Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen.
Yanika has not aged a day, but I hesitate as I see myself suddenly through her eyes. Jeans, an old woolen coat, handbag full of mess. A surgeon should be neat and sharp angled. She still is.
“So what happened?” she asks, when we’re both seated. No preamble. “Why did you quit?”
The Lebanese restaurant she’s chosen is every bit as un-Swedish and maximalist as I remember from my online foray.
Garlands of plastic leaves hang down from the ceiling among hundreds of glass pendants, fringed lights, mirrors.
Arabic pop plays loudly and there is an abstract print of a naked woman behind me, which feels a little off the mark.
But when I bite into my first falafel, it’s quite literally perfect.
“My twins were delivered at twenty-six weeks,” I reply. “I was in a level 3 NICU for months and they’ve both had the inevitable complications. It was challenging for a very long time.”
I had rehearsed this line on the way here, walking carefully through the compacted snow of Vasastan.
This three-sentence précis of years of hell and hopelessness.
Yanika does not have children, but I suspect she’d have little tolerance for my story even if she had.
Brief and factual is the way with Yanika.
She sits back. “Christ, Carrie,” she says, to my surprise. “What a time you must have had.”
The way she says Christ in her full Greek accent makes me smile. I have missed that accent. I’ve missed everything about her.
“Also severe HG in my pregnancy. I thought I was invulnerable, but it turns out I was not. I’ve been feeling more and more like my old self in recent months, though. And I’m missing the work now. Hugely.”
Yanika is eating hummus from her knife, watching me intently. “Things have changed,” she says. “It’s a different world to the one you left.”
“I know. I’ve been watching your videos—the stuff you’re doing is mind-blowing.”
Yanika smiles. “It is. You should come and work for me, Carrie.”
I eat another falafel. Right now I would be delighted to move to this elegant, placid city.
I would work under one of the best surgeons in Europe and at the end of the day I would come here and eat hundreds of these perfect falafels.
But there is no place for my children or husband in this fantasy.
I’ve already dragged them halfway across England; I’m not going to drag them halfway across Europe to resurrect a career I left “for good.”
“Phillip Gaju?,” she says, mopping up baba ganoush with a flatbread. “He’s the clinical lead for upper GI at the Royal Devon and Exeter. That’s your nearest hospital, correct?”
“Yes. I’m hoping to meet with him soon, although it’ll be a while before I can apply for a proper job.”
“True. But if you have a really good mentor in place, you’ll have a smoother path back to work. Phillip’s excellent. And of course there’s Ragheed Ahmed down in Plymouth with the HPB service. I’ll email them both.”
Really? You’d do that? For me? I want to say, but I keep quiet. I was an excellent surgeon. I deserve help.
“I don’t do this for everyone,” she says, because of course she can read my mind. “You were different. I’m surprised you had kids. You never wanted them.”
I don’t remember saying that, but it’s entirely possible. I was still so young when I trained under her. I thrived on the adrenalized cadence of overwork and unending home study; parenthood was foundationally incompatible with my lifestyle back then.
“I have no regrets,” I say. “About having children, about quitting surgery. After they were born I cared only about keeping them alive and trying to recover. But I did recover. That’s why I’m here.”
“Of course, of course, I understand,” says Yanika, who doesn’t.
“You are made of tougher stuff than most people, Carrie.” She checks her phone for a moment.
“You impressed me from the off. And I know what you went through with that man in Thailand, by the way. It was on the news here in Sweden. And yet there you were at St. Mary’s two weeks later, working twice as hard, twice as intelligently, as surgeons several years ahead of you.
That’s what Abe Karami said when I called him to ask him how you were doing. ”
“Really?”
“Really. You seem surprised?”
“I thought I was in danger of losing my job at one point. It’s reassuring to hear he was pleased.”
“I know. Terrible situation, Carrie, but they had to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.
I was one of the consultants who lobbied the hospital trust on your behalf.
Said you’d only been dating the guy a few months; you’d been on and off with him in that time anyway—basically I told them they hadn’t a thing to worry about. ”
I sit back, astonished. “Really?”
“Really!” she repeats, mimicking me. Yanika doesn’t smile much, but it comes easily when she’s teasing someone. “I’m sure you remember that week when you lost your mind entirely because you’d split up with him, or some other such drama.”
I’m laughing, too, now. “We actually hadn’t split up. It was all in my head. But it was my first real relationship. I was mad as a box of frogs.”
“You really were.”
“I didn’t know you’d interceded with the trust, too. Thank you.”
She takes a sip of her mango juice, shrugging. It’s nothing to her. “Back to this placement,” she says. “You’ll only ever be observing, of course, but it would be helpful for our paperwork to know where you’re at with reregistration.”
“I’m fully registered and licensed now. I’ve got a year’s reorientation and update training, then they’ll consider what level I’m to go back at.”
“I’m sure once they’ve seen you in action they’ll want you back practicing as a registrar. You’ll be taking the CESR pathway, I assume?”
I nod. This is the specialist registration route taken by doctors or surgeons who haven’t completed the GMC-approved training program, usually because they’ve trained in another country.
I won’t be able to return to work at the grade I held when I left, but on this pathway I at least won’t have to go back to the very beginning.
“Well, congratulations, Carrie. Exceptionally challenging to get back in after so much time out. What’s it been? Six years?”
“Just over.”
She resumes eating. “Right, well, this placement. It’s four weeks, full time. You’d—”
I interrupt. “Actually—I wanted to say up front, so I don’t waste your time: I can’t do more than two weeks. My kids are still really young. This is the first time I’ve left them.”
Yanika puts her cutlery down. “Surgery is no less demanding than it ever was,” she says bluntly. “Are you sure you’ll be able to cope?”
“Yes. I’m sure. I’ll be going back part time when I get my first job.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“They said it would be doable. Anyway, Yanika—I know you had four weeks in mind, but two is the best I can do. Does that work for you?”
She sighs. “Suit yourself,” she says. “But please be clear: this world is still closed to women who want to put their kids before their jobs. Of course that’s not the official line anymore but it’s the reality. You need to be ready for that.”
“I know. And I am ready.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She leans in. “OK. You’re in theater. Or clinic, even. You get a call saying one of your kids is sick and needs picking up from school. Your husband is away. What are you going to do?”
I look at my plate, thinking fast. I don’t know what I’d do is the honest answer, but it’s not the one she’s looking for.
“I’d find someone to pick them up,” I say, after a beat.
“Who?”
“A friend. Neighbor. I’d have a list of people who could help if my husband was away. Of course I would.”
Yanika sits back, folding her arms. “Are you sure? You’ve a list of people on standby who can collect and look after your kids at a moment’s notice?
People you’d trust to look after them if they were really sick and begging you not to leave them?
” She frowns. “This isn’t general practice, Carrie. This is surgery.”
This is why I’m here. Yanika didn’t need to interview me for a shadowing placement—why would she?
I’ll be little more than an observer. No, the reason she wanted to see me was this.
To be able to look me in the eye and not only ask this question but force me to answer.
Because when push came to shove, I chose my children over my job, and that decision will have troubled her for years.
Yanika is, in many ways, very like my mother. No matter how inelegantly she handles it, this interrogation is happening because she cares. She wants to be satisfied that a good proportion of the Carrie she once knew is still alive in my body, that I won’t get crushed again.
“I think most GPs would find that pretty offensive,” is the best I’ve got.
She ignores me. “Not one person in the NHS could tell you this, Carrie, for fear of being sued. But let me make it very clear: you don’t get to prioritize your kids in this job.
You can work part time, you can find a surgical specialty that doesn’t involve on-call.
But if you leg it home the moment one of your kids falls ill, they’ll find a way of getting rid of you.
So, if you’re not one hundred percent sure, don’t bother. ”
“OK,” I say after a long silence. “I’ll think about it again. But I’ll do that in my time, Yanika. Not now, here at the table.”
She stares at me fiercely for a moment, but I sense the energy of a smile somewhere. She’s pleased I can still stand up for myself.
“Very good. Well—assuming you decide to go ahead, I can have you start March sixth,” she continues, as if nothing just happened.
“You’ll need to arrange your accommodation but I can give you some suggestions.
There are serviced flats nearby that many surgeons use when they come over to train.
And I’ll have my secretary send all the paperwork… ”
As she talks, the couple next to us squash into the same chair, taking an awkward selfie.
It’s 12:40 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in January and I am in a Lebanese restaurant in Stockholm, the sun a bright ball of burning milk behind thick sheets of fog, snow neatly swept on the pavement outside.
Yanika Hatziz is offering to help me resurrect my career, although she’s doing so with a loaded gun. Why did I expect anything less?
She marches off to the toilet. I message Maya for an update about Dad. I check my emails. I’m not ready to think about what she’s just put on my plate—not yet. It’s taken me a long time and a great deal of work to get this far.
I find myself thinking about the young Carrie, the woman Yanika mentored all those years ago. Her inexhaustible energy, her determination and grit. I think about her fiercely protected heart, the heart she was brave enough to hand to a Swedish man with beautiful eyes, and suddenly I’m angry.
Somewhere, within a few miles of this restaurant, he is alive.
Out for lunch, perhaps, or working at his desk—one of the desks pictured on his firm’s website, with a white orb lamp and hipster colleagues as far as the eye can see.
Somewhere, his human body is breathing and moving, and his mind—the mind that holds the answers to so many questions I thought I’d take to my grave—is busy and active.
I try to breathe slowly but the rage is building. I still want answers, no matter how many years have passed. And the one person who has them is only a few miles away. I don’t think I can stand it.
Yanika returns from the toilet just as her phone starts ringing.
She answers quickly and then she’s off, throwing her coat on.
She doesn’t even have time to explain to me, but she doesn’t need to—I know; I remember.
She just runs, talking quickly in Swedish, because of course she has become fluent in Swedish, to whoever it is on the phone, losing their nerve, losing their patient.
I pay the bill, because she certainly isn’t going to, and then I get into a taxi and give the driver the address of Johan’s architectural practice.
I don’t know what I’m doing, only that Yanika has unhinged me in some way, and I don’t need to worry about reality at this moment.
I’m just a woman held in the arms of a dream.