The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways

Sliding doors - how I did (and almost didn't) meet my husband... #Memory Box Moments

Back in September last year - I think when I posted Chapter 19. Nearest & Dearest of my book Hold My hand: A Journey Back to Life - someone asked how I met Kim, my beloved husband of the past 18 years. Just writing down that number it seems insane that we’ve been together so long - time flies when you’re having fun. :o) So here for your reading and listening delight (I can hope, right?!) is that very story… I hope you enjoy!

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I don’t believe in a higher power. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in a pre-defined destiny. But occasionally I feel that the universe has a plan and it’s not going to give up on something that is meant to be.

Back in the mid to late 1990’s I was working in the Osteoporosis Unit at Guy’s Hospital, right by London Bridge station (and these days beside The Shard). Initially I was studying for my PhD, researching a new way to image and identify fractures in the spines of osteoporosis patients. Osteoporosis is a condition that makes bones fragile and more susceptible to fractures. By spring 1999 - as a Prince fan I thought it was cool to have that date on the spine of my bound PhD thesis - I’d finally graduated and was incredibly proud to drop being a ‘Mrs’ and to become ‘Dr’ instead.

I stayed on to run the research section of the unit, working on clinical trials to test potential new drugs to treat the disease. I loved the science, wasn’t so enamored about seeing patients or taking blood, and definitely hated the long commute from Watford. I was also stuck between a rock and a hard place, in a political minefield, being employed by King’s College (the university) and fighting with collaborating with the NHS managers overseeing the running of the unit which also provided a bone density screening service for the community.

By the end of 2000 I’d had enough and I left to join what was then Glaxo Wellcome, as a contractor. It rapidly became GlaxoSmithKline, aka GSK, who were just daft enough to give me a permanent job. I was running something called Phase I studies - testing new drugs for the first or second time in humans. Fascinating, and sometimes nerve-wracking stuff. I made friends and assumed that I’d be there for a decade or more.

But a matter of months after I started there I got a call…

I had no idea that the universe had in fact already failed to execute its plan once and wasn’t intending to fail again. So it was trying to push me in a different direction.

That call was from an imaging company, also focused on the clinical trials space, about going to work for them. It was a lucky break for me. I knew the CEO. At a previous company he’d been the financial sponsor of my PhD, but he’d relatively recently moved to this new company that had been spun out of a clutch of academic groups in Europe and the USA. It was called Synarc - 120 employees spread around six offices. That name has long since disappeared, erased by a number of sequential acquisitions, but some of those folks are still there doing their bit to help patients.

The CEO wanted me to join them. He thought I’d be good at sales. I’d done it before, right? Errrr, kinda?! I’m not sure that selling clothes at C&A for a few years counted? Was I really the type of person to be in sales? I wasn’t sure. My vision back then of a ‘sales’ person was a man with shiny black shoes and white toweling socks. Yes, maybe my thinking was stuck in the 80’s even though we’re talking 2001. I imagined a sleazy secondhand car salesman. Someone who was pushy, slimy, cheesy, dishonest, manipulative, disreputable, smarmy… Need I say more?

He came over to London from the US and a lunch meeting turned into an entire day together - talking, and talking, and talking some more. We walked across the city, all the way back to Guy’s Hospital, to visit mutual friends. There was dinner in a little Italian restaurant - I don’t remember where. And there was an incredibly irate (first) husband who couldn’t understand why I wasn’t home yet and why I was totally ignoring his texts and calls to my mobile!

They made me a formal offer. It was a good one. I almost said yes. But I was chicken. Freaked out at the thought of a SALES job. It wasn’t me. I couldn’t live up to their expectations. I wouldn’t be able to stand the pressure. I turned the job down.

And then a few days later Granny P (Mums mum) died. The first grandparent I’d lost that I could remember. My perspective changed. And boy, did I regret my decision.

I was forced to pull on my big girl pants and call the CEO. Tell him I’d made the wrong decision. Do that apology dance. And ask if they could please make that offer again? Pretty please?

I was given a penance to complete before they’d consider it. I was required to come here to the office in Copenhagen, located in a suburb called Herlev (just a mile or two from where I sit as I write this), and meet with their European General Manager for a second time.

We didn’t get on at my original interview with him. I’d been thrown and had taken offence at some of his (utterly inappropriate) questions. For example - “Do you plan to have kids?” “And if so, when?” He wanted to be able to plan ahead for any maternity leave cover! To rub salt in the wound I’d only recently admitted defeat after spending years enduring fertility treatment to try, and ultimately fail, to have kids of my own. The CEO wanted us to mend some fences.

I got on a plane and I remember sitting in the middle of the open office for lunch. There was a full kitchen and long tables for people to eat together. And there was this guy. Sitting on the other side of the table a little to my right.

I had no idea who he was, but he (and I think all of the office) knew who I was and why I was there. His English had an American twang, gained from watched lots and lots of American movies. He talked to me. Made me feel welcome. He seemed warm and kind, happy to chat while many of his colleagues stayed quiet.

This time when they offered the job I accepted. I started working from home in Watford and then from Oxford. Anyone else remember the days of ISDN lines, the supposedly groundbreaking alternative to analog dial-up, before broadband made it’s appearance?

I was pretty good at having IT issues. But I got support from the head of IT in the Copenhagen office. Until he didn’t have time anymore and dumped me handed me on to his minion, this person called Kim. Who turned out to be the guy who had been so kind to me at that lunch.

Kim would never give up when I (or anyone else) had a problem. But was always generous enough to give me credit when I (rarely) solved something myself. He never made me feel like an error 40 - the problem being 40cm behind the screen. Apologies to all the IT guys out there for giving away your secret code!

But he still takes great delight in telling the story about the time that I managed to collect 187 (yes, that really is 187!!!) viruses on my laptop and it ground, unsurprisingly, to a shuddering halt.

One day, some time in 2002 I’d guess, I’d come over to the office for a day or two, probably for a customer meeting. As always I had to go visit IT because of some kind of problem - nothing to do with the user of course! Kim was peering intently at his own screen. His forehead wrinkled in concentration. As it turns out he was trying to work out why I was already in his Outlook contacts?

It took a while for the penny to drop. One of the other students working with me at Guy’s had been doing a PhD testing the use of ultrasound to measure bone density and diagnose osteoporosis. She was using a prototype machine developed by a company in Denmark.

Multiple times we’d packed up her machine in it’s wooden crate to send it back for repairs or additional testing. I hadn’t realized, but it was Kim’s name that we were printing to put on that shipping crate. And to add to the fun she’d given the company my information as her backup contact and Kim had added me to his Outlook contacts - bringing them with him when he moved company to Synarc.

But it doesn’t end there. This particular machine was a royal pain in the butt a little erratic and unstable when it came to measuring bone density. The company that developed it started to question if there was something environmental affecting it. So rather than send it back for the 100th time they decided to send an engineer over from Denmark to look at it in the room where we were using it.

Have you guessed where this is going?

It would have been somewhere in the summer or autumn of 1998. I was busy writing up my PhD thesis. Spending some of my days at home to get a little peace and more words on the page. And that’s where the universe failed first time around - I was at home on THAT day when the engineer visited.

I remember coming in the next day to stories about this handsome ‘Viking’ engineer who had come to visit. The two other (female) PhD students couldn’t stop chattering about him!

But let me put this in perspective. We worked in a department primarily catering to patients who were old ladies and on a floor also occupied by a children’s ward. We were starved of good looking men in our age group. The highlight of our week would be when someone (usually a kid on the ward) set off the fire alarm so we got to watch a bunch of firemen rush past our offices in their uniforms!

Image caption: Kim in full movie star mode. Just ask him how many years he used this picture on his LinkedIn profile! We’re not sure of the exact date, but we think it was likely taken in late summer 2003 at a Synarc event.

As Kim and I talked, not only did we work out why I was in his Outlook contacts, but light also dawned that he was that handsome engineer that had come to visit the hospital to try and fix my friends ultrasound machine.

So after two attempts the universe finally succeeded and managed to engineer us meeting.

I’ve often thought back to the multitude of sliding doors moments in my life that resulted in that happening.

If I hadn’t decided to go to university at the ripe (not) old age of 24.

If I hadn’t happened to choose osteoporosis as the topic for my final Bachelors degree project.

If I hadn’t happened to see the advert for my PhD place in the New Scientist magazine that week.

If I hadn’t kept on walking forwards when I was tempted to turn back and go home, on the way to my PhD interview, unsure that I could survive on the small financial grant that I’d get if I was offered the place.

If my Gran hadn’t happened to die right at that time.

If I hadn’t met that particular CEO.

If I hadn’t regretted my decision, swallowed my pride to make that call, and hadn’t come to Copenhagen to make peace with the General Manager. (Though I’d still like to give him a piece of my mind when it come to those questions! I can’t believe I held my tongue. But I guess, good that I did.)

If I hadn’t finally been offered the Synarc job for a second time and accepted it.

If… If… If…

As I’ve said before - life is truly a game of chance.

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It would be a few years, with plenty more sliding doors moments that could have sent each of us in different directions, before we realized we had feelings for each other.

There would be a divorce for me, a different job that lasted for only 3 days - until I regretted that one too and returned to Synarc - and then an unexpected move to beautiful Copenhagen.

Later there would also be a separation, followed by a divorce for Kim too.

And then…

… my visa came through to move to San Francisco. I still thank my lucky stars that it felt too far away from my family in the UK, and the company was undeniably unstable, so I decided not to make the move.

But in the end the universe got its wish. We fell in love. Bought a house together … And swore that neither of us needed to get married again.

Image caption: a picture of a horrible old polaroid, but look at those smiles on what was a truly joyful day - of course we had to have the obligatory house-warming party just three days after we got the keys!

Well… you know there seems to be a bit of a theme in this post of me regretting things. In this case I didn’t so much regret that I’d said I didn’t want to get married again, but I had a burning desire to stand up in front of our friends and family and proclaim to the world just how much I loved this guy.

Thank goodness he felt the same.

A couple of years later, on 22nd March 2008 and the day before I turned 41 years old, we sealed the deal and got married in his home town here in Denmark. More on that another day.

It was almost exactly 10 years after the universe starting working on it’s mysterious plan to bring us together.

What sliding doors moments, or chance encounters, have changed your life?

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Thank you for reading or listening along. If you liked this post then I’d love it if you would click on the heart and add a comment about what resonated for you – it means a lot to me to hear from each and every one of you.

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In case you missed it, I published my book - Hold My Hand: A Journey Back to Life - for FREE here on Substack last year. If you’d like to read it then you can find each chapter by clicking HERE and you’ll go directly to the webpage dedicated to the book.

If you would also be kind enough to share it I would be eternally grateful as it will help more people learn about these deadly infections. Maybe one day that knowledge will save a life.

Thank you!