Black Widow Read online

  ‘And how did Dr Jager respond to your suggestion?’

  ‘It would be fair to say she disagreed. She said my beard merely made me look like Hipster Jesus, and that the principal physical attribute affecting the patient’s misunderstanding was my penis.’

  ‘And was this the first time you had been party to such a prejudiced assumption on the part of a patient?’

  ‘Not at all. Patients over a certain age often assume anyone female is a nurse, even if it states their title on their name badge. I’ve even seen male doctors peg female consultants as juniors because they look young.’

  ‘So it is a common, if regrettable, occurrence. And yet from your response we can tell you were utterly aghast that Dr Jager in particular should be assumed to be your junior colleague. One might even say disproportionately horrified. Would that be fair?’

  ‘It would be an understatement.’

  ‘And yet you had never worked with Dr Jager before. Why then were you so treading on eggshells?’

  ‘Her reputation preceded my arrival in the post. In fact, I had no idea she worked there before I transferred to Inverness, so when I discovered she was in the same department, I was … apprehensive, yes.’

  Parlabane nodded to himself, as the fiscal’s intentions began to come into focus. The journey had been like the corporation bus: it had taken a bafflingly circuitous route, but it was finally getting to its destination.

  ‘Where did you transfer from?’

  ‘I was in Liverpool. My wife…’

  ‘Liverpool. So it would be accurate to say that in medical circles there were things widely known about Dr Jager far beyond the environs of Inverness Royal Infirmary?’

  ‘Yes. Very widely. One thing in particular.’

  ‘And what was that, Mr Weatherson?’

  The young registrar spoke with coy self-consciousness, like a kid in a primary school classroom who has been told by the teacher that in the interests of getting to the truth, it’s okay to repeat the rude word he overheard.

  ‘She was Bladebitch.’

  COMPASSION FATIGUE

  It was an inauspicious day for destiny to come calling, though it is not in the nature of fate to give notice. The occasions that we think of as life-changing are seldom precipitate. Rather they tend to be mere milestones and markers, events long in the planning, diligently worked towards and keenly anticipated: births, christenings, exams, graduations, job interviews, career commencement.

  Weddings.

  We recognise the truly significant events – the moments when fate genuinely turns – only in retrospect. This is probably just as well. If you were told in advance that you were about to meet the man who would become the love of your life, then the pressure would be so enormous that most of us would undoubtedly blow it. It would be like a variant of the Heisenberg principle, whereby the act of observation alters that which is being observed. The state you are in during a fateful encounter may be crucial to the outcome, though it is not exactly heart-warming to look back and see that my own chances of finding love may have hinged upon being an exhausted, angry and overwrought mess. And yet I now realise that it was only because my guard was down and finding a life partner was the furthest thing from my mind that he slipped through the barricades.

  I wouldn’t say I’d completely given up on the idea of meeting the right man, but I was moving ever closer to accepting the notion. That’s not the same as saying I had made my peace with it, more a matter of managing expectations. I’d had a few relationships, but the longest of them only lasted a few months, and the last one was four years before the time we’re talking about. Well, strictly speaking … No. I’m not going to start defining one-night stands as relationships. They were only about sex, about getting someone to make me feel a certain way. I’m talking about the last time there was someone I felt something for. So, yes, four years.

  The fact that it had been so long actually snuck up on me that morning: one of the many things that conspired to make the circumstances seem so unpromising on the day I would meet the man who changed my life for ever.

  I was passing the fish counter when I caught a glimpse of some squat lobsters, which I hadn’t seen there in ages. It sparked a memory of buying them the first time I cooked for Dan, a radiologist I started seeing when I first moved to Inverness.

  I really thought it was going somewhere, that it would last. Taking up the post at IRI was supposed to be a kind of banishment from the prestigious world of the big teaching hospitals, but it felt like a new beginning after everything that had happened. I’m not sure whether meeting Dan contributed to that feeling, or whether I felt so optimistic about Dan because of how I felt about everything else, but either way, I had high hopes.

  Then he found out about Bladebitch. That was the beginning of the end.

  It seemed so stupid, so unnecessary. I hadn’t changed, but suddenly I could tell he saw me differently. Whatever he had previously projected on to me had been switched off, and replaced with a new projection he was entirely less comfortable with.

  Shortly afterwards Dan started seeing someone else: someone less complicated; someone who more readily conformed to his ideals of what a woman – what a wife – ought to be. Her name was Donna: a bubbly but vacuous nurse manager who favoured push-up bras and giddy helplessness as her mating displays.

  Dan and Donna were married within a year of us breaking up, and they’ve already got two kids. That was why it suddenly hit me so hard as I stood there at the fish counter: I realised how long it had been since then, how far on his life had moved, and how little mine had changed. It had been four years since I had anyone I could call a boyfriend, and I was at a stage in life where nobody I considered a friend ought to be describable as a boy.

  I’m not saying I thought for sure that Dan was ‘the one’, by the way. It’s simply that back then, I hadn’t reached the stage where I was worrying about whether I’d find ‘the one’; or even allowing embarrassing phrases like ‘the one’ to actually form in my head.

  I was still young, I thought. There would be time. But then one day you wake up and it doesn’t feel like there’s time. Being with Dan was the last occasion I could remember contemplating a guy as date material without wondering if he might be my last chance. That mindset has subsequently killed a few things before they even got started: flirtings that might have gone further; conversations that might have led to something else if I wasn’t already anticipating the reasons a relationship wouldn’t work in the long run.

  That’s what I mean about being off my guard. If I’d been thinking straight that day, he would never have got in under my radar. But I was a long way from thinking straight that day.

  I couldn’t remember feeling so low. I told myself it was just fatigue. I’d had a very demanding and frustrating schedule in theatre the day before, but despite my exhaustion, I was too wired to sleep properly. After a few fitful hours I found myself lying awake at about half past four, which was when I decided to cut my losses and get up. A short while later I was pushing my mini-trolley around a twenty-four-hour supermarket, struggling to fill it with enough items to justify having anything bigger than a basket.

  Walking the aisles, it was like I was navigating a living, walking (and trundling) theatre list, one that would never end. All around me were future cases, meat-wrapped parcels of symptoms filling their trolleys with precisely the items they needed to exacerbate their conditions.

  It was too early in the day for the shop to sell drink, but the guzzling of it was marked indelibly on many of the faces that passed me, their cheeks yellow-tinged and their noses florid with broken capillaries.

  Everywhere I turned, I saw, heard and smelled the symptoms and the causes of disease and decay. The place was dotted with overweight and conspicuously unhealthy people loading up on fat, salt and sugar, filling their trolleys with the very pathogens that were poisoning them.

  It hit me that I could no longer see human beings. I could only see pathology. I was resentfu
l of the choices they were making, wilfully creating a mess that it would be my problem to clear up.

  This happens sometimes. I suddenly see myself as though from the outside, looking down, and I’m someone else: someone I don’t like. She is cruel and callous and I have no control over her. Unfortunately I can’t say she’s someone I don’t recognise, because I had been seeing more and more of her back then.

  Let me tell you, there are few things more pitiful than having an epiphany in Tesco at five thirty a.m., and one of them is standing in Tesco at five thirty a.m. and being in denial about what the epiphany is telling you.

  Yes I was tired. I just wasn’t accepting what I was tired of. I had spent so long railing against exclusion in my profession that it had never occurred to me to consider the value of what I was so determined to be included in.

  When I reached the fish counter and began thinking about Dan, one of the things that struck me was that I had spent the last ten minutes getting angry about other people’s shopping. That’s got to be a pretty big indication that I’d bottomed out. But you’re seldom so low that you can’t fall further, and so it proved when I made it into work.

  ‘Well, you’ve taken the first step. Another two thousand days and you won’t need the procedure at all.’

  The second the words were out there it was like I was looking down upon the scene from above, then suddenly had to pilot my body once more.

  I felt so ashamed.

  What was happening to me? What was I turning into? My very purpose, the thing that got me up in the morning, was to help patients like this one. There was little I didn’t know about what life was like for this man and for all the bariatric patients I had operated on before him. Their conditions were a result of the most intractable psychological complexity, their lives miserable and depressed. By the time they had reached me, it was because the procedure I could carry out was their last hope.

  It sounded like someone else talking: or at least the someone who lurks inside but is never permitted to surface in hospital. I am used to biting my tongue in these situations, because sometimes dealing with their denial and self-delusion is as much a part of helping them as the operation itself. When you ask them about their diet, it’s like asking an alcoholic about how much they drink: you know they’re lying to you, but more importantly they’re lying to themselves. So you have to handle it subtly. They describe a modest intake of food, so I respond by suggesting that this procedure isn’t the right one for them, as it will only help people who grossly over-consume. They usually fess up to a few more Mars bars after that.

  I have been outraged by colleagues who have spoken indiscreetly about such patients, never mind to their faces. Such as the anaesthetist who once expressed his incredulity that a woman with a BMI of sixty was a vegetarian. ‘What does she eat?’ he asked: ‘Fucking trees?’

  I laid into him for his lack of professionalism and for his insensitivity.

  And yet here I was, saying possibly the worst thing I could as the person who was going to operate on this man. I might as well have called him a greedy bastard.

  It was inexcusable.

  There were mitigating circumstances, but I didn’t think ‘having an existential crisis’ was something I should include in my written response to the inevitable formal complaint.

  It was the culmination of a lot of things. My sleep-deprived and brittle state of mind was not improved when I first got to my office that morning and discovered I had been locked out of the hospital intranet. This meant I would have to get in touch with our utterly hopeless IT department and be patronised over the phone for ten minutes, or worse: that it would require an on-site visit and I’d have to endure being patronised in person by Creepy Craig.

  That was how things stood by 7.35, before I had gone to surgical high dependency and learned that they no longer had a bed for the first patient on my list, despite my securing a guarantee of this last thing before leaving yesterday evening.

  It was fair to say I was ready to blow, and I used up the last of my restraint in not responding when the patient voiced his assumption – despite me having spoken to him several times before – that I was not the consultant and that Hipster Jesus was my boss.

  Everybody’s got their limits, an endurance of frustration beyond which their composure cracks. But I was doubly angry about what I said to that patient because as a woman in this job, you’re judged more harshly if you lose your cool. Women are too emotional, see? Fragile temperament. When a chap cuts a strip off of someone it’s because he ‘doesn’t suffer fools’, and it’s a sign of strength. When a woman does the same, it’s interpreted as a sign of weakness.

  So I was in a personal hell of self-flagellation as I worked through the list that day, and just to put a cherry on top, I had a techie visit to look forward to. I had quickly called the IT department to report the problem while the anaesthetist was prepping my next patient, and been given the bad news that it wasn’t something they could sort from their end.

  For reasons I’m sure you’re familiar with, hospital IT personnel were not my favourite people in the world at this point. Obviously the ones at IRI hadn’t done anything as utterly loathsome as I’d endured in the past, but nor were they doing much to improve the low regard in which I held their fraternity.

  What normally happened was that Creepy Craig would show up, at least twenty minutes later than stated, then proceed to walk me through a sequence of steps intended to determine whether the problem was down to stupidity at my end. He never assumed any knowledge. It was like his brain didn’t accept cookies, so he had no recollection of the level of proficiency he could expect in assessing my dealings with the system or with computers in general.

  That’s my more charitable explanation anyway. The alternative interpretation is that this part of the procedure, with him leaning over my left shoulder (and always my left shoulder), afforded him a sustained opportunity to peek through the gaps in my blouse.

  Once Craig had determined that the issue was not going to resolve itself merely as a result of a man using the computer properly, he would usually proceed to get out his laptop or log into the restricted layers of the system from my machine. After a further quarter of an hour of stinking up my office with BO and halitosis, he would declare the problem solved or else sigh a lot and blame issues further up the chain.

  That was what I had to look forward to at the end of this particular day: a little turd garnish on top of a gigantic shit sandwich served with a side of sick.

  My list ended early, due to another cancellation resultant of the HDU bottleneck. I longed to go home, but instead I had to wait in my office otherwise I’d still be locked out of the system come Monday morning, when I had a ton of admin to get through.

  At around ten past five I heard a knock and felt a shudder run through me. I glanced down at my blouse and wished I had a cardie. The problem was I never thought to bring in such a thing, as it was always cloyingly hot in the hospital, apart from in maternity theatre, where a cadre of menopausal midwives fiercely guarded a thermostat set at twenty degrees.

  I was contemplating my mistake in getting changed out of my theatre blues when I called out to Craig to enter.

  The door swung open slightly, and a head appeared around it, tentative to the point of apologetic.

  ‘You’re not Craig.’

  ‘No. I’m Peter.’

  MIGHTIER THAN THE SCALPEL

  Bladebitch, as she became known, was the then anonymous author of the now infamous ‘Sexism in Surgery’ blog, which was already causing controversy among medical professionals before it went explosively – some might even say violently – viral about five years back.

  Parlabane first had it drawn to his attention by his then wife Sarah, whose poring over the postings was equally likely to be accompanied by snorts of indignant outrage or cackles of approval, as well as the occasional disbelieving gasp. These last were not to indicate incredulity at the content; rather more: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe
she went there.’

  She called herself Scalpelgirl, but it was the corrupted version that passed into public notice when scandal struck, meaning her chosen monicker became largely forgotten except among the blog’s original readership, and eventually even they had to refer to Bladebitch if they wanted people to know what they were talking about.

  Scalpelgirl was part agony aunt and part firebrand polemicist. She collated tales of misogyny that had been sent to her by female surgeons from across the UK, passing on their shocking details and responding with sometimes equally shocking invective.

  As the blog grew in popularity, the stories started to come flooding into the comments section by themselves, with Scalpelgirl’s overview articles sparking off areas of discussion or editorialising over a particular theme that had emerged.

  There were copious examples of comments that female doctors had to listen to, which Scalpelgirl categorised as ‘low-level harassment’, constantly reminding readers that ‘the very constancy of this background hum is both its greatest indictment and its greatest threat. The danger is that we’ll become so used to it that people will cease to notice how wrong it is.’

  Parlabane recalled Sarah delightedly sharing one particular column on this subject with her peers on social media. It was entitled ‘Are You Too Cute to Be a Surgeon?’, and began by citing a number of quotes from recently posted accounts, including the one that had given the article its title. Looking ‘too nice’, ‘too sexy’, ‘too homely’ and ‘too dainty’ were all apparently contra-indicated for a career in surgery, according to male colleagues.

  This laid the groundwork for male prescriptions upon a more specific area of the surgical female’s form. ‘I could take her more seriously if those tits weren’t so big,’ one correspondent had heard said of a colleague. A number of similar remarks were cited, before being contrasted with quotes suggesting that a display of cleavage or a generous bust had played a part in career preferment.