And on a Wednesday in the July of 2025, Hollis Quayle came out of a lift with the unredacted file, because the regulator had finally disclosed it under an order, because a malicious complaint does not keep its anonymity forever.
The complainant is Rhett Mallory.
The second page is a supporting statement from a registered nurse at Thornhill General, signed and dated.
Yvie Grear.
The timing.
And here is the part that turned it from cruelty into something a court could look at.
I instructed a solicitor about the house on the fourth of May, 2023.
The complaint was received on the fifteenth of May, 2023.
Eleven days.
And what a complaint does to a doctor in the middle of a divorce is this: it puts you in a position where you cannot fight two things at once.
Hollis told me at the time — in the August of 2023, in his own office, and he was right — that if we contested the finances properly it would take eighteen months and would run alongside the regulator, and that I would be doing both while not practising.
So in the February of 2024 I signed.
I signed a settlement that gave my ex-husband the house in Ellery, which I had bought in 2017, with a deposit from my grandmother, four years before I met him.
I signed it because I could not carry both. That was the entire point of the complaint, and it worked exactly as intended, and it cost two hundred and eleven thousand pounds of equity.
That settlement was set aside in the February of this year on the basis of material non-disclosure and conduct, and the house is being sold, and I will get most of it back.
That took eleven months and it is not finished.
The fourteen months, which people imagine as a holiday and which I am going to describe once.
I was not suspended. That is a word people use and it is wrong, and the distinction mattered enormously to me at the time and matters not at all now.
I was “restricted from clinical duties pending investigation”, which means you come in. You badge in at the same door at half seven. You walk past your own clinic and you go to an office on the fourth floor and you do audit work that a band five could do, and at one o’clock you go to the same canteen as everybody who knows.
Fourteen months of that.
Three people stopped speaking to me. I am not going to name them. Two of them were at my wedding.
Eleven people were extraordinary — the sister, Bernadine, who rang me every Sunday for a year; a registrar called Olu who sent me a photograph of every single thank-you card that came into the department with my name on it, for fourteen months, without comment.
And the rest of that building did the thing people do, which is nothing at all, pleasantly, in corridors.
I lost about a stone. I did not drink, which surprised everybody including me, and started running instead, which is more embarrassing.
And in the April of 2024 I wrote a letter of resignation and did not send it, and it is still in a drawer, and Halla has asked me twice why I keep it and I have not got an answer that satisfies either of us.
Yvie.
She was twenty-nine when she signed that statement.
I have read it about forty times. It is a page and a half and it is not, in itself, a lie — that is the clever bit, and it is the bit that tells you who drafted it.
It says that I worked long hours. True. It says I was distressed in the staff room on an occasion in the November of 2022 — which I was, because I had come out of a clinic in which I had told a family something nobody wants to hear, and she sat with me for forty minutes and got me tea.
And it says that she had “concerns about Dr Sandell’s wellbeing in the period in question”.
She did. She had told me so, in my own kitchen, repeatedly, because she was my friend.
Every true thing she had ever noticed about me as a friend went into a document as a concern from a colleague.
She tried to take it back.
On the ninth of April, 2024 — two months after I signed the settlement, three months before her son was born — Yvie Grear wrote to the regulator asking to withdraw her statement.
Two paragraphs. It says she signed it believing it was a welfare referral, that she had not understood it would form part of a complaint about my fitness to practise, and that she did not wish it to be relied upon.
It is in the file. It is stamped. It was received.
