Nobody told me. That is not sinister; it is how those processes work. It went on the file and the investigation continued and closed five months later, and the letter sat there, and I did not know it existed until the twenty-third of July, 2025, in a hospital corridor with a broken bottle on the floor.
What I did with that.
She was referred to her own regulator in the November of 2025, as the inevitable consequence of signing a statement in a malicious complaint.
And I gave evidence on her behalf.
Not a character reference. A factual statement about the April letter: that she had written it, that it was unprompted, that it predated any legal action of mine by fourteen months, and that she could not have known in the April of 2024 that any of it would ever come out.
Hollis Quayle 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.
He has known since 2012 that I will always choose the version of myself that is least embarrassing to defend.
And the six years, which that man used as the weapon and which I am going to set out plainly, because the sentence he said in that corridor has a specific answer.
We were seen at a clinic in Brackwater between 2016 and 2022.
Everybody is tested. That is how it works.
There was no single cause found. Unexplained — which is a real category and which about one in four couples get, and which is, if I am honest, harder than a reason, because there is nothing to treat and nothing to blame.
Five cycles. Two that did not reach transfer. One that ended at nine weeks in the March of 2019.
And at no point in six years, in any letter, in any clinic appointment, in any conversation with any professional, was it ever said that the problem was mine.
He said it. From about 2018, steadily, at home — that it was obviously me, that his body was fine, that I was too old and had left it too late for my career.
I was thirty-two in 2018.
And in the complaint, in the May of 2023, he wrote that I had been “receiving treatment for mental health difficulties associated with infertility”, which is a sentence constructed to be almost true: I saw a counsellor at that clinic eleven times in 2019, as they recommend, as most people do, and I declared precisely nothing because there is nothing to declare.
