For many years, I have listened to Meat Loaf - I don’t know why his lyrics and music became the soundtrack to my life but I am in love with them. There is a song, a sentence, a melodic and theatrical drama for everything. Over the years, he was certainly my celebrity crush and the one person I would have loved to sit down with over dinner. Like that would ever happen……. I was gutted when he died and had told my family as much before it ever happened - if memory serves me right, I had finished nights when the news broke and they didn’t tell me.
The songs lighten my mood and drive my distractions when I need to escape - I will sing my heart out alongside the music as it fills the surroundings - the agony and melodramatic pleas are a theatrical wave of emotion that I love riding when I need to connect my feelings.
It was on a drive home last October that I realised I had completely misunderstood his lyrics. In a moment of absolute clarity I realised whilst listening to “What about love” for the billionth time that the once in a lifetime didn’t have to reign true if I wasn’t happy.
If you’ve been through it, you would understand completely. I’ve been a professional clinician for nearly 20 years, I was in the RAF and got a flight in a Hawk fast jet whilst stationed at RAF Leeming and I’m now a mother to two beautiful girls.
As for my relationship, that fizzled out long ago - I just didn’t know it or recognise it. Much like the lyrics to the song I am vibing with right now, I was very much “Left in the dark” when it came to the situation that was quietly going on in the background as I forged ahead through my career, maternity leave and planning holidays and weekend trips whilst paying for the Discovery I was so proud to own.
As I started this website, the mantra had already started. Wild, brave, beautiful. And the concept that I had found myself again in the Sahara.
Identity has been something I have always struggled with. I remember being at University and feeling a little bit “without” - always in a little bit of awe over my flatmates music collections, makeup, photos and family. I found myself drawn to the mountaineering club and the freedom of being able to say yes to weekends away in North Wales, the Lakes or Peak District without having to ask permission. It was liberating.
Over time, I continued to pursue a career in medicine even though I’m not entirely sure it was ever “my idea”. When you find out your parent gave up their career in the RAF having fallen pregnant with you and the option in the the 1980s was leave or have an abortion, it leaves a scar. I can’t undo that knowledge but having had much experience and many opportunities to thrash this out, you can see how easy it would be to please someone by choosing medicine in the RAF as your career.
Some twenty four years since starting my second degree and following that path, I still don’t know how I feel about it. But the Katie that said yes to the mountains and rock faces at university was the same Katie I met again whilst living under a Berber tent and being one of the first ever English volunteers at the 38th Marathon des Sables.
It had been almost a decade since doing something on this level. I thought that version of me had been lost and I honestly can’t say what happened. It’s so easy to say it was the life events that had happened - we were in our second season in the Himalayas volunteering at the Himalayan Rescue Association clinic in Pheriche when the Nepal earthquake hit and shattered the country - a country that I loved and that I was visiting for the seventh time. After that came marriage, a relocation to the Scottish Highlands where we had no family or friends, three miscarriages and then a second daughter through lockdown.
It’s safe to say I was completely lost. But listening to that song on the drive home to Inverness last year, I knew it wasn’t my fault and I could no longer accept the narrative that so many people use to excuse this phase of life and marriage. My children and the distance from family was not the reason I had lost touch with my identity. Before this chapter of my life, I had been a doctor in the RAF, I had completed the Diploma in Mountain Medicine, I’d been a doctor on two trips to Everest Base Camp and I had visited nearly 50 countries as part of my love for travelling. That was before securing a year out and back to back seasons in the Himalayas where I lived at 4000m helping trekkers, porters and locals with altitude and other medical problems.
No, the issue was the slow and insidious crack that had started back in 2014 before first flying to Nepal. I buried it but the information was something that ate away the trust and as I continued to execute, finance and plan the future, there was a darker period to come and without the knowledge of that being shared, I was truly left in the dark.
But as the lyrics go, “I just need some love” and so on the 18th October 2025 I made that decision - the morning after the clarity in those lyrics.
I have never looked back.
“Who made the very first move”