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Of all the people I least expected to discuss my plight with, it was Peggy Ollerenshaw. (© Getty Images/United News/Popperfoto/Contributor)

‘Your article moved me so much I had to phone you and speak to you. You’re very brave and I send you lots of love,’ she said.

‘That’s really sweet of you,’ I said lamely.

‘I’m rooting for you.’

‘Thank you.’

I still don’t know if it really happened or not.

At night, I experiment with the only bit of my body that still answers me, that has a glimmer of feeling. My right hand, weak and floppy and fast becoming numb, fumbles down past layers of exhausting obstacles, past sheets and tubes and swaddling gowns to reach the bare skin of my hip. Exploring in the dark. The one-way sensation of touching my own warm skin, and feeling nothing back, is most peculiar, as if it is an alien I am attached to. My fingers are not giving me trustworthy signals, because their nerve connections are damaged too, and retreating further into shock. What’s so devastating is that the skin I touch feels fleecy, beautiful, devastating; all these things at the same time. Because it belongs to me but it doesn’t belong to me. It’s someone else’s; it’s like reaching down and touching your lover’s body in the night. How peculiar. Four-fifths of my body has divorced me, but it’s still attached to me. I’m two people – me and the rest of me. I am eerily still … but inside I’m screaming and waving. I’m helpless as a beetle on its back, except my legs don’t even wave to express it. My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doubly-incontinent tetraplegic. Where do I go from here, seeing I have already blurted out something about Switzerland and Dr Purcell didn’t respond?