After coffee, the meeting continued with practical information about everything from the procedures surrounding research experiments and donations to finding our way around the unit. Staff from the residential department, the health center, the surgical department, the restaurant, the art gallery, the sports center, and the podiatry and massage clinics came along, one after another, introduced themselves and told us what they did.
When we were finished my head was spinning from all the information we’d been given during the afternoon, and I had to go and lie down again for a while so I’d be able to cope with the welcome party that evening.
5
I remember the debate and the referendum. I also remember that it wasn’t really much of a debate to begin with, because the idea came originally from a newly formed party called the Capital Democrats, or something like that, and very few people took their proposal seriously.
I wasn’t particularly interested in politics, and I was far too young to be able to identify with concepts like middle age. Every time the topic came up, in the media or with other people, I heaved a bored sigh and turned the page or switched channels or changed the topic of conversation. Social issues of this kind just had nothing to do with me, in my opinion, and when I got pregnant by accident during the first phase of the debate, I had an abortion. I was young, after all, I was in high school, I wanted to travel, go to college, do some casual work here and there, paint, write, dance and enjoy myself. It was just as impossible to imagine myself as a mother as it was to imagine myself as middle-aged. But if I had known that at the very moment when I allowed myself to be anesthetized and scraped out I was throwing away the only chance of becoming a parent I would ever have, then things would probably not have been quite so clear cut. If I had been able to work out how things were going to be in the future, if I’d had the slightest idea, I would have given birth to my child. At least I would like to believe that’s what I would have done.