The Accidental Confidante

Those of you who read my other current blog, A Year of Kir, will recognize my chest x-ray on the left, which everyone in my program had to get as part of our medical exam, in order to receive the titre de séjour, which allows us to be in France legally for the year. When I photographed it for AYoK, however, I intentionally cut off the bottom part, which, if you zoom in, says protection plombée, referring to the lead wrap I velcroed around my abdomen and lower back, after I answered in the affirmative to the question of whether I might be pregnant. I ended up explaining in both the weighing-and-measuring room and the x-ray room (and, in fact, in the listen-to-my-chest room) that I had stopped taking the pill but had not yet had my period, and that we were trying to get pregnant.

I was not the only student in my program with a 1:30 appointment for my medical exam. There were five of us there, and as I was called in to the listen-to-my-chest room, one of my classmates, L, said that she had heard me talking to the doctor. Oh, really? I asked, playing dumb. She told me that she had heard me say I had stopped taking the pill. Dammit. L and I are friends, but it has been hard work to keep this to myself, and I was frustrated that now someone knew, first of all, and that I hadn't gotten to choose who that someone was. She assured me later, in a very nice e-mail (in response to mine, asking her to please keep what she had heard to herself), that we could trust her. But still. It's nice to know that there's someone I can talk to if I want to, but on the other hand, there's something powerful about having a secret. Ah, well. Hopefully, soon enough, we'll have a next level of secret to keep to ourselves, and shortly thereafter, no secret at all. Knocking on wood.