The Free Spirit

An Answered Prayer, 1958 (Part Three)

"You're like an angel, too good to be true..."

In the early hours of the eighth of December, I woke up with lower back pains that were positively horrific. I stood to try and walk them off and felt them worsen as I moved, and I let out a cry of pain that alerted Don to my condition. "Catherine!" he cried, jumping up from our bed and running to my side. "What's happenin'? Are you all right?"

"Call an ambulance, please," I told him through tears. "There's pains in my back and they're horrific!" He quickly ran off to do just that, and I stood against the wall to try and manage my pain, just as I've had many mothers do. Suddenly, that's when it hit me - the pains had a pattern similar to labour pains. But I wasn't pregnant, or at least I didn't think I was. Midwives know when they're expecting a baby, I'd trained to recognise the signs for so long. The ride in the ambulance was all a blur to me, as was the diagnosis in the emergency room. The last thing I remembered before waking up in a hospital bed was an anesthesia mask being put over my face.

When I did finally wake up, I saw Trixie seated beside me filing her nails, her bombshell blonde hair as neat and tidy as it always had been and her lips a vibrant and shining shade of cherry red. I recall that, through the anesthetic haze I was waking up from, I thought Jean Harlow was sitting beside me, but she had been dead since 1937. Then I began to wonder if I had died and had woken up in heaven beside my childhood idol, Jean Harlow. When I finally realised that it wasn't Jean Harlow sitting beside me, I mustered the strength to speak. "Trixie?" I muttered quietly, and she quickly put aside her nail file and turned to face me with a smile.

"Hello, Catherine!" she said quietly and calmly, in true nurse fashion. "How are you feeling?"

"Numb. I can't feel anything at all," I muttered back. "What happened to me? And where am I?"

"You're in the London, Catherine, in hospital. You had to have major surgery," Trixie replied sweetly, clearly holding something back.

"What? What ward am I in?"

"You're in the post-natal ward."

"The post-natal... What are you not telling me, Trixie?" The smile faded on her face. "Where's Don?"

"He and I both thought that it would be best if I broke the news to you..."

"What news? Just tell me!"

"Catherine... it appears that you were about five or six months pregnant and you went into early labour... They gave you a caesarean because both you and baby were so poorly off." My eyes widened, as I could not believe the news I was just given. Five or six months pregnant... I had been pregnant for the last five or six months and I hadn't even known it! My monthlies had been regularly occurring, the menstrual cramps were just as bad as they had always been, I did not develop the traditional baby bump and I had barely put on a single kilogram!

"Wh...what?" I said, breathlessly. "How... how, how, how could I not have known?"

"Catherine, you know as well as I do how rare something like this is," Trixie explained to me. "We spoke to Dr. Turner and he said everything was normal for you, that there wasn't a single symptom of pregnancy. And all Don said was that you haven't been yourself for a few months now and that he'd been concerned something was wrong."

"Well, he was right, wasn't he?" I said. "Where is he, anyway?"

"Do you want to see him?"

"No!" Trixie looked slightly taken aback as I struggled to catch my breath. "He'll think I'm a fool for not knowing... How does a woman not know she's pregnant? And worst of all, how does a midwife not know she's pregnant? How can a midwife recognise the signs and symptoms of pregnancy in every woman around her but herself?"