The One Day You Were My Husband (5)
Running a household was enough for plenty of other women, brilliant women with sharp brains and important careers before they’d had children. But I’d often wondered, as I scrubbed the toilets in the Pig Shed, if I might simply have a different genetic makeup. My own mother certainly wasn’t built for parenting or housekeeping. She’d gone back out campaigning by the time I reached eleven weeks and had suffered no guilt at all. She’d done what she needed to do and was much happier as a result.
Once the idea of returning to work had taken hold in my mind, it was my sole focus. I wasn’t doing it because I had to—it was at this time that Robin finally got a job—but rather because I wanted to. The day I phoned the GMC to reregister as a physician felt like a rebirth.
Now as then, Robin is in support of my plans, but I know the speed of it all has been overwhelming. Especially with my decision to visit Sweden for three nights next month. Until recently, I wasn’t willing to leave the kids even for a night.
* * *
—
I relax, letting Robin hold me. It is spectacular, he’s right. No matter how long it takes me to retrain not just my brain but my hands, or how many years it takes me to get back to ST6, which is where I was when I left, the NHS’s willingness to accept me back is in itself cause for great celebration. It was never a given.
“I also got a call from Yanika Hatziz this afternoon. She’s said I can go and shadow her in Sweden while I’m waiting for my reorientation to start! Although first I’ve got to meet her for some sort of interrogation when I’m in Stockholm.”
I pick up Raffy’s little stuffed rabbit—Friday Bunny, his name is, because we bought him on a Friday—and throw him up into the air, catching him and hugging him hard.
“My favorite biohazard,” I say, smiling into Friday Bunny’s sweet, germy fur.
I force myself to sit down, and Robin hands me my bowl of macaroni. He says, “I’m ashamed to admit I believed them when they told you it couldn’t be done. More fool me. If anyone can pull this off, it’s you.”
“They had forgotten what a good surgeon I was.”
I’m trying to speak in this way—to think in this way—as frequently as feels bearable. There will be people wanting to crush me at every turn over the next few years, as I inch my way back into my career. My old friend Dell from medical school has warned that the softer edges of the NHS as an employer have yet to extend to surgery.
“Have you told your mum?” Robin asks.
“I called her. She didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“That sounds about right.” He squeezes my hand.
“Oh, I think she’ll be pleased. She’s never been able to get her head around me choosing to be a stay-at-home mum.”
Robin’s seen Mum let me and my children down too many times to have a great deal of time for her, but he’s respectful enough to keep his thoughts to himself most of the time.
“Tell me more about this placement in Sweden,” he says. “Will you have to speak Swedish?”
“I think so. Yanika says they all speak English, but no clinician in their right mind would speak a foreign language in an emergency. I’m getting a language app so I can start brushing up.”
“Right,” Robin says, less enthusiastically. “Sounds sensible.”
He knows that I signed up for Swedish classes soon after getting together with Johan, that I was drunk on love from the start. And, no matter how happy Robin and I are, no matter how many years have passed since I cared in any way about Johan, I think it pains him that the language lives on inside me. That there was once a time when I would lie awake next to Johan, thinking, Jag ?lskar dig. I love you. I love you.
I eat another forkful of macaroni, a reminder to Robin that I’m on his team.
He gets out his phone and we google Yanika.
It’s been more than thirteen years since I last worked under Yanika Hatziz, but she remains the best mentor I’ve ever had. Neither of us were traditional surgeon material back then—Yanika with her heavy Greek accent, me a quarter Malaysian and too short to operate without a steel box to stand on. But: “You must never allow these things to hold you back,” she said in our first supervision meeting at the Royal London. “You are to be outstanding and fearless in all you undertake as a surgeon, Carrie. You’ll have the power to save people’s lives in a few short hours! Do not allow anyone, any man, to prevent you from carrying out that duty.”
Sadly for me, Yanika was poached just before the end of my core training—bribed over to Sweden by a prestigious university hospital. She’s the director of cancer and emergency surgery there now; surgeons fly in from all over the world to learn advanced robotics with her. Those that can’t are glued to her YouTube channel, where she uploads videos of surgical techniques she’s quite literally invented herself. I’ve watched them all, agog. She is a powerhouse.
“Isn’t she magnificent?” I say. Robin’s still reading her biography.
I glance at him, just in time to catch something different—something odd—in his eyes. “Oh. What?”
He hadn’t realized he was being watched. He waves me off. “Sorry. I’m just—” He sighs. “It’s just a lot to take in at the moment, Carrie. Six months ago you said you were really happy being a mum, looking after the house and the holiday let. But when I was made redundant you decided almost overnight to go back to surgery, and now you’re making plans to travel abroad.” He waves his phone, Yanika’s picture still on the screen. “I know it’s all happening at seventy miles per hour in your head, but I’m a little way behind you. Forty miles per hour, I think. Accelerating to fifty. But I may still need to take a minute to change gear, every now and then.”