Two hours later, he was filling our doorway, looking every bit the Irish ex-cop familiar to me from family gatherings in the Bronx. He sat at our dining-room table with his little flip-top notebook and seemed genuinely startled by our frankness. We told him, yes, we were partners, yes, Barbara used to be my doctor, and no, I didn’t want to make a complaint to the College. As strange as it sounds, I was grateful for the chance to tell my side of the story. After he left, we both felt giddy with relief. Then the CPSO ordered Barbara to hand over my medical chart.

Back in the day, Toronto lawyer Marlys Edwardh had confiscated lots of charts. She was one of several high-powered gunslingers brought in by the College in the early 1990s to prosecute doctors under the amended act. She’d worked some tough cases, but after a few years some of the prosecutions began to seem unreasonable to her. Now that she was playing for the other side, she was the obvious choice to protect my chart, which contained ten years’ worth of the most intimate aspects of my life and could be used against Barbara in any number of ways.

I met Edwardh at the office she then shared with her partner, Clayton Ruby. The place had a ’70s vibe, right down to the jumbo artwork on the walls and Ruby’s English pointer wandering the hallway. In her deep, expansive voice, Edwardh warned me that the College wasn’t playing around. Under Sections 75–79 of the Health Professions Procedural Code of the Regulated Health Professions Act, the College could even issue a search warrant for our home if Barbara didn’t produce my chart. Edwardh was also keenly aware of how important it was to keep the chart privileged, and ended up successfully arguing that investigators could confirm the chronological details of my relationship with Barbara through my OHIP records, because obviously Barbara stopped billing OHIP when I stopped being her patient. She then asked that I have standing in the proceedings against Barbara, that I be allowed to speak for myself. The College turned her down.

The summer of 2003 seemed interminable as Barbara’s case wound its way through the system. The first College prosecutor went on maternity leave; other lawyers took holidays. Meantime, SARS hit Toronto, and both Barbara, who was by then working as a geriatric psychiatrist at a large seniors’ facility in the city, and my son, whose Crohn’s medication left him significantly immune-compromised, had to be on high alert. At the end of the summer, as our anxiety mounted about what the College’s next move would be, Barbara left her job at Baycrest, and we soon started to run out of money.

Barbara was finally called to appear in front of the discipline committee on March 26, 2004. The day before, I went shopping for an outfit for her to wear at the hearing. I decided on something expensive, something we couldn’t afford and she’d never buy for herself: trim charcoal green slacks and a sharp Jones New York jacket. It seemed unreasonably important to me that she look good when she faced the firing squad. As we stood together outside the ugly, squat building across from Women’s College Hospital, waiting for her lawyers to show up, I smoked hard enough to set my hair on fire. Barbara, a closet smoker, was terrified to steal a puff lest someone from the discipline committee see her. It all felt a bit like high school.

Inside the building, it was freezing cold, and Barbara sat next to me on a bench, shivering. In some ways, it was anticlimactic, because the lawyers for both sides had already inked a deal a few months earlier. The College had withdrawn its original charge of sexual abuse — which is perhaps even more alarming than independently concluding that I had been abused, given its position on doctor-patient intimacy — and had instead found Barbara guilty of professional misconduct, in that she engaged in actions “that would be regarded by members as disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional.”

The opposing lawyers went through the motions of reviewing the case, during which I heard nothing I recognized as my story. I never even heard my name. I was still the unwilling complainant. The official reprimand from the discipline committee took place immediately afterward, behind closed doors, with just Barbara and the five committee members. They suspended her licence for twelve months, three of which would be waived if she completed the College’s ethics and boundaries course. And there would be no professional restrictions on her. She would be free to reopen her private practice without supervision.

Our saga dragged on for months, however, as we went a few more rounds with the College over its planned publication of Barbara’s case in the Discipline Summaries section of Dialogue, informally known as “The Hall of Shame.” Dr. Michelle Horonczyk prescribing methadone for an incarcerated patient who later became her boyfriend, Dr. Gregory Smith defrauding OHIP out of around $169,000, and Dr. Wahid Abouelnasr throwing a temper tantrum when he had to wait for emergency treatment of a puncture wound sustained after stepping on a rusty nail while renovating his bathroom — it all makes for juicy reading but can obviously be incredibly damaging, not only to the docs but to their families and, in some cases, their patients (unnamed but still often identifiable).

The following qualification eventually appeared, along with a summary of Barbara’s offence, in the July 2006 issue: “After the physician-patient relationship was terminated, Dr. Schogt and the patient began an intimate relationship. Since that time, Dr. Schogt and the patient have lived together as a family, along with the patient’s child, for whom they have both assumed parental responsibility. At no time has the patient complained to the College about Dr. Schogt or their relationship. This matter came to the College’s attention by way of mandatory reports.” It’s worth noting that the following issue included a letter to the editor from a doctor convinced that Barbara had gotten off lightly because she was a female doctor who had taken up with, he assumed, a male patient. My ex-husband, too, thought the College had been lenient, he later informed me, adding that he’d been granted an audience with the College to tell them so.

Between the time of her suspension and her appearance in Dialogue, Barbara and I got married. Along with friends and family, two of the three doctors who had filed mandatory reports about our relationship were in attendance as we made our vows. But for the fact that he’d passed away the year before, the third would have been there as well to see us stepping into our happily-ever-after.

But, of course, living happily ever after in the real world is complicated. Discovering that the College had tweaked its sexual misconduct policy last December was the sucker punch that brought me to my knees — a brutal reminder of just how badly I’d been knocked around. Getting my ass kicked had been bad enough; to have the College insist that it was only trying to protect me had been absolutely crazy making. And while I’d tried to fight back, each time they refused to acknowledge me it was like punches catching air. I wondered if now, after all this time and the recent changes, they would finally talk to me.

I spoke first to senior communications coordinator Kathryn Clarke, who wanted to be clear that the College still supported zero tolerance for sexual abuse and had merely changed its “dating guidelines.” She listened politely as I sputtered out my story in 100 words or less, then told me that no one at the College would be available to address Barbara’s case. It wasn’t “useful to talk about specific cases when talking about a general policy,” she said. And when, afterwards, I tried to speak directly to Barbara’s prosecutor, the call was forwarded to Clarke, who kindly called to remind me that any appeal I made to anyone involved in the case would circle back to her.

Shut down again by the College, I thought I’d try to reach Marilou McPhedran of task force fame, now principal of the University of Winnipeg Global College. Had the intervening years perhaps softened her position? She came out swinging in the first few minutes of our conversation, letting me know she wasn’t about to be used as a foil in some magazine piece undermining zero tolerance for sexual abuse. And while I tried mightily, I was unable to convince her that wasn’t what I was trying to do.

I fully support the notion that even a little sexual abuse is not okay. My beef is with the blunt instrument designed to stamp it out, since, as the saying goes, when you’re a hammer everything starts to look like a nail. Is it really so difficult to distinguish harmful behaviour from benign? Other governing bodies in Ontario don’t think so. The Law Society of Upper Canada voted against zero tolerance for sexual abuse in 2004, and two years ago the Ontario Ministry of Education abandoned its zero tolerance for violence policy. It seems reasonable then to expect a profession in the business of discerning subtle differences in patients’ emotional and physical experiences to give discretion a whirl.

And it’s tempting to believe that changes in the College’s dating guidelines do indeed represent a more sophisticated approach to dealing with the sexual abuse of patients, perhaps even a more enlightened take on power relations between patient and doctor, but I’m not optimistic. The College is still dismissing anything I have to say, after all. It’s still making decisions that affect me and my family, still, in effect, telling me who I am, what I think, and what’s best for me, all without knowing me. The bottom line is this: I have felt many things in my romance with Barbara, but the only time I’ve felt like a victim was in my encounters with the College.