Chapter Two #2
He’s right, although I want to dismiss him. I don’t like it when Robin worries about the kids less than me, which is all of the time.
“Carrie,” he says, after a pause. “Have you eaten anything this evening?”
“I ate earlier.” I get up and go over to the fire. “With the kids.”
“Are you sure? I only saw you galloping around finishing costumes.”
I smile, caught out. “Fine. I’ll eat.”
I poke at the fire while Robin sets about levering off a square of hardened macaroni. “Well done,” he says.
“You’re a fascist.”
“Tell me about your day,” he replies, watching without comment as I shovel around in the embers with no effect on the flames. Until recently the fire was his jurisdiction, but I’ve been trying to change that.
I’ve been trying to change many things.
“Your dad OK?” Robin asks.
I pull my phone out of my pocket to check. I never have it on silent these days, but I still worry all the time that I’ve missed an SOS from Nicola. Thankfully, there’s nothing.
“He’s been quite peaceful today, thank God. But I do have news.” I shut the woodburner and sit back on my heels. “I’m going back to work—it’s confirmed.”
It’s the first time I’ve said these words out loud. They feel exotic, plump with promise. “I’m going to be a surgeon again!”
Robin stares at me. “They’ve given you the green light?”
I nod, beaming like Raff when we put him into his Rolo costume earlier.
“They said my assessment went really well and they’ve just confirmed my license to practice.
I’m to do six months reorientation in supervised practice, then another six months in specialist, and then they’ll decide what level I’ll go back in at.
I’m hoping core trainee at minimum, but even if they make me go back as an F1, I don’t care, I mean—”
“Carrie.” Robin’s grinning. “Layman’s terms.”
“Sorry!” I’m practically hopping up and down.
“But the best thing is that they recruited one of my old mentors to set up a specialist hepatobiliary service down in Plymouth last year. He says he’d be open to having me back one day, and, and…
and I just feel it, Robin, I feel it! It’s going to happen! ”
For a moment, Robin is speechless. Then he gets up and hugs me. “This is nothing short of spectacular.”
—
The end of my career began the moment I became pregnant.
I felt great for a total of three days, until the vomiting started.
It deteriorated rapidly into hyperemesis.
When I reached eight weeks Robin had to go away on a three-week business trip and I nearly lost my mind.
I was signed off work—a black mark for any surgeon, let alone a pregnant female surgeon—and when I found myself unable even to keep fluids down I had to be admitted to Chelsea and Westminster for six days.
I hated Robin for abandoning me. Despised and loathed him, even though he’d done nothing but go on a work trip that had been in the diary for two months; even though he’d have come back at a moment’s notice if I’d been willing to call him and tell him what was going on.
I forgave him when he returned, of course, because there was nothing to forgive, and the poor man barely left my side until I began to feel better at seventeen weeks. He even went so far as to book us a holiday at the end of my second trimester, by which time we both expected me to be feeling well.
But then our babies were delivered three months premature, and I haven’t traveled since.
I spent 172 days in Chelsea and Westminster hospital with my tiny moths, felled by the way my body had rejected these two helpless creatures, by the appalling anxieties of life in NICU.
My life revolved around ventilators, endotracheal suction, infusion pump alarms; the sight of my breast milk trickling through plastic tubes, the purple veins in Raffy and Maeve’s miniature hands.
I was entirely disconnected from the outside world.
My babies survived beautifully, but my faith in myself didn’t.
When it was time for me to return to work I found that I could not hand my children over to the childminder I’d so painstakingly sought out.
What if Raffy deteriorated rapidly with a respiratory virus?
Would she spot it in time? What if she was one of those people who “didn’t want to bother me” at work?
I had survived because the twins were with me all day, every day, but I couldn’t manage my anxiety at leaving them with someone else.
No more was I equipped for the daily buffet of life and death my job brought; the crushing hours and lack of time to think, the on-call shifts.
And so I told Robin I didn’t want to go back.
Without hesitation, Robin cashed in the money he’d inherited aged twenty when his parents died in a road accident.
It had been untouchable until this point—his pension and security, guarded closely in an investment portfolio—but he channeled it all into our household savings account so I could be a stay-at-home mother.
I wrote to the London Deanery and Imperial College to tell them I was done with surgery. There were panicked offers of evidence-based rehabilitation this, confidential crisis counseling that, but I declined them all and deregistered from the General Medical Council.
It takes years of work and sacrifice to get into surgery, but it turns out that it takes just a few hours to leave. I became a full-time mother and refused to look back.
Until six months ago, when Robin suddenly, shockingly, lost his job.
For more than a decade he had worked for Andrew Heynes, a man of colossal wealth and praiseworthy intentions—or so we believed.
Then Andrew, distressingly, was investigated for fraud and most of his operations, even the charitable ones, were temporarily closed down.
Robin was one of many redundancies that followed.
I think we both assumed he would find another job quickly, but it took a long time.
The landscape has changed a lot in the past decade, it turns out, and people are less keen to give their money away.
Robin did a lot of number crunching. We still had his inheritance, of course, but it wouldn’t last indefinitely.
Robin wasn’t sleeping and neither was I.
At some point during the past few years I had, without realizing, simply rolled over like a soft animal and allowed my husband to carry me—to carry all of us.
I had no idea where Carrie Cole had gone, why I had allowed her to disintegrate without resistance. I had to start earning.
Running a household was enough for plenty of other women, brilliant women with sharp brains and important careers before they’d had children.
But I’d often wondered, as I scrubbed the toilets in the Pig Shed, if I might simply have a different genetic makeup.
My own mother certainly wasn’t built for parenting or housekeeping.
She’d gone back out campaigning by the time I reached eleven weeks and had suffered no guilt at all.
She’d done what she needed to do and was much happier as a result.
Once the idea of returning to work had taken hold in my mind, it was my sole focus. I wasn’t doing it because I had to—it was at this time that Robin finally got a job—but rather because I wanted to. The day I phoned the GMC to reregister as a physician felt like a rebirth.
Now as then, Robin is in support of my plans, but I know the speed of it all has been overwhelming. Especially with my decision to visit Sweden for three nights next month. Until recently, I wasn’t willing to leave the kids even for a night.
—
I relax, letting Robin hold me. It is spectacular, he’s right.
No matter how long it takes me to retrain not just my brain but my hands, or how many years it takes me to get back to ST6, which is where I was when I left, the NHS’s willingness to accept me back is in itself cause for great celebration. It was never a given.
“I also got a call from Yanika Hatziz this afternoon. She’s said I can go and shadow her in Sweden while I’m waiting for my reorientation to start! Although first I’ve got to meet her for some sort of interrogation when I’m in Stockholm.”
I pick up Raffy’s little stuffed rabbit—Friday Bunny, his name is, because we bought him on a Friday—and throw him up into the air, catching him and hugging him hard.
“My favorite biohazard,” I say, smiling into Friday Bunny’s sweet, germy fur.
I force myself to sit down, and Robin hands me my bowl of macaroni. He says, “I’m ashamed to admit I believed them when they told you it couldn’t be done. More fool me. If anyone can pull this off, it’s you.”
“They had forgotten what a good surgeon I was.”
I’m trying to speak in this way—to think in this way—as frequently as feels bearable.
There will be people wanting to crush me at every turn over the next few years, as I inch my way back into my career.
My old friend Dell from medical school has warned that the softer edges of the NHS as an employer have yet to extend to surgery.
“Have you told your mum?” Robin asks.
“I called her. She didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“That sounds about right.” He squeezes my hand.
“Oh, I think she’ll be pleased. She’s never been able to get her head around me choosing to be a stay-at-home mum.”
Robin’s seen Mum let me and my children down too many times to have a great deal of time for her, but he’s respectful enough to keep his thoughts to himself most of the time.
“Tell me more about this placement in Sweden,” he says. “Will you have to speak Swedish?”
“I think so. Yanika says they all speak English, but no clinician in their right mind would speak a foreign language in an emergency. I’m getting a language app so I can start brushing up.”
“Right,” Robin says, less enthusiastically. “Sounds sensible.”
He knows that I signed up for Swedish classes soon after getting together with Johan, that I was drunk on love from the start.
And, no matter how happy Robin and I are, no matter how many years have passed since I cared in any way about Johan, I think it pains him that the language lives on inside me.
That there was once a time when I would lie awake next to Johan, thinking, Jag ?lskar dig. I love you. I love you.
I eat another forkful of macaroni, a reminder to Robin that I’m on his team.
He gets out his phone and we google Yanika.
It’s been more than thirteen years since I last worked under Yanika Hatziz, but she remains the best mentor I’ve ever had.
Neither of us were traditional surgeon material back then—Yanika with her heavy Greek accent, me a quarter Malaysian and too short to operate without a steel box to stand on.
But: “You must never allow these things to hold you back,” she said in our first supervision meeting at the Royal London.
“You are to be outstanding and fearless in all you undertake as a surgeon, Carrie. You’ll have the power to save people’s lives in a few short hours!
Do not allow anyone, any man, to prevent you from carrying out that duty. ”
Sadly for me, Yanika was poached just before the end of my core training—bribed over to Sweden by a prestigious university hospital.
She’s the director of cancer and emergency surgery there now; surgeons fly in from all over the world to learn advanced robotics with her.
Those that can’t are glued to her YouTube channel, where she uploads videos of surgical techniques she’s quite literally invented herself.
I’ve watched them all, agog. She is a powerhouse.
“Isn’t she magnificent?” I say. Robin’s still reading her biography.
I glance at him, just in time to catch something different—something odd—in his eyes. “Oh. What?”
He hadn’t realized he was being watched.
He waves me off. “Sorry. I’m just—” He sighs.
“It’s just a lot to take in at the moment, Carrie.
Six months ago you said you were really happy being a mum, looking after the house and the holiday let.
But when I was made redundant you decided almost overnight to go back to surgery, and now you’re making plans to travel abroad.
” He waves his phone, Yanika’s picture still on the screen.
“I know it’s all happening at seventy miles per hour in your head, but I’m a little way behind you.
Forty miles per hour, I think. Accelerating to fifty.
But I may still need to take a minute to change gear, every now and then. ”
“Right,” I put my fork down. “Of course. Sorry. I get it.”
I lean over and plant a kiss on the side of his face.
“It’s fine. Great, even.” He tucks my hand into his.
“But I do want to say something: If it ever feels like too much, can you promise me that you’ll step back and wait a few more years?
I’m working again. We’d be OK. I just don’t want you to force yourself to see this through if you realize you’ve made a mistake. ”
“Thank you.” I smile. “You’re right; forcing myself on is exactly what I’d do. But—honestly—I want this.”
Robin takes this in for a moment.
“I want to go back, Robin. I’m ready. Truly ready.”
He takes a breath. “That’s good to hear, darling.
The fact remains, though, you told me never to let you go back to surgery, if you ever changed your mind in the future.
And yet here we are, in the future, and you’ve changed your mind.
I’m not going to try to stop you, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that your well-being has to come first. We love you too much to watch you fall apart again. ”
I pick up Friday Bunny. Raffy wouldn’t go anywhere without this little creature for years; nowadays he’ll often forget even to take him to bed. My babies are growing up fast; with the passing of each day they become a clearer expression of the souls they were always meant to be.
But I am a soul, too, and I haven’t been faithful to the blueprint of my DNA. I am a woman who has been called to work at the confluence of life and death, and that’s the place to which I must return. It no longer concerns our bank balance or Robin’s long-term career security. It’s a basic need.
“I get it,” I say, trying—as I have done for years—to straighten Friday Bunny’s crooked ear.
It flops back down and I give up, taking Robin’s hand again.
“It must have been exhausting to watch the human roller coaster that is your wife over the past few years. I can see that, Robin, and I’m sorry.
But this is what I need to do. None of it is a mistake. ”
My husband smiles and kisses me. He says he’s going to find some fizz so we can celebrate my great news, and he’s whistling as he goes out to the shed where we keep our stash—but I sense I’ve failed to allay his fears.