‘Transvaginal?’

Geraldine shot me a brief sympathetic look. The nurse popped her head in. ‘You want me to do that, Geraldine?’

‘No thanks, Beth, but if you could take that blood and put it in for me, that’d be great. And when you’ve done that, could you contact A&E and let me know the status of . . .’ Geraldine looked to me.

‘Cathy Krause,’ I said.

‘She came in by ambulance.’

‘Yep.’ The nurse grabbed the blood and left as Geraldine squirted gel onto my tummy and leaned over and flicked the switch on the machine.

‘Been a while since I’ve done this, too,’ Geraldine said as she pushed the flat wand down hard, digging in above my hip on both sides and angling it sideways and looking at the screen. ‘You’ve set me all sorts of doctor-challenges tonight. That’s the beauty of country doctoring, you get to do it all.’

In the light from the screen I watched Geraldine’s face closely. She nodded to herself. ‘Okay,’ she said without looking away from the screen. ‘First thing. You ready? I don’t think that last period was a period.’ She glanced at me to see how I was taking that.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘So, about three weeks implantation bleed, plus four, yes, we’re looking about right for seven to eight weeks.’

‘Shit!’

‘The good thing about that is that I can see it pretty well here and it looks like it’s in the right place in your uterus. So, unlikely to be ectopic – so that’s great. And I think with your relatively minor pain –’

‘Minor?!’

‘Okay, well the fact that the pain has lessened and the bleeding has stopped and wasn’t all that much, and the fact that I’m seeing what I’m seeing here – I think we’re in the territory of probably-all-good-let’s-just-watch-closely.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Are we in the territory of it’s-okay-for-me-to-take-the-abortion-pill?’

Geraldine wiped the ultrasound wand with a cloth while she thought about that. I could see her tallying up symptoms and indications and contraindications until finally she nodded. ‘I don’t see why not. Seven to eight weeks, no recorded adverse effects on women who do later turn out to have a missed ectopic – yes, it’s safe. But you can’t take it after nine weeks, so it will have to be soon. Do you have the pills already?’

‘Yes.’ I gave her the name of the organisation I’d got them from and she nodded. ‘But I may have already mauled one of them – didn’t take it, just kind of . . . nibbled it.’

She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Were you planning on taking them by yourself?’

‘Um . . .’

‘Don’t do that, Anna. Medically speaking it’s not a very good idea.’ And when I didn’t say anything else, she said, ‘And not medically speaking, it’s also probably not a very good idea.’ And then she filled out a new prescription for a fresh set of pills and handed it to me. ‘Any chemist,’ she said.