Pulse

It started raining heavily as I drove to the hospital on Sunday evening at a time when most sane people would be going home for the night.

I’d failed miserably to get back to sleep and had finally dragged myself out of bed and into the shower just before Grant returned from his run, all hot and sweaty, demanding access.

There had been a time when we would have squeezed into the shower cubicle together, relishing our wet bodies being in such close contact. Things would have invariably progressed to another form of steamy action in the bedroom.

It was as much as I could do to be naked and visible in the same room as my husband, let alone within his touching distance.

I hated my body and I felt sure he must too, in spite of him continually telling me he loved it. My once firm, fulsome and prominent breasts now sagged alarmingly towards my waist and, in spite of nightly applications of expensive anti-cellulite creams, the skin on my thighs was already giving a good impression of orange peel.

‘What do you expect?’ Grant would say. ‘You’re in your forties having had two children. It’s nothing to worry about.’

But, of course, I did worry about it. And I was constantly desperate that he might trade me in for a younger model, just as he did every three or four years with his car.

I had finally made it downstairs just before ten and, of course, the marmalade had been in the right place on the table all the time. If it hadn’t, then I would surely have known about it. The house would have burned down, or the boys infected with some debilitating disease, or we would be involved in a worldwide nuclear Armageddon with only minutes left to live.

Toby returned from his football practice caked in mud and with a bloodied knee after being accidentally kicked by one of the other boys. But he wasn’t about to let his emergency-doctor mother do anything about it.

‘Leave it out, Mum,’ he said sharply when I tried to see exactly how deep was the cut. ‘It’s fine.’

Fourteen-year-old boys. Not yet men but so eager to be manly. A bleeding knee was a badge of honour, a war wound.

‘Go and have a shower and put some of this on it.’ I tossed him a tube of antiseptic cream from my first-aid cupboard in the kitchen.

He rolled his eyes in irritation but he caught the tube and took it upstairs with him to the bathroom.

Lunch had then come and gone without any great fanfare, Grant and the boys mostly grazing on what leftovers they could find in the back corners of the refrigerator.

Only a year or so previously, I would have eagerly produced a proper Sunday lunch – maybe a roast chicken or a joint of beef with all the trimmings.

I had prided myself on my Sunday lunches, taking great pleasure in having the family sitting down at the dining-room table for one meal in the week with no TV, video games or mobile phones allowed to interrupt the conversation.

Meals in the Rankin household had mostly become either ready or takeaway, with Grant now on first-name terms with the managers at both the local Indian and Chinese restaurants, even if they did rather embarrassingly call him Mr Wankin.

I, meanwhile, had decided to stop eating altogether, existing on a meagre diet of vegetable soup plus the occasional sliver of plain grilled fish. Not that it seemed to be doing much good. Even though our bathroom scales showed that I’d lost another seven pounds in the last month, I was yet to feel any thinner. I regularly spent far too much time looking at myself in a full-length mirror. Not that I liked what I saw. It was far too stressful.

It was ten to six in the evening but it might as well have been the middle of the night. The sun had gone down at quarter past four and it had been pitch-black for over an hour. The intense rain had also cleared the streets of all but the most hardy.

I hated the prospect of the coming winter. The ever-dwindling length of daylight reflected the lowering of my own mood. Just five weeks, I thought, until the winter solstice and then the days would start getting longer again.

I was not ready for any form of socialising. All I really wanted to do was hide myself from everyone except my immediate family. Yet, perversely, here I was about to delve into the darker recesses of humanity, dealing with people at their most vulnerable, when they would be relying on me to make them better.

I would be more anxious about joining close girlfriends for a drink than of swimming in piranha-infested waters. But I felt able to deal quite easily with a waiting room full of prospective patients.

There were two men and a woman waiting for me when I went in from the car to change. I could tell immediately that it didn’t signify good news.

‘Ah, Chris, there you are,’ one of the men said when he saw me. I knew him well. He was the Medical Director for the Gloucestershire Hospitals. My clinical boss. What was he doing here on a Sunday evening? And in a suit too.

The four of us walked together down a long stark hospital corridor, brightly lit only by the cool glow of overhead fluorescent tubes. ‘On my way to the condemned cell’ was the only thought that floated into my head.

We went into one of the consulting rooms in the now-closed outpatients department. There were only two chairs at a table so we all remained standing.

‘Um,’ said the Medical Director uneasily, ‘we have received a complaint concerning your medical competence.’

‘From whom?’ I said, but I knew who it must have been – either the staff nurse who I’d told to administer the adenosine, or the junior doctor who’d been standing by with the defibrillator.

I personally thought that it was very relevant but saying so wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

I was surprisingly calm – not a tingle to be felt anywhere. I even wordlessly congratulated myself on my control in such a stressful situation.

‘We have decided,’ the woman went on, looking around briefly at the other two, ‘that it would be best if you were suspended from duty while the complaint is investigated. On full pay, of course.’

‘Suspended?’ I said. ‘But why? I used my judgement as a doctor to make a decision that I felt was in the patient’s best interests. Are you doubting my ability to make future decisions?’

‘We are also concerned by the state of your mental health,’ said the Medical Director.

‘We have reasons to believe that you are suffering from clinical depression.’

Putting the word clinical in front always made something sound much more serious.

‘What reasons?’ I demanded, anger rising within me. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have a slight anxiety problem, that’s all.’

‘Chris, please be reasonable,’ the Medical Director said. ‘Several of your colleagues have raised concerns, noting that you sometimes absent yourself from the department during your shift.’

‘But you don’t go to the toilet, do you, Chris? You go and hide in a cupboard. Jeremy Cook saw you do that yesterday.’

‘I was concerned enough to use my legal powers to gain access to your medical records. One doesn’t have to take Prozac twice a day just for a slight anxiety problem.’

‘I thought personal medical records were meant to be confidential.’ It was almost a mumble.

‘Are you suggesting that my depression has something to do with the death of a patient?’ I could feel the anger rising in me again and, this time, there was a slight tingling in my fingertips.

‘No.’ It was the other man, the one who had so far remained silent. ‘We are suggesting no such thing. We are simply stating the fact that a complaint has been received and it is the hospital’s decision that you be suspended from duty while the circumstances are investigated. No one at this stage is implying that you have done anything wrong.’

‘But first I would like you to sign this,’ the lawyer said quickly, removing a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and placing it on the table along with a pen. I sat down on one of the chairs and read the single paragraph printed on the hospital’s official headed notepaper:

I, Dr Christine Rankin, understand that, following a complaint made against me, I have been suspended from duty at Cheltenham General Hospital pending an investigation into my competence to practise. I undertake that, until that investigation is complete, I will not attempt to gain access to the hospital premises in the role of a clinician. I further undertake that, prior to any hearing that might take place, I will not discuss the details of the said complaint with any of my medical colleagues.

Signed.............................................. Date......................

‘What was the complaint?’ I asked. ‘I can’t undertake not to discuss something I know nothing about.’

‘That you failed to consult with colleagues and administered medication to a patient without due professional care and in a manner likely to have hastened the death of the patient.’

The Medical Director read it from another piece of official notepaper, which he now handed to me. It was the formal notification of my suspension from duty.

I believed that the complaint was justified, that the man’s death had been my fault.

After a few minutes the phone started ringing again. I went on ignoring it and after six rings it stopped once more. It rang again – six more rings, then it would go to voicemail. It stopped.

I couldn’t remember driving out of the hospital car park. In fact, I couldn’t really remember driving at all but I must have. How else could I have come to be where I was?

I looked out through the windscreen, past the raindrops on the glass to the view beyond.

Some rightly say that Clifton Suspension Bridge is the most beautiful creation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel although, in truth, it wasn’t completed until five years after his death to the final design of two different civil engineers, and only based on Brunel’s original.

But it certainly looked magnificent to me now, dimly lit only by occasional streetlights at this time of the morning. The bridge spans 702 feet across the Avon Gorge, crossing some 245 feet above the river surface. It said so on a notice near one end.

That had been my plan, and that was why I’d driven more than an hour from Cheltenham to get here. I had even walked across the bridge, searching for the best place to go over the side, the place from where death would be most certain, most instant.

But I had been back in the car now for the last six hours, just sitting here churning things over and over in my head, trying desperately to make sense of my life – or my death.

It wasn’t that I was frightened of dying. I was much more frightened of living, of having to face up to what was happening to me.

‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ Grant wailed from the other end. He was crying. ‘Where are you?’

‘Oh my God, Chris!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t do anything. Just stay calm. Please, my darling, don’t do anything! Think of the boys. I’m on my way.’

I got out of my Mini and leaned against it, stretching away the kinks in my spine. I could do with a cigarette but I’d smoked my last one at least an hour ago.

‘I’m in the car on my way to you,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Please, my love . . . don’t . . .’ It was a desperate plea.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t kill yourself on the roads trying to get here too fast.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said again, feeling dreadfully weak at the knees. ‘Please just come and get me.’

A police car came hurtling round the corner with its blue lights flashing. Someone else was also having a bad day, I thought, but the car pulled up next to me and two young policemen climbed out.