As it turns out, Ben and I don’t really go to many dinner parties anymore. I can’t stand them. I’ve lost my ability to chat, too. I listen to people talk about their interesting, full lives. They’re training for marathons, they’re learning Japanese, they’re taking the kids camping and renovating the bathroom. I had a life like that once, too. I was interesting and active and informed. But now my life is three things: work, television, IVF. I no longer have anecdotes. People say, “What have you been up to, Elisabeth?” and I have to stop myself from treating them to a complete medical update. I understand now why very sick people and the elderly have such a compulsion to tell you everything about their health. My infertility fills every corner of my mind.

How things have changed. Now I’m the one groaning when I hear someone’s cheerful voice on the phone asking me if I’m free next Saturday, while Alice is hosting kindergarten cocktail parties and Mum is salsa-dancing three nights a week.

Alice can’t believe she’s got three children. I wouldn’t be able to believe I had none. I never expected to have trouble getting pregnant. Of course, no one does. It hardly makes me unique. It’s just that I did expect so many other different medical problems. Our dad died of a heart attack, so I’ve always been frightened by the slightest case of heartburn. I’ve had two grandparents on different sides of the family die of cancer, so I’ve been permanently on standby, waiting for the cancer cells to strike. For a long time I was terrified I was about to be struck down by motor neuron disease for no other reason than the fact that I’d read a very moving article about a man who had it. He first noticed he had a problem when his feet started hurting on the golf course. Whenever I’d feel a twinge in my foot, I’d think, OK, here we go. I told Alice about the article and she started to worry about it, too. We’d take off our high heels and massage our sore feet and discuss how we’d cope with getting around in wheelchairs, while Nick rolled his eyes and said, “Are you two for real?”

Alice is the other reason I didn’t expect infertility. We’ve always been so similar health-wise. We both get a dry, irritating cough every winter that takes exactly one month to go away. We have weak knees, bad eyesight, a slight dairy intolerance, and excellent teeth. When she had no problem getting pregnant, I thought that meant it would be the rule for me, too.

So it’s Alice’s fault that I never invested the appropriate time worrying about infertility. I never insured against it by worrying about it. I won’t make that mistake again. Now every day I remember to worry that Ben will die in a car accident on his way to work. I make sure I worry at regular intervals about Alice’s children—ticking off every terrible childhood disease: meningitis, leukemia. Before I go to sleep at night I worry that someone I love will die in the night. Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn’t understand that I’m fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It’s my own personal War on Terror.

That was a tiny joke, Dr. Hodges. Sometimes you don’t seem to get my jokes. I don’t know why I want you to laugh so badly. Ben finds me funny. He has this sudden bellow of appreciative laughter. He did, anyway—when I wasn’t an obsessive bore with only one topic of conversation.

I guess it might be sensible to cover this “worrying” issue at one of our sessions because it’s obviously just stupid superstition, and childish, too—as if I’m the center of the universe and what I think actually makes a difference. But I don’t know, I can already guess all the sensible things you’d say, the perceptive questions you’d ask, trying to gently lead me to my own personal “Eureka!” moment. It all seems sort of pointless and dull. I’m not going to stop worrying. I like worrying. I come from a long line of worriers. It’s in my blood.

I just want you to make it stop hurting, please, Dr. Hodges. That’s why I’m paying you the big bucks. I just want to feel like me again.

I have wandered off from the point again. My point was that I’ve been imagining what it would be like if I lost memory. So, I hit my head, and I wake up and I discover it’s 2008 and I’ve got fat and Alice has got thin and I’m married to this guy called Ben.

I wonder if I would fall in love with Ben all over again. That would be nice. I remember how it crept up so slowly on me, like that agonizingly slow old electric blanket which used to almost imperceptibly heat up my frosty sheets, second by second, until I’d think, “Hey, I haven’t shivered in a while. Actually, I’m warm. I’m blissfully warm.” That’s how it was with Ben. I moved on from “I really shouldn’t be leading this guy on when I have no interest” to “He’s not that bad-looking really” to “I sort of enjoy being with him” to “Actually, I’m crazy about him.”

I wonder if Ben would try to protect me from bad news, the way we’ve been skirting around certain subjects with Alice. He’s a terrible liar. I’d say, “How many children have we got?” and he’d mumble, “Well, we haven’t much luck there,” and he’d scratch his chin and clear his throat and look away.

I would bossily insist on all the details, and eventually he’d just have to go ahead and say it.

Over the last seven years, you’ve had three IVF pregnancies and two natural pregnancies. None of those theoretical babies became real babies. The furthest you ever got was sixteen weeks and that one broke both our hearts so badly we thought we’d never recover. You’ve also been through eight failed IVF cycles. Yes, this has changed you. Yes, it has changed our marriage, and your relationships with your family and your friends. You are angry, bitter, and, frankly, you’re often a bit strange. You are currently seeing a counselor after an embarrassing incident in a coffee shop. Yes, all this has cost a lot of money, but we really prefer not to go into the figures.