The bruise that frightened me

Fiction, about adults over 18. The lump was not the frightening part. The frightening part was the sentence she was going to have to say out loud to a receptionist.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

On the Sunday it was an ordinary bruise and I was pleased with it.

On the Monday there was a lump.

I know what my marks do. Eleven years of this and you learn your own body's schedule: dark by the second day, that unlovely green stage around day five, gone inside a fortnight and quicker on the thigh. I could have written you a calendar.

This was not on the calendar. There was a firm area about the size of a satsuma, raised, and hot to the back of my hand, and sitting down at my desk on the Monday morning made me make a noise in an open-plan office.

So I did what everybody does. I looked it up on my phone in the disabled toilet on the second floor, which is the only place in that building with a lock and a mirror, and within four minutes I had read the words compartment syndrome and deep vein thrombosis and had to sit down on the closed lid.

Do not do that. That is the one piece of advice in this whole account. Whatever you have got, a search engine will find you the version of it that kills you by Thursday.

Tom said go on the Monday evening. He said it straight away, before I had finished showing him, in the voice he uses when he has already decided.

I said I would see how it was in the morning.

I want to be honest about what that was, because it was not stoicism and it was not sensible watchful waiting. It was that I could see the whole thing laid out in front of me like a corridor.

Ringing the surgery. The receptionist, who is a woman I have stood behind in the queue at the Co-op, asking what it was regarding. Saying the word bruise. Being asked where. The pause. And then a doctor looking at it and asking the question, and me having to answer the question, in a small room, at half past nine in the morning, as a forty-three-year-old woman with a lanyard still round her neck.

Three days I spent in that corridor. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday morning it was no smaller and I had started walking differently.

I rang 111 on the Thursday from the car, in a Sainsbury's car park, because I could not do it from the house with Tom listening and being right.

I had a script. I had actually rehearsed a form of words in the shower that involved the phrase a fall against some furniture, and I am not proud of it, and I had practised it enough times to have got the emphasis right.

The woman who answered asked me how big it was. Whether the skin was broken. Whether it was getting bigger. Whether I had any numbness or pins and needles below it. Whether I was on any blood thinners, which I am not. Whether I had a temperature.

She did not ask me how I got it. Not once, in eleven minutes.

At the end she said it needed looking at that day rather than left, and that it was very unlikely to be anything dangerous, and that if it started to feel tight or the leg went numb I should go to A and E instead. Then she said, "Have you got a pen? I will give you the number for the hub," in the tone of a woman with a queue.

I sat in that car park afterwards and felt absolutely wrung out, and all that had happened was that somebody had asked me sensible questions about my own body.

The GP was a man of about sixty with reading glasses pushed up on his head.

He asked me to show him. He pressed it in three places and asked whether that hurt more or less than the middle. He asked when it happened, and I said Saturday, and he wrote Saturday down. He asked if I was on anything that thins the blood. He asked whether it had got bigger since Monday and I said no, about the same, and he said good, that is the thing I wanted to hear.

Then he said it was a haematoma, that a bad one can sit there for six or eight weeks and feel like a marble under the skin for longer, that there was nothing to be done for it beyond time and paracetamol, and that I should come back if it grew, if the skin broke, if I ran a temperature, or if anything went numb.

And that was it. Eleven minutes. He never asked me how, and when I started to produce my furniture sentence he was already typing and said, without looking up, "It happens."

I cried in the car afterwards, which surprised me, because the news was good.

It was not relief about the lump. It was three days of a specific dread coming out at once. I had spent seventy-two hours protecting myself from a conversation that never happened, and I had done it by not getting a thing looked at that could, in a different version of that week, have been something that mattered.

That is the part I would want anybody to take from this. My embarrassment was the only real risk in the whole story. Not the strap, not the man holding it, not my own body. Me, standing in front of a mirror on a Tuesday, deciding that being asked an awkward question was worse than an unexplained hot lump.

A friend of mine who is a nurse laughed at me later, in an affectionate way, and said the thing that finally landed.

She said: think about what else that man saw before lunch. Somebody's chest pain. Somebody's ingrowing toenail. A man who had dropped a paving slab on his own foot and told him a long story about the paving slab. You are not a scandal. You are eleven minutes.

Two things changed after that and both of them are dull.

We look afterwards, together, properly, with the light on. Not romantically. The way you check the oil. It takes ninety seconds and it means I know on the night what I am dealing with rather than finding it on a Monday.

And we have a rule now, which Tom wrote on the back of an envelope and which is still stuck inside a kitchen cupboard. If either of us says it should be looked at, it gets looked at, and the other one does not get a vote and does not get to be brave about it.

Tom took it harder than I did, in the end. He did not say much on the Thursday evening, and then somewhere around the ten o'clock news he said that he had been the one holding the strap and I had spent three days on my own with it, and that he did not know what to do with that. We sat with it for a bit. There was not a great deal either of us could usefully say.

It took eight weeks to go. He was right about the marble.