“Is someone coming?”
I clutched my pregnant belly and looked around the room. Nearby, nursing students moved briskly through a crowd of emergency patients, checking vitals, calling out to each other. I knew I wasn’t their most urgent triage priority, certainly not compared to the bleeding patients on gurneys around me moaning, “Help me ... can someone please help me?”
“We’ve called OB/GYN, and they’ll be here as soon as they can,” a young nursing student promised me.
I closed my eyes and sighed. Help was on the way.
At some point – I couldn’t tell you exactly when – my hand stopped seeking out my baby bump for reassurance, and located something else instead. It was small and square and adhered discreetly to my skin beneath my maternity shirt: an oestrogen patch, oozing a steady dose of this miraculous hormone into my bloodstream.
Because I wasn’t pregnant – I was pretty much the exact opposite. I was in the relentless grip of menopause, and I was playing a pregnant woman as part of a disaster simulation at a nursing school. The bloody patients calling out for help? They were mannequins, and their pleas were being remotely broadcast through micropho...
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