The Fruit of the Tree by Jacquelynn Luben

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    Thus I was incapacitated by my immovable right hand and my inefficient left hand, and forbidden even to sit up, so that at mealtimes a young nurse had to feed me in a semi-supine position. There is a limit to the amount of cosseting that even I find acceptable.
    I put up a bit of a fight when it came to bedpans, and they were kind enough to bring me a commode, for which little dignity I was most grateful.
    I had little discomfort and I refused a sleeping pill, but when night fell, I was restless; my stomach seemed to be heaving about. A nurse bent over my bed.
    ‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked.
    ‘Perhaps I should have taken a pill,’ I replied. Then I confided: ‘I keep thinking I can feel the baby moving.’
    She seemed to shudder.
    ‘Oh, how awful,’ she said. She didn’t seem to understand.
    ‘Perhaps the baby’s all right,’ I explained to her. ‘Please tell someone, so they won’t take it away.’
    She went away; I heard her talking to another woman. I heard the reply echoing back from the quiet corridor.
    ‘Absolute rubbish! She can’t feel the baby yet.’
    I wanted to explain to them that perhaps my dates were wrong. Perhaps I was 16 weeks pregnant, not 12 weeks.
    The young nurse came back with a sleeping pill, and I settled down to sleep.
    In the course of the next couple of days I acquired a new neighbour, a young woman who was also in danger of miscarrying for the second time, and who, like me, had one child already.
    We compared notes and it was amazing to discover that we had experienced the same emotions—the same feelings of guilt, of inadequacy as well as anger and sorrow. Marooned, as we were in our beds, we had nothing to do but rest and talk, and for those few days, we became as sisters in the sharing of our mutual experience.
    One morning the consultant arrived, with his respectful entourage in attendance. Unsmiling, he conducted his examination. Immediately afterwards, he informed his staff he would carry out a ‘D. & C.’
    Flabbergasted, I protested stutteringly and inarticulately.
    ‘But what about the pregnancy tests—they were positive. I felt the baby moving!’
    ‘I am sure the foetus has broken up during the haemorrhage,’ he replied unemotionally.
    As a parting shot, he ordered: ‘She’s very constipated; give her an enema before the operation.’
    They left me in the curtained off cubicle. I was glad they had not opened the curtains, because now that I was alone, the tears poured from me. Why had they allowed me to believe the baby might be saved? Why had they given me extra care for two days only now to rob me of my child? Why had they not taken it away the first moment I entered the hospital?
    My tears spent, I waited patiently while a middle-aged nurse fumblingly tried to administer an enema. She had to get help from some other nurses, and after their eventual success, I was reduced to an exhausted, limp rag. I half wondered if the doctor had only specified it to knock all the fight out of me, and indeed with the administration of the injection, I lay there unresisting and uncaring, as I was wheeled to the operating theatre.
    The familiar tableau of green-overalled, masked figures met my eyes.
    From a long way away, a voice asked, ‘Have you any children?’
    ‘Yes, a boy of two.’
    The gap was widening; I had wanted a two-year gap between my children, and now I would have to wait another year.
    I drifted away into sleep.
    When I awoke, I found I was no longer attached to the drip and I was allowed to sit up for the first time. As soon as the haziness of anaesthesia had left me, I conducted an animated conversation with my neighbour, which went on into the night. From the far corner of the ward came the shout: ‘Aren’t you two ever going to get to sleep?’ and I was reminded that the bulk of my fellows in the ward were recovering from major surgery, whilst I was practically fit. The removal of my potential blood supply served to underline my now even less