My head emerged from the hood of my cotton top like a meerkat peeking out of its burrow. I trudged from reception into the doctor’s office like a condemned woman to the electric chair. The decor, I noticed, was flesh coloured. I sat down on a hard chair facing the doctor’s desk, which squatted on a faded rug. The name on the desk plate read Zahra Hanbury, but our family doctor was on sabbatical. The locum greeted me with brisk professionalism.

‘And what brings you here today?’ she asked with perfunctory politeness.

‘Unexplained weight loss, constant fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, headaches . . . It’s cancer, clearly,’ I stated.

The doctor, who was around half my age, showed about as much interest in this self-diagnosis as she would if I’d read her the specifications from the back of a manual for a fridge freezer.

‘Been consulting that well-known quack Doctor Google, have we?’ the locum diagnosed. ‘Let’s just take some actual medical tests, shall we?’

I extended my arm for a blood-pressure check then looked away from the needle at the cheap walnut panelling on the walls and the commercial grade rust-coloured carpet on the floor. Tests were pointless. I knew I was doomed. At least I’d get to pen my own obituary for my paper. ‘Fate struck while the irony was hot,’ I would write. Through the window, grey clouds sloshed across the sky like jumbled washing. A sense of foreboding as heavy as a winter coat pressed down on me. As I left the medical centre, the cloudy laundry overhead had thickened. It was only when I got to my car that I realised it was smoke – bushfire smoke billowing up the coast. It seemed ominous and apocalyptic.

On Christmas Eve I dragged myself from the office back to the surgery for the results of the tests. I couldn’t think of a less appealing rendezvous. A barbecue with Hannibal Lecter held more allure. Sitting opposite the doctor, I could feel my blood coagulating with fear. I actually flung my hand over my eyes like a damsel in distress about to be tied to a railway track. ‘Give it to me, straight,’ I said. ‘Is it pancreatic?’

‘Congratulations,’ the doctor said.

‘What? It’s not pancreatic cancer?’

‘On your pregnancy.’

I fell back against the plastic bucket seat in a fugue of shock, my eyes bare and round as light bulbs.

‘There must be some mistake. I mean, I’m fifty!’ I looked at the locum the way a monkey must look at a medical researcher – knowing such experiments need to be conducted for the sake of knowledge but still pleading for release.

‘A lot of women your age presume they’re peri-menopausal, so they forgo contraception,’ she explained. ‘When they get the symptoms of pregnancy, they put it down to the change of life.’