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Pregnancy has given me a whole new respect for how useless your opinions become the second someone more medically qualified decides you are a problem to be managed.

Within minutes I’m being eased into a chair I don’t want, while Simone texts furiously beside me.

“Who are you texting?” I ask.

“Nate,” she says without looking up.

I close my eyes briefly. “You couldn’t wait?”

“No.”

The ride to the hospital is short enough to be inconvenient and long enough to be miserable. Every bump in the road registers more than it should. The pain hasn’t become unbearable, but it’s settled into a steady, unwelcome presence that keeps me from pretending this is just a false alarm.

Simone sits beside me with one hand wrapped around mine and the other still clutching her phone. “Hey,” she says after a minute. I open my eyes. “You with me?”

I nod.

She tilts her head. “That was a very fake nod.”

“I’m trying not to panic.”

“That seems smart.”

“I thought so too.”

That gets a brief, strained smile out of her.

By the time we reach the hospital, I’m cold in that strange, internal way that has nothing to do with the weather. People appear with questions before the vehicle has fully stopped. Name, age, weeks pregnant, pain, bleeding, allergies, medications. I answer what I can. Simone answers the rest with the confidence of someone who has spent enough time around me to know all the useful things and most of the embarrassing ones.

Then the automatic doors slide open, and I’m wheeled into the bright, overlit churn of the emergency department, where everything smells like antiseptic and old coffee and urgency.

As they start moving me toward triage, my phone begins buzzing inside my bag.

I don’t reach for it. I don’t need to look to know who it could be. And right then, in that awful narrow space between fear and hope, I can’t decide which possibility would hurt more.

They take me into a curtained bay, ask me the same questions three different ways, hook me up to monitors, take blood, press cold gel where I don’t want anything touching me, and tell me to breathe like that’s a meaningful instruction when my whole body feels like it’s been clenched for hours.

The pain has changed by then. It isn’t the sharp, grabbing thing it was in class. It’s lower now, duller, but that almost makes it worse. Sharp pain gives you something to fight. This feels like my body sulking around an injury I can’t see.

A resident checks my abdomen. A nurse takes my blood pressure twice because the first number is “elevated.” Another asks if I’ve had bleeding. I say no so many times it starts to sound unreal.

Simone stays beside me through all of it, one hand on my bag, one hand on the rail of the bed, as if she plans to physically drag the entire hospital into functioning properly if anyone annoys her enough.

The doctor on duty is younger than I expect, tired-eyed and efficient. He studies the chart, glances at the monitor, asks me a few more questions, then says, “We’re not seeing anything catastrophic right now.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means the baby’s heart rate looks okay,” he says. “Your vitals are elevated, and you’re having pain, but at this point it looks more reactive than structural.”

I stare at him. “Reactive to what?”

He gives me the kind of look doctors give when they’re deciding how plainly to say the obvious. “Stress,” he says.

I almost laugh.

Of course it’s stress that finally gets me. Of course my body would choose now to revolt in the most humiliatingly psychological way possible.

Simone, standing near the end of the bed with my bag looped over one arm, snorts softly. “Well, what a mystery.”