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“No,” I admitted quietly, staring down at my hands. “It has been eighteen years since we were intimate.”
Dr. Bennett nodded slowly, then turned the screen toward me with a serious look in her eyes.
“This is not about that,” she said softly. “I am seeing something that concerns me more.”
I leaned forward, squinting at the black and gray shapes on the ultrasound image that meant nothing to me.
“There is significant scar tissue on your uterine wall, and it is consistent with a surgical procedure that happened many years ago,” she explained carefully.
“That is not possible,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “I have never had any surgery except for a natural childbirth when my son was born.”
Her expression did not change, and that made my heart begin to pound harder.
“The imaging is very clear, and this type of scarring is usually caused by a dilation and curettage procedure,” she said, watching my reaction closely.
I felt the room tilt slightly, and my thoughts became disorganized as I tried to make sense of something that felt impossible.
“I do not remember anything like that,” I whispered. “Could it be a mistake or some kind of imaging error?”
“It is not a mistake,” she said firmly. “You should think carefully about your medical history, or you may want to ask your husband if something happened that you do not remember.”
I left the clinic in a daze, walking to the curb without fully noticing the people around me or the sound of traffic passing by.
A memory began to push through the fog, something buried deep in a part of my mind I had avoided revisiting.
Back in 2008, a week after everything fell apart, I had taken too many sleeping pills during a moment of overwhelming despair.
I remembered darkness, then waking up in a hospital bed with pain in my lower abdomen, and my husband had told me it was from the stomach pumping.
I got into a taxi with shaking hands, and the entire ride home felt like a slow descent into something I was not ready to face.
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