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‘Like going from the Ritz to a Travelodge,’ she said. And laughed. Took me a while to find it funny, but I did eventually.

The ward seemed more Guantanamo than Travelodge, though, that first night after the interruption, as I lay with a thumping heart and retinas imprinted with the white-hot square of the ceiling light. It struck me, as I struggled to take in the rules and understand the rhythm of the ward, that this was what being dumped at boarding school must have felt like to a sheltered child. A doctrine of tough love with the love taken out. Newly paralysed, I was exquisitely powerless to do anything but watch and listen. Once again, I garrisoned myself deeper and deeper in that only safe place, my head. Once again, it came down to survival.

And boy, imprisoned, motionless, I really did feel my spaceship had landed me on yet another alien planet. I had to learn fast. There was something almost Darwinian about it. Sink or swim. Adapt or die. A rehab ward in a spinal unit is like an under-strength factory floor: too few staff battling to a relentless timetable of feeding, medicating, washing, toileting, dressing and hoisting dozens of helpless carcasses into wheelchairs to get them to the gym. I guess it’s a bit like a geriatric ward only there’s more shit and less dementia, and I’m not sure, from a nurses’ point of view, if that’s a wholly desirable payoff. The operation was geared to through-put. The aim was to get us wrecks into the best possible state of semi-independence as quickly as possible, aware and able to self-manage, so we could be returned to our homes. It was noisy, smelly, shitty, relentless hard work for the nursing staff and a slow, tormented awakening to reality for the carcasses, many of whom lacked even the motor function to press their call buzzer for attention. But it was functional. Something had to be done with us.