The One Day You Were My Husband (4)

I’ve been trying to change many things.

“Your dad OK?” Robin asks.

I pull my phone out of my pocket to check. I never have it on silent these days, but I still worry all the time that I’ve missed an SOS from Nicola. Thankfully, there’s nothing.

“He’s been quite peaceful today, thank God. But I do have news.” I shut the woodburner and sit back on my heels. “I’m going back to work—it’s confirmed.”

It’s the first time I’ve said these words out loud. They feel exotic, plump with promise. “I’m going to be a surgeon again!”

Robin stares at me. “They’ve given you the green light?”

I nod, beaming like Raff when we put him into his Rolo costume earlier. “They said my assessment went really well and they’ve just confirmed my license to practice. I’m to do six months reorientation in supervised practice, then another six months in specialist, and then they’ll decide what level I’ll go back in at. I’m hoping core trainee at minimum, but even if they make me go back as an F1, I don’t care, I mean—”

“Carrie.” Robin’s grinning. “Layman’s terms.”

“Sorry!” I’m practically hopping up and down. “But the best thing is that they recruited one of my old mentors to set up a specialist hepatobiliary service down in Plymouth last year. He says he’d be open to having me back one day, and, and…and I just feel it, Robin, I feel it! It’s going to happen!”

For a moment, Robin is speechless. Then he gets up and hugs me. “This is nothing short of spectacular.”



* * *



—

The end of my career began the moment I became pregnant.

I felt great for a total of three days, until the vomiting started. It deteriorated rapidly into hyperemesis. When I reached eight weeks Robin had to go away on a three-week business trip and I nearly lost my mind. I was signed off work—a black mark for any surgeon, let alone a pregnant female surgeon—and when I found myself unable even to keep fluids down I had to be admitted to Chelsea and Westminster for six days.

I hated Robin for abandoning me. Despised and loathed him, even though he’d done nothing but go on a work trip that had been in the diary for two months; even though he’d have come back at a moment’s notice if I’d been willing to call him and tell him what was going on.

I forgave him when he returned, of course, because there was nothing to forgive, and the poor man barely left my side until I began to feel better at seventeen weeks. He even went so far as to book us a holiday at the end of my second trimester, by which time we both expected me to be feeling well.

But then our babies were delivered three months premature, and I haven’t traveled since.

I spent 172 days in Chelsea and Westminster hospital with my tiny moths, felled by the way my body had rejected these two helpless creatures, by the appalling anxieties of life in NICU. My life revolved around ventilators, endotracheal suction, infusion pump alarms; the sight of my breast milk trickling through plastic tubes, the purple veins in Raffy and Maeve’s miniature hands. I was entirely disconnected from the outside world.

My babies survived beautifully, but my faith in myself didn’t. When it was time for me to return to work I found that I could not hand my children over to the childminder I’d so painstakingly sought out. What if Raffy deteriorated rapidly with a respiratory virus? Would she spot it in time? What if she was one of those people who “didn’t want to bother me” at work?

I had survived because the twins were with me all day, every day, but I couldn’t manage my anxiety at leaving them with someone else. No more was I equipped for the daily buffet of life and death my job brought; the crushing hours and lack of time to think, the on-call shifts. And so I told Robin I didn’t want to go back.

Without hesitation, Robin cashed in the money he’d inherited aged twenty when his parents died in a road accident. It had been untouchable until this point—his pension and security, guarded closely in an investment portfolio—but he channeled it all into our household savings account so I could be a stay-at-home mother.

I wrote to the London Deanery and Imperial College to tell them I was done with surgery. There were panicked offers of evidence-based rehabilitation this, confidential crisis counseling that, but I declined them all and deregistered from the General Medical Council.

It takes years of work and sacrifice to get into surgery, but it turns out that it takes just a few hours to leave. I became a full-time mother and refused to look back.

Until six months ago, when Robin suddenly, shockingly, lost his job. For more than a decade he had worked for Andrew Heynes, a man of colossal wealth and praiseworthy intentions—or so we believed. Then Andrew, distressingly, was investigated for fraud and most of his operations, even the charitable ones, were temporarily closed down. Robin was one of many redundancies that followed.

I think we both assumed he would find another job quickly, but it took a long time. The landscape has changed a lot in the past decade, it turns out, and people are less keen to give their money away. Robin did a lot of number crunching. We still had his inheritance, of course, but it wouldn’t last indefinitely.

Robin wasn’t sleeping and neither was I. At some point during the past few years I had, without realizing, simply rolled over like a soft animal and allowed my husband to carry me—to carry all of us. I had no idea where Carrie Cole had gone, why I had allowed her to disintegrate without resistance. I had to start earning.