Author’s Note
This is a true story. It spans eleven years, starting when I was halfway through medical school and finishing when I was well into my career as a doctor. All names have been changed and the setting adjusted to suggest that it could have taken place anywhere within the modern medical world in order to protect myself and others who got involuntarily entangled in the drama. If I had not written this book under a pseudonym I would not have been able to say what I wanted to say and still continue to work as a doctor, and if I had not disguised the identities of everybody else I might have harmed them. What good would that do? By anonymously sharing The Sound Of Silence with you I am sending an ‘SOS’ from the medical world to the rest of society in the hope that it may bring relief, help and hope to those who are still suffering, and be an inspiration for improving the way we deal with sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace.
The timeline and details of the plot were established with the aid of emails, text messages, call logs, meeting agendas and minutes, conference dates and programmes, aeroplane tickets, diary logs, sent and unsent letters, documents from my personnel file and notes I took after sessions with psychologists. While I publish many of my own emails in their original form I cannot publish other people’s emails word-for-word for legal reasons. I do, however, convey the messages they contain by carefully paraphrasing the content. Conversations are reconstructed to the best of my ability.
The thing that originally inspired me to write this book was to compile lists of ‘warning signs’ and ‘lessons learned’ in relation to my story, in order to help other victims realise what is happening to them, pull out of a harmful situation faster and with greater ease than I did, and get well sooner. The warning signs and lessons learned are, in my opinion, the most precious part of this book. I placed them separately at the end of some of the chapters so you can easily skip them if you like, but I still suggest you read them together with the main text to broaden your perspective and better understand what I ultimately gained from all the suffering. I later created questions to help people reflect upon abuse in the workplace in a wider context, and compiled the tools of my recovery in a separate section called The Medical Bag. That material was included in the first edition of this book, but has now been moved over here to my website in order to make it more easily available to the public at large. You’ll find the questions under the Extras tab and the tools of my recovery under The Medical Bag tab at the top of the screen.
Many chapters contain musical quotations. I invite you to pause and listen to the pieces whenever they are presented in the text; the playlist (SOS from Volcania) can be found on Spotify, and I’ve placed a link to it under the Playlist tab on this website. The music conveys the mood much better than words ever could, the lyrics were often meaningful to me, and they sometimes contain forebodings and clues to details of the story that I could not openly share in the main text. I was completely silenced every time I spoke up about the harassment, and to emphasise this pervasive pattern I inserted a silence symbol into the text every time that happened. Importantly, I would hardly have survived had I not replaced the sound of silence with music.
I deliberately stayed away from quoting scientific literature while writing the text, and only resorted to such measures when absolutely necessary. I needed and wanted my story to come directly from the heart in order to preserve my humanity, without depersonalising the events with references to research results, statistics, or diagnostic labelling. Us doctors tend to drown difficult experiences – both our own and that of our patients – in professional jargon in order to distance ourselves from them and make them easier to manage. That very process tends to remove the wisdom of the human heart from the equation. And yet the wisdom of the heart, together with my gut feeling, proved invaluable when it came to me getting better. I hope you enjoy the read.