Tuk-tuks zoom past her, hooting as they go. The sky darkens. Kirsten shields her eyes and looks up to see a drone-swarm fly overhead. She doesn’t like them, doesn’t like the shadow they cast. Hates the fact that they have cameras. They make her feel like she is living in someone’s bleak futuristic imaginings. Already she feels as if she is being watched, always has. She shakes her brain, tries to focus on the task ahead. The time had come.
Carpe diem, and all of that.
For as long as she could remember, she had always hated doctors. And hospitals, but doesn’t everyone? She abhors it when someone says they hate hospitals. That’s like saying you hate stepping in dog shit, or wetting your pants in public. Obvious. Or in local slang, obvi-ass: the stating of which usually just shows how little you know.
Yuck, she thinks, I’m just grouchy. Nervous.
She notices that her underarms are damp and slows her pace. Thinks about the ice-cream, the Piña Colada.
Besides, how can she say she hates doctors when she’s practically married to one? Just one example of how conflicted (read: crap) her personality is. Anyway, Marmalade is different. He’s a paediatric cardiologist and goes around fixing kids’ hearts, like some kind of golden-haired scalpel-bearing angel. And it’s not like he has ever been her doctor. Never going to happen (No, not even then).
inVitro looms before her. It’s bigger than she expected. The pictures on the website made it look less intimidating. The architecture is beautiful, inspired by Petri: the disc-shaped building is built out of attenuated glass (Crystal Whisper), strangely transparent and reflective at the same time: as if the architect meant for it to look invisible.
She slows down, wipes her clammy hands on her jeans, wonders if she really wants to go ahead with this. All the electronic poster-projectors near her apartment have been advertising this place; it seems to be the best of the hundreds of fertility clinics around. The spambots hack your online social status, and as soon as they see you are in a relationship they bombard you with wedding messages. As if anyone gets married anymore. After a while they give up on you getting married and start with the fertility and baby spiel. A bit like parents.
Or, Kirsten sniffs, how parents used to be. Her pain is still jagged.
There are two heavily armed guards at the entrance. They look more like American militants than security: top of the range automatic rifles, Kevlarskin, tortoise-shell-shaped helmets that make them sweat. They don’t take their eyes off the pedestrians walking past. Seeing-eye cameras swivel in Kirsten’s direction and blink at her. A bit further in, a lesser-armed female guard scans Kirsten for anything suspicious, then points out where to go.
The reception area of inVitro is plush but anaemic: decorated in the kind of soulless way a five-star hotel is. The walls are covered in vanilla wallpaper that feels flat, compact, and tastes dry, but slightly sweet, like a wafer. Kirsten hears the whisper of air sanitiser, sees empty smiles at the desk.
Understandably, fertility is big business nowadays. The waiting room is packed; this place must be printing money. A woman, camouflaged in beige, hands her a stylus and a glass tablet with a form to fill out. She looks for an empty seat in the crowded room. Mainly couples: some scrubbed-looking and hopeful, some carrying the stale air of defeat, a few pinkly embarrassed, although Kirsten sees no reason to be. As difficult as it is, it’s generally accepted that everyone in South Africa is IUPO nowadays: Infertile Until Proven Otherwise. At least Kirsten, and the other people in the room, had the money for treatment – most aren’t that lucky, hence the huge skew in the latest population stats.
Some of the patients are wearing SuperBug masks. Kirsten supposed she should be wearing hers too but reckoned you had to draw a line somewhere. If she had to choose between wearing a mask over her face every day for the rest of her life or getting sick she’d rather take her chances with The Bug.
Besides, the government-issue masks were revolting to look at. Perhaps if she could get hold of one of the designer masks… she is about to sit next to a resigned-looking pair – two men who look nice enough, if not a little beaten down – when her name is called.
She is led by a woman in scrubs through a few adjoining corridors that open on to another waiting room, which she skips, and finally to the doctors’ offices. The gold nameplate on the half-ajar door is blank. The nurse knocks and they enter. Now or never, Kirsten thinks, taking a deep breath.
The doctor takes the electronic clipboard, dismisses the nurse, and looks with interest at Kirsten over the top of his black-rimmed glasses.
‘Miss Lovell?’
His eyes are the palest blue (Quinine) (Arctic Icecaps). They drill through her, make her feel intensely uncomfortable.
‘I’m Doctor Van der Heever.’
Kirsten’s nerves stretch her smile wide. She feels like running. He motions for her to take a seat and ignores her for the next two minutes while he scans her form, pinching and paging the screen. She focuses on her breathing and casts her eyes around: one side of the office is floor-to-ceiling glass, with an uninspiring view of ChinaCity/Sandton.
Glinting certificates take up most of the opposite wall. She wonders what kind of specialist feels the need to wallpaper half of his office with certificates. What he’s trying to make up for.
‘So… you’ve been trying for around three years?’
Kirsten jumps to attention.
‘Three years. Yes.’
He grunts acknowledgement, keeps paging.
‘You have children?’ she blurts out, without really meaning to. She thinks he’ll say no, that he’s married to his job. There are no framed prints of family on his desk.
He looks up at her, stares. Moistens his lips.
‘I do,’ he says. ‘A boy. Well, he used to be a boy. A grown man, now. A doctor.’
Yuck, she thinks. ‘You must be proud.’
He grunts, and resumes studying the tablet. On the last leaf there is something that catches his interest.
‘You’re synaesthetic?’ he asks, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘It’s less interesting than it sounds.’ It was her standard line.
‘Indeed,’ he says.
‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with… my difficulty to…’
Finding the words was tricky. Conceive? My fertility issues? My infertility? They didn’t smell/feel/taste right.
‘Of course not. It’s just unusual. These things… interest me. Being a medical man. Are you an associative or a projector?’
‘Projector.’
‘Hmm,’ he murmurs. She can tell he wants her to go on. She doesn’t.
He blinks at her; his eyes magnified by his glasses.
‘Your family’s medical history—’
‘It’s patchy. I’m working on getting more information. I’m actually—’
‘No matter,’ he says, ‘we’ll do the standard primary diagnostic tests on you and your partner.’
The mention of tests sock Kirsten in the stomach. It was true that she didn’t have many memories of her early childhood, but what she does remember is having test after test, doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist, x-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, urine tests, blood tests. Breathing in radioactive gas to trace the blood flow to her brain, a hot flush of an iodine IV to examine her renal system.
It made her hate her condition. Only when she was free of the weekly appointments did she finally start to accept the way she was: regard it as a gift instead of a disability. Now it seems to her like it’s starting all over again and she feels heavy with foreboding.
‘What kind of tests?’ she asks, trying to keep her voice even.