|
|
Then Carrie left, and everything seemed flat, dull and featureless again.It should surely have been obvious to me that one person cannot be all and everything to another, that such enforced seclusion a deux was unhealthy and potentially more dangerous than solitude. The fact that I missed Carrie so keenly should surely have told me that we were slavishly following a convention which came into being in another age but was no longer practicable today. Instead, I persisted in believing in Tony and in the notion that monogamy could, or, at least, should make me happy.We had always vaguely intended to have children, and the need to do so (disgracefully as it now seems to me) had become pressing, to supply a reason for our marriage and our existences. A combination of factors, however, not least my excessive weight, had caused me to have polycistic ovarian syndrome, but that was something that ‘they’ could deal with. |
 |
|
|
In September, I entered the Hampshire Clinic to have the core of my ovaries burned out in a process called ovarian drilling. This was intended to release female hormones, stimulate ovulation and so make conception more likely.During the course of the operation, it was discovered that both fallopian tubes were heavily damaged by past infection and that I had so many adhesions around both of my ovaries that they were hard to find. In fact, after cutting for twenty minutes, they could not reach my left ovary at all.
The surgeon told me all this as I lay in recovery. The awareness sank into me like water crackling in dry earth.For a moment, I actually thought that a persistent earth tremor had started or that the hospital boilers were about to blow. I looked around me for confirmation in the form of general alarm or moving furniture, but everything was still.
|
 |
|
|
