Night Shift [h.s]

thirteen

I wasn't pregnant. I couldn't be. I think I would know if I was. I seemed to know pretty quickly when I was pregnant with Harmony, this wasn't the same.

But I had this fear growing within me that I was pregnant. I had missed a period, it was now just two days over three weeks late, I had been calculating every day, I had been making a metal note of how many days had passed, to the point where it had become almost an obsession. So much so that I would spend my days that I should be sleeping and resting my tired and aching body, looking at my calendar and trying to work out if my period really was three weeks late or maybe I was just imagining things. Maybe I had a period and forgot to track it, maybe it hadn't been that long since my last one. Maybe the stress of starting a new job and endeavouring in some sort of new rendezvous was just throwing everything off.

I was a nurse, I knew what to look out for, I knew exactly what needed to happen. I knew that if a patient had come into my care with these exact symptoms, I'd run a pregnancy test immediately. But because it was me, I was doing all I could to convince myself otherwise.

It was just tiredness, that's all it was. It was just stress and anxiety, both can present in very similar ways.

"You're fine- you're fine" I have to remind myself, the only noise in this deadly silent locker room being my staggered breaths for air as I tried to get myself to calm down. After seeing a newborn baby wailing in the waiting room just an hour ago, I just couldn't get the thought off of my mind. It was terrifying, completely haunting. And whilst a lot of people usually can't wait to take a test to determine their fate, I quite possibly couldn't think of anything worse right now.

I didn't need to know. Or more like, I didn't want to know.

The noise of that baby, that my eyes caught sight of for just a second or two, wouldn't stop ringing out in my ears like some kind of sick and twisted nightmare on repeat in my head.

I wasn't sure that I had ever wished so hard for my period to grace me in this present moment. Every day I woke and begged to feel a cramp or two, I was dying to see a little patch of blood in my underwear. I was pretty much as desperate as a teenage girl waiting to get her period for the first time. I had even gotten to the point where I was frantically googling ways to induce a period, just to bring myself a bit of peace of mind. I needed something to relax me, something to reassure me that a child wasn't beginning to grow inside of me.

I had tried to push all thoughts of a baby out of my head, I had tried my absolute hardest to ignore it all and completely block it out, but it was just staring me in the face, everywhere I looked. It had brought a whole new wave of anxiety, the type that I just couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried. It was so ingrained within me, it was buried deep in my skin and I don't think it would leave until I was in the all clear.

"Lana" I coach myself through my breathing, needing a good slap around my face to bring me back into reality, though at the moment, this was my reality. This had been my everyday life for the past week or so. I had had to psyche myself up every time I started a shift, every time I saw a patient, every time I ended a shift, every time I saw Harmony or Grace.

My life had become a melody of deep breaths and racing thoughts.

"Alannah, hey? What's wrong?" A voice pricks at my ears and for a singular second, I'm convinced it's Harry. My brain likes to torment me in that way, it likes to make me panic for no apparent reason. It likes to throw a spanner in the works and unsettle my peace, though I wasn't really sure how much peace I even held at the moment. It felt like everything was just falling out of my hands and I couldn't get a grip on anything. It was like I had no control of my life or my emotions.