I take the 96 tram from St Kilda, change at William Street. Calm, calm, try to be calm. Hands on my belly, Steve next to me. My weight presses into the fuzzy green cloth of the seat. Where are these other passengers going? Normal day at work? Cancer appointment? Not to have their unborn baby turned around most likely.

This roundabout, top of the city, where Flemington Road meets Royal Parade, gateway to the north, to the zoo, to Melbourne’s best hospitals. How many hearts have soared or shattered at this junction, fresh with the news of a pregnancy confirmed or a dreaded verdict given? Not that bad, having a bum-first baby. Not that bad.

I grip Steve’s hand as I enter the hospital, look down at my appointment letter. ‘Pregnancy Clinic – Level 1’. I step inside the lift, doors close, doors open, front up at reception. “Take a seat in the waiting room, we’re running behind.” She’s even terser than the front deskers at Sandringham. Is that a job requirement of medical receptionists? To make women feel like irritating cattle?

I take a seat, big recliner chair, Steve next to me on something spindly – as it should be, no mutually-created human inside his body. I look around the waiting area, surreptitiously checking out the other patients. Big bellies and small, some women on their own, others in couples. A toddler tugs on the sleeve of a woman in a burka, her stomach hidden beneath folds of material. Do they all have breech babies? Do they all have tiny humans inside them with their bottoms, not their heads, stubbornly facing the exit? Are they all as nervous as me?

“Isabel, how’re you going today?” A male midwife, solid, ginger hair. Looks like Steve’s cousin Paddy. Busy but friendly. I like him immediately. “Right this way and let’s have a look at that baby of yours. If you’ll just hop up on there.” I know the drill: dress up, belly out. On goes the gel. “So you’re here for an ECV,” he says, looking at my letter. I nod. All these words and acronyms that six months ago I’d never heard of. ECV – External Cephalic Version. A process by which a breech baby can sometimes be turned from buttocks first to headfirst. If I’d seen it in a pregnancy book my eyes would have skimmed past it. Well. Here I am.

Paddy slides the doppler over my slimy skin, up near my belly button, down towards the top of my pubes. I take deep breaths. “Yes,” he says. “Right.” RIGHT WHAT I want to scream but don’t because I’m a nice polite woman who just wants to give birth to a healthy little boy. Not to have him cut out, early, before he’s ready. To push him out. I want that very, very much. More than I’d ever thought I would.       

“Yeah, so there’s nuchal cord,” says Paddy. “The umbilical cord’s wrapped around his neck.” I focus on my breath. Calm, calm, calm. “I don’t think the obstetrician will attempt ECV with nuchal cord. I’ll go get him.” Nuchal cord. Around his neck. Nuchal sounds like noose. Noose around the neck. My mind flashes to a scene in the TV show SeaChange, a crying Carmen cradling a stillborn baby in her arms, the doctor saying “the baby choked on its own cord.” No no no no no. That’s TV. TV is not real life.

The obstetrician comes in. Paddy moves the doppler back to where my boy’s head is, I can feel it, a hard little apple beneath my belly button. The doctor – tall, gangly, 50s – doesn’t look at him on the screen for long. “Yes. So it’s not recommended to attempt ECV when there’s nuchal cord. And The Women’s no longer offers vaginal breech deliveries. You’ll need to book in for a Caesarean.” He leaves.

I look at Paddy. “Is that my only option?” Paddy pauses. He speaks slowly, choosing his words carefully. “A C-section is the advice you’re going to be given going forward,” he says. “If you want something else, well…” He looks at me knowingly. He is a man – how can he know how badly I want something else? And yet he does.

I walk out the sliding doors of the hospital, down the ramp, back across that great intersection towards the market. “It’s going to be OK,” says Steve, and I know it is, I hope it is, but in that moment I’m angry and pregnant and hungry and disappointed and furious at myself, at Steve, at my baby, at that doctor, and my mind sees a child with a rope around its neck and I stand outside McDonalds in the winter sunlight and I cry.

I wrote this piece in 2020 during Melbourne’s lockdown, as a homework assignment during Sian Prior’s excellent Creative Non-Fiction course (highly recommend). I shopped it around for publication, but no bites, so publishing it here – 5 years later!