more than a dull throb, and the bandages and stitches pressed against her once whole skin. There would be a scar. A physical scar to join the mental ones.

Also trapped in the graveyard lay another headstone, worn by rain and cold and dark, the missile trapped in her body. The pain that would never go away. The words for the songs that should be in her head, as the band began their tour, as the album prepared itself to fly off the shelves – they would be the only words she could ever write for a while.

Images flashed to her of the last two weeks. The pain. Frightened faces of loved ones. Catrina, bawling her eyes out, telling them to save her baby daughter, whilst her father, Andrew, hugged his wife tight, and their two children – her little brothers – had been shuttled off to another friend’s house. Tina, her fingers pressed against the glass, watching her best friend be wheeled away.

Kostya, taking an emergency flight and dropping into the hospital to see her, and leave her flowers, and break down and cry, something she’d never seen him do before.

Don’t cry, she’d wanted to tell him. I’ll be alright. Of course, she wasn’t, but it made it worse to see everyone else breaking down beside her, as if they had been the ones struck with pain, had collapsed and needed to be rushed into hospital. It had been her, though, her under the operating table, her listening to what the doctor, the calm female one with the horn-rim glasses said as she had sat by Elinor – that she’d suffered from an ectopic pregnancy, one that went bad, and burst one of her fallopian tubes – and they’d dealt with the shock and stress it inflicted on her body, and removed the tube – but had noticed an issue with the other tube. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome was the word, along with ectopic pregnancy. Words that swam, alien and confusing, emerging out of obscurity like a secret war that had been raging in her body for years, undetected. Under the health insurance coverage from Elinor’s new contract, and under the desperate help of Kostya Vasilev, she got officially scanned, examined inside and out, had things shoved up her and things snipped out, and been told the things she had feared.

The empty, hollow blackness in her stomach region persisted.

The female doctor, known as Kalina Gerald, had explained, as gently and clearly as she could: “The cysts have developed along different spots in your ovaries, and whilst these are not necessarily harmful, they are responsible for excess androgen in a female body. Androgen is a type of male hormone, like testosterone. It is produced in the ovaries, so is perfectly normal. But an excess of this hormone causes cysts to form. This can offset your hormonal balance which may show in the form of struggling to lose weight, excess body hair, and difficulties in trying to become pregnant.

“It’s likely you have had this for a long time and it has gone undiagnosed. It is also likely that it may be the precursor to the miscarriages you have had, which, I suspect, may have all been failed ectopic pregnancies.”

She had said at the end then, for good measure, and a frown knitting between her brows, “The individuals who never thought to look deeper into your condition and your recurrent miscarriages should be shot. You’ve had a lucky escape.”

The only thing Elinor cared about was the issue she dreaded the most. “You… removed one of my ovaries. And the other one is covered in… cysts?”

“No,” Kalina said, matronly face stern. “You’ve already had a laparoscopy. This removed the prominent cysts forming on your remaining ovary. And the other one, as you know, has been removed.”

Elinor digested the news as best as able. “Can… can I become pregnant? Is it even possible, anymore?”

Kalina Gerald stared at her for a long time, a faint smile upon her lips. “I’m not sure. It will be difficult, but not impossible. You will need to rest and recover, and we’ll need to prescribe you some medicine to combat the excess androgen production. If you do become pregnant, you’ll need to be watched carefully as well, to make sure the issue does not happen a fifth time. I take it you’ve had irregular periods?”

Elinor nodded. She’d never thought much of it, because women did have irregular periods for a number of reasons, and people and doctors in the past had assured her it was nothing to worry about. Even Catrina thought it nothing terrible, and Catrina herself suffered irregular periods. It made Elinor wonder if she had inherited this condition from her mother – if Catrina had blithely gone through her entire life without realizing her body produced extra androgen, that it might have caused the periods to only come five times a year instead of every month.

Elinor remembered she liked the doctor’s truth, that Kalina didn’t want to fill Elinor with false hope. However, it didn’t boost her confidence to be given the reality, face to face. She had lost an ovary. She would have difficulties with pregnancy her entire life, which would only increase with age.

The window of time when she could safely start a family was dwindling, just like her dreams, and her life in a failed marriage and a job that sent her nowhere. Some cruel twist of fate had allowed her to get pregnant with Kostya, to carry his doomed seed in her for two, perhaps three months, only to have it seriously endanger her life, and halve her chances of conceiving. Four times. How is that possible?

She wanted to be discharged, so she could crawl back home, lock herself up, and contemplate the cold face of things. Emotionally, she existed at a soul crushing low, and did not know how to see the positive side of anything.