Travel Reference
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with trembling hands and saw, out the corner of my eye, Judi being wheeled by on a bed.
Attached to her wrist was an IV drip and red bag of blood. “She has lost a lot of blood as
she is bleeding internally and is shivering because it is freezing cold from the blood bank,”
the surgeon explained as he rushed away.
Just then our doctor arrived and strode over to the operating theater, with a worried smile
and a wave. I sat and waited on a hard bench, my heart in my mouth. It seemed that hours
passed by, but must have been minutes before our doctor reappeared and came across to
me. “I think Judi will be alright, Jonathan. She is undergoing surgery at this time, and it was
what I suspected. Judi has a burst fallopian tube due to the embryo forming in the wrong
place, not in the cervix as it should. She has lost a lot of blood and would have died if you
had not gone home when you did!”
I burst into tears with relief and the effects of the stress I had just gone through. The doctor
kindly patted me on the shoulder and turned to leave but not before he said, “I'm afraid
there is a million to one chance of Judi ever becoming pregnant again.” He looked sadly
down at me, shook his head, and walked away.
“God, poor Judi,” I thought, sitting back in a daze. She had had two miscarriages, and had
very nearly died from one of them, and now this! The news that she may well never have a
child would destroy her; she had longed for the day when she would be a mother, lived for
that day! How would she react to this terrible blow?
Well, I should have known better! No sooner had she recovered from her surgery and was
over the bad news, when we moved to a cottage in Simon's Town, up high on a hill. The
cottage overlooked the huge, blue False Bay with a view of the entire Simon's Town Navy
Yard as well as the False Bay Yacht Club, and we could see Déjà vu snubbing gently at her
mooring chain. It was a good move as it turned out in the long run.
We had now taken up residence in a dinky, little stonewalled house called, “Bessie's Cot-
tage”. Apparently, Bessie had been an only child and a confirmed spinster whose family
had built her this cottage where she had lived and died some one hundred and twenty years
before. Her spirit was very strongly felt, and we could almost see Bessie limping about the
place, bent over with age, the old floorboards creaking.
Judi and Bessie were in cahoots, and with renewed vigor several months later, against all
possible odds, Judi was pregnant again. She glowed with the news and was especially care-
ful about seeing our doctor on a regular basis, just to make sure all went well. I was de-
lighted as well and watched in awe as the months went by and she got bigger and bigger.
Judi went to pre- and post-natal lessons, and I believe I may have attended one or two as
well. At this stage of our lives, we had started our own little business down in Simon's
Town. I had managed to rent a small workshop from the town council, which was conveni-
