Hospitals are a place where I feel secure. I hate them when it means I have to be off the ice, but I know this is the best place to be. It’s a symbol of recovery and safety. There is something comforting about the bright open space. As uncomfortable as the chairs are, it is a comfort to know I won’t have to sit in them for long. This is very different to any other hospital waiting room I’ve been in before. The medical rooms in stadiums always have the best equipment and the top minds in sport medicine are at our beck and call. I have been incredibly lucky in my career not to have received too many hits. I’ve dislocated a few shoulders and bruised every rib, but there has not been a time when I have needed to worry about my career ending.

A prenatal ward is unlike anything I’ve seen. The walls are plastered with informative posters about the dangers of smoking while pregnant and charts displaying foetus sizes compared to fruit. Apparently our baby is the size of a lime. These types of posters never really made sense to me. I’ve looked at them online, but it’s confusing because no two limes are the same size, so what size lime is our baby exactly? A big juicy lime ready to eat, or a little lime left on the shelf? I guess Ellis will know by how much her back aches.

Unbeknownst to her, I’ve got a little pile of pregnancy books on my bedside table. Just because this is the first scan I could come to that doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying to find out as much information as possible. That is how I know our little lime is fully formed in there. All its bones and organs are inside Ellis.

Even the thought amazes me. She’s growing someone else’s organs and acts like it’s not a big deal. It is a huge deal.

As we wait I can’t help but notice the other couples around us. To our right there is a pair who I think might hate each other. I know some people just co-parent, hell it’s what Ellis and I are doing, but these two have barely spoken a word. I have scripted a whole morning for them where they were trying to paint the nursery; he wants blue and she wants something more neutral like a beige. He threw a fit about how nothing he suggests is good enough and she told him to stop yelling at a pregnant woman (as she should) then he stormed out of the nursery to calm down, but she is still holding the grudge.