Something bad and life-changing happened to me: last October I had a subarachnoid brain haemorrhage and then spent three months in hospital shackled to a cylinder containing my cerebrospinal fluids. Ordinarily, I’m a private person and recoil from those who need to centre their “lived experience”, especially if that experience amounts to a claim of victimhood. But I also feel trapped in my story and figure that if I tell it here I will stop reliving it in my head. Perhaps there are others who will recognise their own experiences in mine, but that’s not really why I’m writing this. It’s more to make sense of what happened to me and to draw a line under something that’s difficult to absorb.

My doctor recently described my stay in the hospital as “long and complicated”. This is one way of putting it

My doctor recently described my stay in the hospital as “long and complicated”. This is one way of putting it

I have a good and horribly vivid memory of the day it happened, although it’s something I find hard to talk about and for a long time euphemistically referred to it as “the event”. A few dear, if not especially delicate, friends have asked me what a brain haemorrhage feels like. Well, it feels bad: like you’ve been shot in the back of the head. It feels like you’re going to die, without knowing why. You also vomit a lot. I was conscious throughout the whole thing, but I was deeply confused and terrified by what was happening to me.

My doctor recently described my stay in the hospital as “long and complicated”. This is one way of putting it. A few days after the haemorrhage l had surgery to reduce the liquid on my brain and while this saved my life it led to a severe ventriculitis infection called pseudomonas aeruginosa, which explains why I was in hospital for such a long time. This meant six weeks of antibiotics via an intravenous drip, which further curtailed my movement and in turn meant that I was confined to a hospital bed in semi-intensive........

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