The One Day You Were My Husband (17)

I knew nothing of him that morning. Aged twenty-six and nearing the end of my core training, I’d taken my second MRCS exam a few days before and my thoughts were still consumed by my performance: whether or not I’d said too little at the anatomy station, whether I’d said too much at critical care. I would not be called for a registrar interview unless I’d passed.

Of course you’ll pass! Yanika had texted the previous night. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re worrying because you’re not a white middle-class man. I’ve been there, Carrie, and I can only say, to hell with all that old thinking. Enough!

Maybe she had a point. Compared to Maya, who looks a lot more like our half-Malaysian mother, I take after our British father. But I’d still had unwelcome comments growing up in rural Devon, and even now I’d have older patients ask things like, So where are you from? It happened only occasionally, but it was enough for me to feel like I was on the back foot.

The cold wind flamed my face as I marched on. Yanika was right: enough. I’d graduated from medical school with a distinction, had already presented at a national conference, and had been awarded the Foundational Trainee of the Year before getting my first choice core training post. I would of course get a registrar number, and if I didn’t rank highly enough to choose the London Deanery there were many other excellent hospitals to choose from around the country. There was even the possibility of a year abroad. The world was my oyster.



* * *



—

Four hours into my on-call shift, somewhere in Limehouse, an elderly Turkish woman named Deniz was hit by a motorcycle traveling beyond the speed limit, and a young man called Johan witnessed the entire thing. He tried to look away, he later told me, when Deniz’s tiny body was thrown grotesquely high into the air before crashing down on the freezing tarmac, but he couldn’t—he was already running toward her.

I remember everything that happened.

Deniz was still conscious when the paramedics brought her in, but the primary exam was so bleak the A&E consultant had put her into an induced coma almost straight away. She had rib and neck of femur fractures, bruising to the spleen, and a massive haemothorax. She needed a chest drain urgently.

I asked if I could do the chest drain, of course, but the A&E registrar needed the procedure for his own log book. As I prepped Deniz for the CT afterward, I could see that her chest drain only had around two hundred fifty milliliters of blood in it, even though there must have been at least a liter in her chest. I queried this with the A&E consultant.

“I think it’s good enough,” the consultant told me, peering at her registrar’s work. “We need to get her down to scan now, anyway.”

I let it go. I was a core trainee; this woman was not interested in my opinion.

As we wheeled Deniz’s trolley down toward the lifts, a police officer came through from A&E. “Lose the police officer” was a common pastime in Emergency Medicine, and I purposefully kept my eyes down. But—and I would later put this down to my Johan sixth sense—I found myself turning back to look at the policeman as we passed. Seconds later, my eyes were drawn to the man he was talking to.

And for a few more minutes Johan was still just a man in a corridor. A tall young man, deep in conversation with the policeman. He was wearing work trousers, the sort tradesmen wear, full of pockets and covered in paint. A rucksack with a bike helmet clipped to the side. His eyes, striking even from a distance, swerved away from the police officer mid-conversation and momentarily met mine.

I registered a fleeting shock, although that wasn’t so unusual in trauma. Most of us operated in a heightened state.

Johan’s eyes held mine as he talked, following me. I turned away to call the lift and check Deniz’s monitor, but then I looked back again. Oddly, for me, I couldn’t help myself. He was still talking, still watching me quite openly. Somewhere inside me, a warning signal. For a moment we looked directly at each other. Then the lift doors opened and I was off.



* * *



—

It was a bad day in the department. As we came back from scan most of the team was diverted to a code red being helicoptered in from Essex, leaving me on my own to do Deniz’s secondary exam.

I began immediately, starting with the chest drain I’d been worried about. It had slipped, I was right, and the drain wasn’t swinging with Deniz’s breath. I ran across to Resus 2 to ask for help but the code red was just arriving and there was not one person I could have peeled away.

I ran back across to Deniz, whose oxygen sats were now dangerously low. I yelled for anyone else in Emergency Medicine—anyone at all—but nobody came.

At that moment the police officer from the corridor walked into the room, as if it were no more than a ward cubicle, and with him the man in the work trousers with those eyes.

“I’m sorry to trouble, you, Nurse, but I need to ascertain—”

“I’m one of the surgical doctors,” I interrupted. Yanika had taught me to shut that kind of thing down immediately. Nothing will change if you don’t, she’d said, just like my mother would have done, and they were right. “Please leave. My patient needs urgent help.”

He bristled. Police officers don’t like being given orders. “I understand that, Doctor”—a mild note of disdain—“but the thing is, this man, who was an eyewitness at the scene, has the patient’s belongings with him, and before we can release them to her we need to confirm her identity.”