Listen to the author reading this story:
I cry for you. I cry on a bed with my legs splayed in stirrups and the tears dribble into the curls in my ears.
Everywhere is white; walls, sheets, ceilings, lights, masks. This will hurt a bit, they say. Like a smear, but worse, they say. I dig my fingernails into my palms, glad they are long, glad they will leave moon marks.
As I’m wheeled out everything is blurred, like a windscreen in a storm.
Now we wait, they say. We wait.
I recline on a chair too comfortable for something like this, too kind for doing something so fucking unkind. Things contort and cramp. Things shudder and stretch. I know it’s you moving, moving further into me hoping you can stay.
The woman beside me vomits, violent and continuous. She cries between retches. She squirms and curses. She says isn’t it awful as she grips her bowl and I clasp my belly wondering if there was another way.
I dilate but it’s not like before. Like the times when I knew my body was ready for a baby to come out. There are rods inside, pushed and shoved into me like herbs in a Sunday roast. Drugs leak and stretch and do what they are meant to do.
Four hours. That’s how long I recline and you have to wait in there. And I know you’re being pulled away, your walls crumbling. I tell you I’m sorry every minute of each one of those four hours and somehow hope it helps.
I’m brought back into the theatre, back on the bed reciting my name, my date of birth. I’m connected to pads and tubes and monitors and oxygen and feel the cold gush of anaesthetic. Goodbye, I say. All I can see is white.
Clodagh O’Brien is…