31 July 2015
‘You really think I’m ready to leave?’
‘What do you think, Kerry? It’s your decision to make.’
As always, Earl throws the most difficult question back to me.
‘Our relationship has lasted about the same time as my marriage. I’m scared of what it’ll be like not to have you as my safety net.’
‘What is there that I can do that you can’t do alone now?’
I look out of the window, at the leaves rustling on the trees. It’s my second summer of watching them from this bloody IKEA chair. In the first summer, when I was falling apart, they were mostly a green blur because after so many years refusing to cry, I suddenly couldn’t seem to stop. We talked about how alone I felt, how I couldn’t imagine admitting these feelings to anyone: not Tim, not Ant, not even Hanna from med school days.
By autumn, the leaves turned red as my tearfulness turned into deep gloom. This was when I went to my GP. She wanted to sign me off for a fortnight with depression, to give the SSRIs she prescribed a chance to kick in. We compromised on seven days, and there was no mention of depression on my sick note. I hadn’t worked my balls off for nine years to destroy my career with doubts about my mental health.
Earl told me my response meant I was still in the bargaining stage of grief. But what had I lost?
By winter, the trees were bare and the antidepressants were keeping me afloat while I began to understand. Earl and I worked backwards. I’d been in denial about my losses: Elaine’s death, my ectopic pregnancy, the divorce. Yet I couldn’t blame those recent events entirely. When we mapped it, I’d been having my ‘funks’ as I called them – weeks when my life faded to grey – since my late teens.
Becoming a doctor was meant to heal me. Instead, I shut down my emotions in an attempt at self-preservation. But what did I need preserving from?
It came to me this spring, when pink buds grew from dead branches, and I finally talked about millennium night: those eighteen minutes of pummelling life into someone and the five mind-altering months that followed it. Euphoria, love, rejection, failure. I’ve been cycling through that same sequence ever since.
Until the counselling forced me to admit that I can’t save everyone. That sometimes even the doctor’s basic law, first do no harm, is an almost insurmountable challenge.
‘Kerry?’
‘Sorry. I was thinking about your question.’
‘And?’
‘I . . .’ I am about to bottle it, tell him I still need him, when I remember a patient from the weekend. ‘There was this woman on Saturday. Younger than me. She’d been knocked off her bike. She arrested in the ambulance; we took over resus. Kept going for a very long time because you could see she was fit, capable of surviving most things.
‘But it didn’t work. When we removed her helmet, we could see why she was never going to make it – her whole head . . . well, her injuries were not compatible with life.
‘For the first time I can remember, I knew there was nothing more I could have done. We had a debrief and when I took the newest member of the team into a side room – it was his first resuscitation – I held him and I told him it was OK to cry. And I meant it.’
Earl nods.
I expect to cry again now but it doesn’t happen. ‘I’m done.’
It’s the first Saturday in August and Tim is over for a conference: he’s been the headline speaker, talking about what developing countries can teach other nations about maternal health.
I doubt the delegates would recognize the Tim who has just danced non-stop to The Human League. We’re at Pride with a couple of doctor friends from A & E. NO canisters are scattered like bullets all over the park and I feel sorry for colleagues who’ll be dealing with the aftermath later.
‘Keynote speaker and you’ve got the moves, Tim,’ I say when the others go to get more beer.
‘Yep. Who’s the daddy?’
‘You’re the daddy!’
And he is. He and Maria finally became parents last September, when they adopted three-year-old Julia and her baby brother Andreas. It’s his first overnight away from them. He got the early flight into London this morning and is heading home first thing tomorrow.
‘I’ve got the wrinkles to show for it.’ He grins at me. ‘Whereas you are all zen and glowing, like you walked off the set of Grey’s Anatomy.’
‘Ha. Hardly. But I do feel better.’
‘The counselling has helped?’
‘Massively. My only problem these days is I’m about to start a stint in ICU, which I suspect will be a deadly combination of dull and scary.’
Tim laughs. ‘I meant to mention, I’ve found you the perfect specialty.’
‘I’ll be fine once I get back to the blood and gore in A & E.’
‘What if you could have blood, gore and helicopters?’
‘Nah, I looked at the air ambulance years ago, you have to be a grizzled old consultant or army medic to do that.’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s changed. I read it in the BMJ mag. Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine is becoming a specialty in its own right. Adrenaline, zero hierarchy. No long-term relationships with patients. Your dream job.’
I google it on my phone. He’s right. As I read the role specification, my mind is already whirring with the things I’d have to work on to get my application to stand out: my physical stamina and strength, my portfolio, my commitment to the specialty.
There are only a handful of places available each year, and I don’t tick all the boxes.
Yet.
Even though the new, improved Robodoc is more touchy-feely, she’s still bloody-minded. As soon as I’m home I’ll start a list of what I must do to become the inevitable candidate.
I work hard, but start to play hard too. I meet Marek on a team night out the following spring – something I’d have endured, not enjoyed, before counselling. It’s a light and sound show in the woods, very Brighton. The installations are hidden amongst the trees – giant birds with ethereal voices, a harp that plays itself, the strings being pressed by invisible fingers.
‘Someone fancies Kerry . . .’ one of the F1s says in a sing-song voice that’s loud enough to be heard all the way back to the hospital.
‘Bullshit.’
But I look up and . . . she might be right. That guy is staring at me, and I don’t think he’s an ex-patient I’ve sewn up wrong.
The man is too pretty for me, with an Edward from Twilight vibe, tall with very dark hair and skin so pale in the blue lights that I’d be getting him X-rays for TB if he’d just walked into the department.
He walks over before I have time to hide behind an exhibit. ‘Do you like the show?’
‘It’s fun,’ I say. ‘You?’
‘Fun. Yes. I think it would be more fun if I could walk around with you? I’m Marek.’
I am about to say a polite no – I’m with work people, after all. But instead I say, ‘Kerry. Yes, tag along.’
As we walk through the glades, he tells me he’s Polish and he’s in Brighton for a week looking for somewhere to live, before he takes up a position in the Archaeology Department at the university.
‘Permanent?’
‘Two academic years only.’
I’m relieved. Whatever this is – and I know already that it is something – mustn’t distract me from my work. I imagine Earl leaning back in his IKEA counselling chair and wagging his finger at me. I laugh.
‘What is the joke?’
‘I was thinking that it’s perfect if you’re only here for two years maximum because that way we can’t get serious . . .’ I laugh even more. ‘I am laughing at myself because we haven’t even kissed yet.
Marek frowns. ‘So, that I can fix right now.’
He leans in and we kiss on the edge of a magical pond, where frog princes dance on the water and music made by moon-powered wind chimes means the same melody will never be played twice.
I lose my colleagues in the woods. I ask Marek where he’s staying tonight and he tells me the name of the hotel and I suggest I join him.
‘Too soon, Kerry. As an archaeologist, I believe the best things take time to develop.’
I relax into the lightest relationship I have ever had.
I do the coupled-up stuff I used to do with Tim, the stuff I was too young for at twenty, but feels right now that I’m thirty-three. At dinner parties, Marek charms my sister and her husband, and jokes with Ant and his wife. He plays with everyone’s children, but afterwards we agree that it’s a relief to hand them back.
He’s often away on digs, but separation and anticipation is part of the pleasure. I let myself go in bed, in a way I haven’t felt able to since the spring of 2000. Then, I was wild and open because I didn’t know how bad it felt to be hurt. Now I know hurting is part of life, and survivable.
Time is the hidden element that makes it work between Marek and me. It’s been almost a year now but there are two countdowns that give us boundaries. I start my PHEM training in August and he goes back to Poland next spring. Every time we meet, we know we are simply having fun.
Nothing – even the coins and dishes Marek digs up – lasts forever.