Hot flushes. 

Brennan was surprised in a detached sort of fashion.  For months now he’d been accepting hot flushes as his wife’s part of the programme.  Here he was having one himself.  Very odd.  It was odder still that he could focus so lucidly on the phenomenon.  There was a major trauma going on and another part of him was observing his own physical reaction.  Emotionally he was shot to pieces and he was still watching his own hot flush, feeling his cheeks, his brow, his whole head getting hot.  And his body, too.  The sweat was forming on his back, round his shoulders, under his arms, beginning, ever so slightly, to trickle down his rib cage inside his tee shirt.

He knew he would cry, too.  He knew that when that nurse came back through the door he would cry.  And yet he couldn’t.  Julie would be crying and he would have to be her support.  And all this time he was watching it happen.  Like his mind and his emotions weren’t mixed.  His brain was nonchalant, watching events unfold and his chest was heaving, squeezing the moisture upwards, forcing it to his tear ducts, forcing him to cry.  His chin was getting wobbly and his brain was telling him not to do it.

He’d never thought it would be like this.

Brennan had forgotten how long he and his wife had been trying for kids.  Six years, maybe?  At first they hadn’t even discussed it, just, sort of…stopped trying to prevent it.  Taking precautions it had been called before condoms had stopped meaning family planning and begun meaning survival.

After a couple of years nothing had happened and Julie had suspected – she’d known, really, she said – there was something wrong.  Unsatisfactory trips to her GP had thrown no light on the situation.  She complained of pains, her gut being bloated and her system just not being right, dammit.

But it got nowhere.  One time her doctor even told her it was wind.  Or constipation, maybe.

Brennan hadn’t given children a huge amount of consideration through all this.  Concerned, of course, that his wife wasn’t firing on all four cylinders, he got more than a little heated at her reports from her doctor. He wanted to go with her and grab her doctor gently by the throat and explain how he wanted his wife fixed.