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Things got a bit blurry after that. Time and cognitive slippage. Apart from everything else, it’s very hard to discern what’s happening when all you can see is a very small patch of ceiling. There was a warm, pretty female doctor in A&E who bent down to my ear and told me: ‘You’re going into resus now – it’s going to be very noisy, lots happening, but don’t worry,’ and I clung to her words and her humanity. She had blue eyes and blonde curls. A feeling of almost unbearable loneliness was settling upon me with the knowledge that I was absolutely on my own in this. Only in my brain was there sanctuary.

Snippets only thereafter, those dreadful hours, as shock and morphine kicked in. I was struggling with the unfairness of it; I couldn’t believe what had actually happened. Good Friday, it was; how inappropriate was that; and I’d taken the day off work to take part in the cross-country instruction. At some point my poor husband appeared at my bedside, his handsome, ever-optimistic face crushed with shock. Already, I think, he knew more than I did. At one point I remember being slid into an MRI scanner, immobile, staring at the plastic tube wall just a couple of inches above my face. White noise, claustrophobia: the very stillness made my ears boil. I was utterly passive; all will was gone; I no longer had a body. Is this what it feels like, I thought, losing everything?