Does my foetus look fat in this?

The day of reckoning. The day when I learn whether I’m carrying a two-headed freak child or something approaching normal. I kick off the day by watching Case 39 starring Renee Zellweger as a well-meaning social worker and Jodelle Ferland as a demon-child who has slaughtered most of her family and sent her parents to the loony bin. Nice choice.

The clinic is in the basement of a townhouse on Harley Street. The entrance hall is decorated with faux-naïve paintings of women presumably meant to signify fecundity, tranquillity and auspiciously complication-free pregancies. There’s a tense silence in the waiting room. Thin, rich women pretend to read copies of Grazia. Couples converse in strained whispers. Performing my scan is Dr Violeta Stratieva, a steely Russian woman who punches me repeatedly in the stomach in order to ‘wake baby up’. ‘This hurts?’ she says – it’s more a statement than a question – before telling me, accusingly, that my bladder is very full. I guiltily shuffle off to the loo, with lubricant jelly still damp and clammy on my stomach. It’s kind of like the walk of shame but without the sexual indiscretion.

We get a better look at the foetus. It has a brain. ‘Good brain’, says Dr Violeta approvingly. It has the full complement of limbs and kidneys. It has a fat little pot belly. The heart is beating. My heart, I realise, is beating almost as fast. I’m far more nervous than I thought I would be. Dr Violeta gives us the full run down. Everything is normal. The risk of Downs is downgraded from 1 in 75 to just under 1 in 1500. The baby is towards the top end of normal in terms of its size. I have a fat foetus.