Kelly Cahill - Encounter

by a government agency, the news of it would be all over Australia in three minutes.

Anyway, that’s it for the helicopter business, except to say that it fell into the same time slot as all the other unusual things that happened at Lalor.

What occurred a few days later made the ‘black helicopter incident’ seem mildly amusing.

At 8 am on the morning of 14 October 1991, I woke up to find that I was lying flat on my stomach, and the sheets were soaking wet from my broken waters. As I awoke, I couldn’t understand how I could be lying like that — I was very pregnant, and it would have been practically impossible for me to get into that position. I was spread-eagled and balancing on my belly, and it was as if I had been dropped on the bed like that.

James was kicking the living daylights out of me, and that’s what woke me up. I was squashing him in that position, and I still shudder to think how it must have been for him, cramped up inside me with my full weight on top of him. They later told me at the hospital that my back waters had broken, but at the time I didn’t even know there was such a thing as this. The fluid continued to dribble down right up until delivery.

When I finally hoisted myself off the bed, I walked into the bathroom and noticed that my nightdress was on inside out. I thought about it, wondering how I could have done something so silly. I tried to remember putting it on, and that’s when I realised I couldn’t remember going to bed.

The last thing I could recall was sitting by myself, fully dressed in the lounge room. Andrew had already gone to bed.

I’d never had a blank like that in my memory, and I was more than a little curious about it. I was racking my brain thinking, When did I go to bed?

How could I forget that? What did I do after sitting in the lounge room?

My unborn baby took precedence, however, and I realised that I was about to deliver. Andrew took me to the hospital, and I had to be induced on the following day because I still hadn’t gone into labour.

James came without too much trouble, but two very interesting things happened subsequently which relate to that strange night.