Danielle – ‘Daniel’ – de Koster is dead. She died unexpectedly two years ago, an event her younger girlfriend Jodie cannot understand. Daniel had helped patients –particularly women – diagnose their historically under-researched diseases. To some she was a hero; others thought her mad. Jodie, haunted by grief, tracks down Daniel’s friends and former lovers in an attempt to untangle her past.
It’s the late ‘80s: Daniel is as a twenty-year-old psychology student. She falls into a passionate relationship with Barbara, a medical student five years her senior. Where Barbara is ambitious and determined to become a GP, Daniel doesn’t know what she wants in life and has difficulty connecting with the other students. Sparks fly when Barbara finds out that Daniel has quit her studies: the two have an intense fight followed by rough sex and the next morning, Daniel goes missing. She leaves a note to say she’ll be back before dinner, but she doesn’t return. A day later, Barbara learns that Daniel has been found next to a boulder in the woods. She slipped and crushed her coccyx and has a crack in her skull. Over the following months, Barbara uses her medical knowledge to care for her – but in doing so, finds herself feeling less attracted towards her. When Daniel’s condition doesn’t improve, Barbara breaks up with her, leaving Daniel heartbroken.
During the years following her accident, Daniel makes a slow recovery. As Lucille O’Connor, an older, attractive physiotherapist, teaches her to walk again and the two become very close. Daniel is forced to leave her student housing and Lucille invites her to stay in a house she lets to her gay son Sjoerd. Sjoerd is looking for a new housemate, but he isn’t pleased with his mother’s decision. It’s 1994 and the Aids crisis is in full swing, having lately claimed his housemate: so, how come Daniel deserves his room? Slowly, however, a friendship blossoms, and Sjoerd helps Daniel find a job as a call handler at a local HIV charity. Here, Daniel learns to navigate the ‘HIV Net’; a precursor of the internet connecting HIV patients across the world. It’s the first place Daniel feels truly at home and where she meets the young HIV patient named Julia.
Julia suffers from itchiness, a side effect from her medication. Thanks to the HIV Net, Daniel gets her antipruritics – and thus becomes her dealer. At the same time, Daniel falls madly in love with her and enjoys being her saviour. At the annual ‘Aids Gala’, Daniel introduces her to her ex-girlfriend Barbara, who’s still part of her life. Julia, who isn’t gay, nevertheless enjoys Daniel’s attention – most people have been avoiding her since she fell ill. When she tells Daniel that she’s stopped taking her HIV inhibitors, Daniel acts like a worried lover. She nags at Julia to stick with her treatment, but Julia insists on only using homeopathic remedies. But when Daniel turns up at Julia’s place unannounced, her confrontational behaviour alarms Julia and forces her to state the hard truth: they are not in a relationship. Daniel must go.
Julia’s illness proves to be fatal. Enraged, Daniel confronts the woman who plied Julia with homeopathic crystal water and buys up her entire stock to stop her trade. She leaves the HIV Charity and commits herself full-time to combatting charlatans and quacks.
Daniel joins ‘The Club Against Medical Phantasmagoria’, a private body warning patients against medical fictions, and represents them on a TV talk show. She soon develops a deep bond with the founder of The Club, Mr Allard Dubois. Allard is a gynaecologist and admires Daniel for her courage and inventiveness. But Allard is dismissive of women with unrecognised symptoms; he thinks they should be more like Daniel, who’s been in pain every day since the accident but never complains. Daniel cannot wish for a greater compliment, and Allard’s approval becomes her driving force. But her loyalty to him is soon tested in a secret mission.
Allard wants to write an article about the dangers of acupuncture and suggests that Daniel visits the well-known acupuncturist Milayla, pretending to be a patient. Daniel agrees to make a secret recording of the consultation, in the hope that Milayla will talk nonsense. The mission fails. Daniel is too impressed with what Milayla tells her about her own battered body. Allard feels forced to manipulate Milayla’s words instead and, with Daniel’s connivance, portrays the acupuncturist as a quack. When Daisy, one of Milayla’s clients, sends The Club a personal email, it unnerves Daniel. Daisy, a young woman suffering from endometriosis, writes that Milayla helped her get the right diagnosis for her abdominal pains. Milayla too speaks out; the furore hits the media, and when Allard gives a disastrous interview, Daniels former physiotherapist Lucille advises her to break all ties with Allard. Daniel does so and hands over the secret tapes to the press so everyone can hear that Allard twisted Milayla’s words. Allard is deeply hurt by Daniel’s betrayal.
As a new millennium approaches, Daniel is almost thirty, without a job or a clear purpose in life. Lucille announces she is going to sell the house Daniel and Sjoerd have been living in. When Sjoerd tells her that he and his boyfriend are moving in together, Daniel feels abandoned. The only thing that gives her joy is the internet – the new medium expands her world a little. Months earlier, Daisy had added her to an email group for endometriosis patients; she has no idea that Daniel is still quietly reading their outpourings and finding comfort in their messages.
Now that her own life has ground to a halt, these emails form a welcome distraction. And when Daisy shares with the group that she’s throwing a party, Daniel, craving social contact, decides to go.
Initially, Daisy is unpleasantly surprised to find Daniel on her doorstep, but Daniel soon impresses everyone with her medical knowledge. Another guest, Kayla, tells her that her doctor does not take her painful symptoms seriously, and after a few drinks, Daniel declares loudly that she will help her. She later accompanies Kayla to her doctor in a worn-out leather jacket chosen to make an impression, and presents herself as Kayla’s cousin. They should investigate Kayla for endometriosis, she bluffs, because it runs in the family. Daniel is persuasive: reluctantly, Kayla’s GP agrees to the necessary laparoscopy, and Kayla is indeed diagnosed with endometriosis.
In no time, Daniel’s heroic deed goes round the patient community. More and more women contact her, first via the mailing list, later through online forums. Daniel ends up helping dozens of women, by accompanying them to their GPs, pretending to be their cousin. Sometimes she hears Allard’s voice in the back of her mind: are all these women really ill? But Daniel’s sense of honour makes her tenacious, and when doctors do not cooperate, she takes the women to Barbara for a second opinion.
Daniel enjoys her heroic status until she receives terrible news. Lucille O’Connor has died of cancer; Daniel did not even know she had been ill. Lucille’s death throws her permanently off balance. Who can she turn to now? Then she receives a phone call from a nineteen-year-old woman called Jodie Barda and her life takes a turn of its own.
Jodie’s mother has been suffering from undiagnosed abdominal pain and desperately needs help. When Daniel visits them, she recognises the signs of endometriosis, but Jodie’s mind is elsewhere; she is mesmerized, she can barely keep her eyes of the much-celebrated saviour who’s now in their living room. Take me with you, is all she thinks. Teach me everything you know! Daniel is not looking for company and when Jodie asks if she can be her trainee, she resolutely turns her down. But Jodie is persistent and persuades Daniel that by setting up a foundation together they will be able to help more people and earn income. Daniel relents: Jodie sets to work as an apprentice in the shabby property Daniel’s living in as a guardian. The ‘Lucille Foundation’ for ‘people who are not getting the health care they are entitled to’ is born.
Jodie is ecstatic. She works overtime just to be around Daniel and on days when it’s too dark to cycle home, Daniel makes an extra bed for her. When her apprenticeship is finished, Daniel offers her the role of financial director. To work full time for Daniel, Jodie quietly abandons her law studies. This sacrifice is worth it, she tells herself; at the Lucille Foundation she can make a real difference. The truth, however, is that she is madly in love, while suspecting the feeling isn’t mutual. But gradually the tension builds to boiling point and then, unable to contain her desire, she kisses Daniel on the mouth. Daniel reciprocates, and Jodie has her first sexual experience with a woman.
Jodie and Daniel enter an idyllic period: their relationship is intense and passionate, while their material circumstances continue to improve. The Lucille Foundation flourishes. Jodie occasionally accompanies Daniel on consultations so that, should this ever be necessary, she can take over Daniel’s work. The foundation provides enough income for them to have a decent life. They move into a simple but comfortable terraced house. They have a car, two canoes, and sometimes dream of having a dog.
And then Daniel takes on a case that sets in motion a disaster. A mother called Maryam is worried about her eight-month-old baby Ilyas. According to the doctor, there’s nothing wrong but Daniel suspects the child has a heart condition and pressures the doctor to refer Ilyas to a heart specialist. Yet the baby’s heart turns out to be completely fine; the cardiac examination delays other investigative options, and Ilyas dies of cancer.
Daniel grows increasingly bitter thereafter. Instead of admitting her mistake, she looks to take revenge on Maryam’s family doctor, and helps the young mother bring a disciplinary case against him.
The case receives a great deal of media attention. It’s 2010, and Daniel’s name reverberates across social media. More victims of medical fiascos come to her for help. Jodie runs the foundation practically on her own now and takes over the doctors’ visits. But when Daniel summons doctors to the disciplinary board, their dislike and fear for her – and for the Foundation – grows.
One of Daniel’s disciplinary cases is against Doctor Dieter Sterenberg, who had overlooked the pulmonary embolism of a deceased dementia sufferer. Distraught, the doctor pleads with Jodie, who explains that Daniel’s cases are independent of the Lucille Foundation. But then, out of fatigue and frustration (she gave up her law studies for Daniel, after all), she tells Dieter a bit too much about baby Ilyas. Daniel goes viral, and not in a good way. Dieter mentions Ilyas in an interview, and a populist blog calls Daniel a baby murderer. When Daniel determines to pay a visit to Dieter, all Jodie can do is confess. Daniel walks away, as she did nineteen years ago when she slipped into the woods. Besieged by memories of that time, Barbara reacts coldly when Jodie reaches out for help. It’s Sjoerd who reassures Jodie, revealing that Daniel has gone hiking in the German Black Forest.
Jodie celebrates Christmas alone. She’s enjoying her sudden freedom until a woman called Rosa rings the doorbell. Now that Daniel is under fire, she also wants to tell her story.
Years ago, Rosa used to experience unexplained paralytic symptoms and Daniel promised to help her. But when Daniel found out that she was being treated by a psychiatrist, she broke off all contact. Something shady is beginning to dawn on Jodie, and that evening she makes a shocking discovery. She opens Daniel’s old email folders and finds hundreds of emails that Daniel kept from her: messages from women who report pain but have also been diagnosed with a mental disorder. Daniel never answered these messages, despite their foundation ostensibly serving everyone. Did Daniel foresee that these women would not be believed? Or did she ignore them because she did not believe them herself? Jodie decides to delete the emails. For her, this means the end of the Foundation.
Seven years later: it is 2018, Daniel and Jodie are happily together again. They no longer talk about the Lucille Foundation or Daniel’s sudden disappearance; they have tried to bury the past. Daniel, almost fifty, runs a coaching practice. Jodie, thirty-five, works for a sustainable start-up. Their life plays out in the side lines, until Daniel is asked to take part in a podcast interview about her life, and ends up becoming a media hit. To her bemusement, Daniel is suddenly lauded as a feminist hero by a new generation of women.
Amid the Covid pandemic, Daniel and Jodie grow ever closer. When Jodie contracts Covid, Daniel refuses Jodie’s request to leave her side and also becomes infected. After the lockdowns, Daniel continues to be exhausted. Jodie is convinced it’s because of the virus, though Daniel refutes this. Now that she can no longer fulfil Jodie’s sexual needs, Daniel agrees for her to have sex with others.
Jodie has a joyful encounter with a woman called Jacky. One summer morning, after a night of passion, she rushes home to Daniel to thank her for allowing this to happen. But instead, she finds Daniel at the bottom of the stairs, no longer breathing. She has died from a neglected heart condition.
Jodie blames herself, for having misattributed Daniel’s symptoms. But Barbara too is guilt wracked. She confesses that she had given up being Daniel’s doctor after her disappearance into the Black Forrest, in 2011, because this brought back memories of Daniels’ earlier, abrupt departure in the nineties. After Barbara’s confession, Jodie realises that Daniel, of all people, had feared going to her new doctor – feared that she would not be believed, as she had seen happen to other women for decades.
At Daniel’s funeral, Allard Dubois, founder The Club Against Medical Phantasmagoria, introduces himself to Jodie. He repeats his admiration for Daniel’s stoicism in the face of pain, and how he wished other women would follow her example. Suddenly Jodie understands that Allard’s words must have continued to linger in Daniel’s mind to the end of her life. She now comprehends the pride Daniel took in concealing her pain and refusing to visit a doctor.
In a vision, Jodie sees Daniel pulling her onto the back of her horse. Jodie wraps her arms around her girlfriend’s waist, and together they ride off over a hill, and then another one, through the woods, into the meadow, through the pond, around the corner, and when the sun has gone down completely, they will pitch their camp.