I have read it about forty times. It is a page and a half and it is not, in itself, a lie — that is the clever bit, and it is the bit that tells you who drafted it.
It says that I worked long hours. True. It says I was distressed in the staff room on an occasion in the November of 2022 — which I was, because I had come out of a clinic in which I had told a family something nobody wants to hear, and she sat with me for forty minutes and got me tea.
And it says that she had “concerns about Dr Sandell’s wellbeing in the period in question”.
She did. She had told me so, in my own kitchen, repeatedly, because she was my friend.
Every true thing she had ever noticed about me as a friend went into a document as a concern from a colleague.
She tried to take it back.
On the ninth of April, 2024 — two months after I signed the settlement, three months before her son was born — Yvie Grear wrote to the regulator asking to withdraw her statement.
Two paragraphs. It says she signed it believing it was a welfare referral, that she had not understood it would form part of a complaint about my fitness to practise, and that she did not wish it to be relied upon.
It is in the file. It is stamped. It was received.
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.
He turned the eleven appointments where I was looked after into the thing that took my clinics away.
What Rhett did afterwards.
He has not apologised and he is not going to and I have stopped waiting for the scene where he does.
The complaint is not in itself a criminal matter and nobody is going to prosecute him for it, which took me about four months to accept.
What has actually happened to him is civil and slow and boring and extremely effective.
The settlement went. The house is going. There is a costs order against him from the February that he cannot pay, and a second claim that Hollis says will be listed next year.
He has moved to Brackwater and is living in a rented flat with Yvie and that boy, and I know those facts only because they are in the papers.
And the thing I have had to make peace with is that he is forty-two, and he is not going to look at any of this and understand it. He is going to understand it as a thing that was done to him.
The corridor.
One more thing about that day, because people always want the moment.
It was not satisfying.
I have thought about it a great deal and I would not have it again.
That was a paediatric corridor on a Wednesday afternoon. There were eleven people in that waiting area and two of them were children in wheelchairs, and one family had come out of a conversation I know the shape of.
And in the middle of it a man said the word infertile at volume about a colleague of theirs, and a bottle broke, and a lot of frightened people had to watch two adults have a divorce in front of them.
The sister on that floor is called Bernadine and she is sixty and she has worked there twenty-two years, and she got everybody moved and the floor cleared inside about ninety seconds, and then she came and found me in the sluice and said: “Right. Breathe.”
That is what actually happened. There was no applause. There was a woman of sixty with a mop.
And I went to my meeting, eleven minutes late, and did not say why.
What I did not do.
I did not look at that child’s notes.
I want that written down because it is the only thing in this entire account that I am proud of without qualification.
He was on the system. I could have had his record open in about nine seconds from any terminal in that building, and I would have been able to tell you his birth weight and his blood group and who was at the delivery.
Thirty-one per cent of me wanted to.
And I have access to that system because sick children need me to have it, and the day I use it for anything else is the day the complaint becomes true.
So I did not, and I am going to keep not doing it, and when he is eighteen there will be an audit trail with my staff number nowhere on it.
And my sister Wren, who did one thing in 2023 that I have never properly thanked her for.
In the July of that year, six weeks in, she drove to Ellery and sat in my kitchen and asked me straight out whether I thought Rhett had made the complaint.
And I said no.
And she said: “Petra. Look at me and say that again.”
And I said no again, and I held her eye while I did it, because I am extremely good at that and always have been.
And she did not argue. She said, “Okay,” and made the tea, and then she said one thing before she left, which I dismissed at the time as sisters being sisters.
She said: “Right. Well. Write down the date you decided that, because you’ll want to know it later.”
I thought she was being dramatic.
I wrote it on the back of an envelope that night out of pure irritation — 17/7/23, told W no — and put it in the drawer with the resignation letter, and forgot about it for two years.
Hollis Quayle has that envelope now. It is in a bundle, with a page number, as evidence of when I formed the belief and what I did about it, which goes to the question of why I signed in the February.
My sister, who is a dental nurse in Ellery and has never been inside a courtroom, told me in a kitchen in 2023 to write the date down.
Where things are.
I went back to clinical work on the eleventh of August, 2024, in a paediatric outpatient clinic, with a mentor sitting in for the first six weeks, which was not required and which I asked for.
I am a consultant. I have been at Thornhill for eleven years and I will probably die there.
My sister Wren moved to Ellery in the January of 2024 and has not mentioned leaving.
And I have no interest in anybody and have stopped being asked about it, which is the single best thing about turning thirty-nine.
And the giraffe, which I have not been able to stop thinking about and which is the only part of that corridor I would keep.
When the bottle went, the boy did not cry.
He was eleven months into his life and a glass bottle had just gone off like a gunshot about a metre from his head, and his mother had made a noise, and four adults had gone rigid.
And he leaned over the side of the buggy to look at the floor, interested, and then held the giraffe out.
Towards the mess. Towards nobody in particular — the way they do at that age, offering you the thing they are holding because something has happened and they do not know what else to do.
He offered a stuffed giraffe to a broken bottle, in a corridor, while the four adults responsible for his entire life stood over him being the worst versions of themselves in public.
Bernadine saw it too. She mentioned it, months later, without my bringing it up.
And that is the image I have instead of the one everybody wants, which is my ex-husband’s face when the lift opened.
I can barely remember his face.
I can remember a child holding out a toy to a puddle of milk and glass because he had worked out that something was wrong and that was everything he had.
And the last thing.
In the May of this year a referral came through to my clinic.
A boy of twenty-two months, routine, from a GP in Brackwater, about his hearing after a run of ear infections. Nothing frightening. The sort of thing I see four times a week.
And the surname was Mallory.
I sat and looked at that screen for a while. Not long. Perhaps a minute.
And then I filled in a form.
There is a box on it for the nature of the conflict, and you write it in free text, and I typed: I am the former spouse of the patient’s father and have been party to legal proceedings involving both parents.
And then I passed the case to a colleague called Jun Abara, who is better than me at ears anyway, and I wrote a one-line note on the system and did not open the rest of the record.
Yvie rang me about it eight days later. She had been told it had been reallocated and why, because that is what the letter says.
And she said — and she was crying, and I do not think it was tactical — “You could have just seen him, Petra. I’d have been fine with it. I’d have preferred it.”
And I said no.
And she said: “Why? You know you’re the best one there for it.”
And I said: because he is two.
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And because in about eleven years he is going to be old enough to look his own parents up, and some of this is going to be findable, and at some point that boy is going to want to know whether any adult in the whole business behaved properly.
And when he gets to that form, with my name on it, I would like it to say that the first thing I did when he came onto my list was take myself off it.
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