I Clutched My Pregnant Belly And Called For Help. No One Knew The Secret I Hid Under My Shirt

“At some point – I couldn’t tell you exactly when – my hand stopped seeking out my baby bump for reassurance, and located something else instead.”

Writer, journalist, and certified crazy catperson.

I clutched my pregnant belly and looked around the room. Nearby, nursing students moved briskly through a crowd of emergency patients, checking vitals, calling out to each other. I knew I wasn’t their most urgent triage priority, certainly not compared to the bleeding patients on gurneys around me moaning, “Help me ... can someone please help me?”

“We’ve called OB/GYN, and they’ll be here as soon as they can,” a young nursing student promised me.

I closed my eyes and sighed. Help was on the way.

At some point – I couldn’t tell you exactly when – my hand stopped seeking out my baby bump for reassurance, and located something else instead. It was small and square and adhered discreetly to my skin beneath my maternity shirt: an oestrogen patch, oozing a steady dose of this miraculous hormone into my bloodstream.

Because I wasn’t pregnant – I was pretty much the exact opposite. I was in the relentless grip of menopause, and I was playing a pregnant woman as part of a disaster simulation at a nursing school. The bloody patients calling out for help? They were mannequins, and their pleas were being remotely broadcast through microphones from a nearby control room. My baby bump? A prosthetic that had been velcroed in place.

“Thanks everyone,” one of the managers in charge of the set called out, causing a few of us to break character with nervous laughter.

I did need help – that part of this scenario was entirely true. Most urgently, I needed financial help. So this simulation was one of many part-time jobs I’d taken on after severe menopausal symptoms had, at least in part, driven me to quit my full-time job as a medical writer months before.

The $160 estrogen patch had been on a national shortage. I had called around to several pharmacies before I was lucky enough to score one, out of pocket. The last time I felt this desperate for something this scarce was in fifth grade, when I competed with every other kid in my class for a Cabbage Patch Kid. Now, apparently, we had grown up and aged into hormone patch kids.

To understand how I ended up here – menopausal, underemployed and incubating a pretend baby – you’d have to go back a few years, to a time when we were still wiping down our groceries and wondering if it was safe to touch the mail.

The truth was, the pandemic had spoiled me.

I am not going to say I enjoyed the pandemic, although I know I wasn’t the only one who guiltily noticed certain silver linings........

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