No Regrets by Tabitha Webb

Author:Tabitha Webb [Webb, Tabitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Ana

Ana was lying on their small two-seater sofa. It was ideally small, so small that she could lie with her head on one arm and legs propped up at a thirty-degree angle on the other. This was not on account of any specific medical advice. It just made sense. As did the hot water bottle on her stomach. She couldn’t tell whether the cramps were stress or ‘pregnancy related’. In fewer than three weeks she would know whether the embryo had taken. The consultant had explained how a small hole had been drilled to maximise the probabilities of success. ‘Assisted hatching,’ they had called it. The hole assisted with the ‘implantation’. The language, Ana often thought, could be improved. She felt somewhere between a gardener and a poultry farmer. She sighed deeply as she considered the success of her spider plants in the window. She chose to ignore the empty pots where once geraniums had endured, at the vacant sun spot where the recently eloped cat had lain and considered its options. The sedation from the implantation was wearing off and Ana heard Rex curse again from the kitchen. He’d insisted, sweetly enough, in ‘taking care of her’, which meant reproducing, for the fifty-somethingth time, his dead mother’s sausage casserole. If only she’d insisted on a takeaway. She wasn’t sure she had the strength to fake enthusiasm for undercooked sausage in a watery tomato sauce. She really hoped he hadn’t added sweetcorn, ‘for colour,’ as he often said, but also, ‘to bulk it up so you can live off it for a couple of days’.

In maybe two weeks they’d know whether they were having a baby. So much can happen in two weeks, a fact highlighted by the speed with which all this had happened. This felt like the first time in a month that Ana had had any time to reflect. The results of Rex’s sperm test had been a disruptive shock to them both. They’d both assumed that it was Ana’s 40-year-old eggs that were the issue, so when the specialist, in roundabout language, had talked of viability and vitality and morphology (shape issues), the quantity of technical data had made their cause appear hopeless. It seemed that only in terms of volume did Rex reach reference limits. His 4 ml of hard-won ejaculate was in the second quartile. In terms of sperm count, concentration, motility and morphology, well, the less said the better, but the consultant’s face told them this was going to be difficult, and it wasn’t long before they’d signed up for an £8,000 targeted insertion of a single viable sperm into a lucky egg, rather than wait for the NHS. Yuck, Ana had thought.

Her disappointment was aggravated by the requirement to regulate her menstrual cycle and prepare her ovaries with two weeks of birth control. Ana despised the pill. It affected her physically and emotionally. She’d not taken it since her late teens, insisting it caused liver problems, mood swings and catastrophic, ankle-swelling water retention.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.