advised me against it in writing, which he is obliged to do and which I have kept.
She got a caution and conditions on her practice for two years. She is still a nurse. She is on nights at a different trust now.
People have asked me why and I have given four different answers, and the true one is this: I was not doing it for her.
There is a two-year-old in that family, and a nurse’s income, and I had a choice about whether that boy grew up in a house with one wage or none — and I had the only piece of paper that made a difference, and I was not prepared to be the person who sat on it.
That is not forgiveness. I have not forgiven her and I am not sure I am going to. I have said four sentences to that woman since
2023 and three of them were in a corridor.
What I have had to take.
And now mine, which is the part I have had to go at for eighteen months with a woman called Halla on Thursdays.
I knew.
In the June of 2023, four days after I was taken off clinical duties, I sat in Hollis Quayle’s office and he said: “Have you got any idea who might have made this?”
And I said no.
That was a lie. I knew within about four seconds of reading the second page, because of a phrase.
The complaint says I was “unable to accept that the problem was mine and not shared”.
That is not a sentence anybody at Thornhill General would write.
That is a sentence from my own kitchen, in the October of 2021, from a row about the clinic in Brackwater, in which my husband told me
I was unable to accept that the problem was mine and not shared.
I read it on the sixth of June, 2023, and I knew whose it was, and I said no to my solicitor.
Why I said no.
Because I was a doctor under investigation for being emotionally unstable, and I was being asked whether I thought my ex-husband had done it.
And I could hear exactly how it would sound. I could write the paragraph myself. Dr Sandell’s response to the complaint was to allege, without evidence, that it had been fabricated by her former spouse.
So I sat in that office and said I had no idea, and then I spent fourteen months not saying it, to anybody, including my own sister.
And the complaint did what it was built to do — not because it was clever, but because I did exactly what he knew I would
do, which is to be reasonable about it.
That is what I have had to take. Not that he did it. That he could predict me down to the day.
