That Fateful Day

It's been close to a year since my last post. Time does fly by, regardless of the existence or otherwise of fun as defined by contemporary terms. Change was the predominant theme of the last three hundred and sixty or so days. Some good, some not and some were to be forever etched in the chronicles of my memory within this short span of existence.

I've switched jobs, though I wouldn't describe this vocation that I currently hold as new. Apart from the dire need of a curriculum and structured systems, it's pretty much an amalgamation of job scopes from two of my previously held positions. My colleagues, for the most part, are nice and the clients are inspiring enough to warrant these minor inconveniences. But this is but one minute level of change among a spate of minute changes in the flow of my life. The most significant, and dare I say life altering, of these changes occurred on Monday, the 6th of February 2012. That was however not to imply that things haven't been building up to that point since the the early days of December of the previous year.

We, that is both my wife and I, had suspected that she was pregnant as early as the December 2011. The physical changes, nausea, purging of food were clear symptoms of pregnancy. Faint second lines on off the shelf pregnancy test kits she took did not help to make the situation any clearer. I for one do not quite give weight to tools which may produce false positive or false negative outcomes. In other words, I do not trust equipment that measures not the object it is meant to measure but instead measures something else that may be indicative of the existence of the object. I understand that most scientific measurement tools has yet to be elevated to the levels of the tricorder but I'm an idealist and that's that. And as if to lend weight to my argument, the supposedly more accurate blood or serum tests showed decisively negative results when she took it in the middle of January this year. And so with the symptoms persisting, we had decided to schedule an ultrasound scan to once and for all confirm or deny the existence of the next of our generation. She had picked a gynaecologist that she was comfortable with and made an appointment for that fateful Monday. I had specifically requested for a delayed reporting time to work for that Monday morning so that I may share in the experience of it all.

But as all things are on life's stage, the play doesn't always follow the script.

We had arrived outside of the gynaecologist's clinic a good hour before our appointment and delighted ourselves to some much needed breakfast. I had chosen a heavier breakfast than normal in anticipation of a long day ahead. Little did I know that this day would redefine what a long day truly meant.

The heavy breakfast

It was only around 15 minutes prior to our appointment time when we received a call from said clinic to inform us that our appointment had to be canceled due to the rise of an emergency that the doctor had to attend to. Setting our thoughts of poor client communication and management aside, we decided to call other nearby gynaecologists in the hopes of being able to secure an appointment and whilst at the same time placate our now ever tense nerves. We were able to acquire an appointment at a clinic in Ang Mo Kio albeit at a later time slot. My wife then suggested for me to go to work and for her to go to the appointment alone but I had decided against it. There was this nagging sense, a vague precognition if you will, that things would not go as smoothly as we would expect. One would even call it the start of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so I took an urgent leave from work on that day and proceeded to accompany her for the appointment.

When we arrived the clinic seemed, for all intents and purposes, normal. It wasn't until the registration process when we felt that something was not quite right. One of questions the staff was, I assumed, required to ask would be whether or not the couple would like to keep the baby, once confirmed of course. Now there are many direct, indirect, verbal and non-verbal means to ask this but the manner in which we encountered this query really threw us, well me in particular, off.

"You're not keeping it, right?"

Now whether you're like me an avid student of psychology or not, I'm fairly certain you'll be able to fathom the nature of the clinic we were in or at the very least, it's more popular services from that one line. And we should have left at that moment and sought another practitioner but that pressing need and desire to confirm my wife's pregnancy coupled with the difficulty in acquiring a short notice appointment far outweighed what we both, perhaps saw at the time, as a minor inconvenience. During our wait, there were numerous individuals of the female persuasion who were hurried into the second floor of the clinic for them to arrive moments later clutching their abdomen.

The gynae himself, when we did get our turn, did not improve our perception of him or his establishment. Although he did greet the both us with a smile, the conversation after him performing the ultrasound (which took like less than 3 minutes) were littered with phrases of "miscarriage", "complications", "poor embryo quality" and finally culminating in "abort". It would have been too easy and tempting for me to do a case study on this guy on the effects of Conditioning and Desensitization due to one's chosen profession or rather what one had chosen to do with the profession.

The clinic & gynae in question. Avoid at all cost, unless you are looking to get an abortion done.

All in all we paid close to SGD$300 for both the supposed consultation and the ultrasound scan which left the both of us worse off emotionally. It's not about the money or our time, what this Jen Shek Wei took from us, was that initial feeling of wonder and excitement that would be parents would get seeing that black speck that would soon grow into their future sons and daughters for the first time, ever. What he robbed us of was the sense and feeling of hope for a future generation to nurture and care for. He robbed us of all that was meant to be beautiful in that moment for would-be parents to be in awe of viewing their child for the first time.

Although I am sure that he provides a "necessary" service to those who might need it and probably earns quite a sum for them too. Perhaps it would be for the psychological good of this practitioner to retake the Hippocratic Oath and preferably internalize the line:

"I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug."

Took the better part of the day for me to console my wife, inclusive of a trip to our family doctor for assistance in acquiring a more emphatic gynaecologist.

At the end of it all, the only positive thing that I was able to get from that day, is this picture of my would-be child. Who knew that the tiny black speck could inspire such feelings of hope in a guy like me ...