Free The Choice by Bernadette Bohan Page A

contain his excitement – he could hardly sit still. Leaping ahead as children do, he kept exclaiming, ‘A brother! Mum, I’ll be able to show him how to play football!’ I couldn’t dampen his childish enthusiasm, but I did try to explain that because mummy had been sick things might not always go to plan. ‘Steady, son, I lost a baby once before, you know. Don’t get carried away now.’
Dear God, please don’t let me lose this baby, I prayed, please don’t take it away from us. I had to hang on to it, I had to stay well.
While my family wanted to celebrate, my doctor made an appointment for me to see the oncologist as soon as possible.
He looked up at me when I entered his surgery. Because it was an unscheduled appointment he knew that there could only be two reasons for my appearance. Either the cancer was back, or I was pregnant. Or both. He looked at the file on his desk containing the referral letter from my GP. Wordlessly he motioned me to lie on the couch. This felt totally different from my normal appointments. No friendly banter, no routine questions and answers. It was only a couple of months since he had given me, for the enth time, his ‘don’t even think of getting pregnant’ spiel. Yet I was desperate for a word of reassurance, something to make me believe it was all going to be OK. He checked me for any signs that the cancer was ‘presenting’. Nothing. ‘You’re fine.’
At the moment.
I waited for him to rail at me for my temerity in getting pregnant, but he just looked unbearably weary. He wasn’t going to tell me to get rid of the baby; he knew well enough how much I wanted it. Instead, he said brusquely but not unkindly, ‘You’re back in the system now. You’ll be in and out of here throughout your pregnancy.’
So I was a ‘cancer patient’ again. I had been doing all right – well, even – and now I wasn’t.
He put his hand on my shoulder as I rose to leave. ‘Poor Bernadette,’ he murmured.

Chapter Ten

 
‘A Little Miracle’

M y heart sank as I left the hospital. Like any woman who wants a child, I had been rejoicing in my pregnancy, despite the nagging worry. Now the oncologist had struck fear into my heart. Here I was, defiantly, stupidly pregnant, after so many warnings to put all thoughts of a baby out of my mind. I knew from his comments seven years before that his main priority would be to keep me well, and I remembered as if it was yesterday his workaday reaction to my last miscarriage. I wondered if he was hoping I would miscarry again. It would certainly make his life easier: one fewer potential cancer patient to treat.
Bernie, I said to myself, you’ve done it now. There’s no going back. This is a baby you have wanted for so long – you are risking everything for it. It dawned on me that in the eyes of the medical establishment I was being irresponsible; but for me I was obeying a compulsion stronger than sense. It may not have been a rational, sensible, thought-through choice, but it was a deep and instinctive biological and emotional need. It was a decision I had made with my heart and soul. He thought I was mad, yet I had never felt saner.
Despite this inner conviction that I was somehow doing the right thing for me, for my family and for my unborn child, I was sick with worry. My body was changing by the day, and these changes – fascinating as they had been during my previous pregnancies – now brought with them new fears. Were my breasts sore and lumpy because of the pregnancy hormones, or could I feel a new tumour in its early stages? Was the pain in my lower back normal or sinister? Was I tired because my body was working overtime to establish the pregnancy, was I exhausted from trying to look after two young children, or could this be the first sign of lymphoma returning? I fretted constantly about losing the baby, and every time I