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After a couple of weeks, the intensive hand therapy began to reap rewards. My left hand became less stone-like, and the thumb and fingers were starting to wiggle. The wrist grew strong enough to prevent it flopping. My right hand was definitely more powerful and I could grasp an old-fashioned phone receiver, something I couldn’t have done a fortnight ago. Dave and I managed our first telephone conversation, home to hospital, which made both our hearts sing. Eventually, in hand therapy, I even managed to open an envelope, a major victory. To do this, I had learnt how to use my teeth, my invaluable third hand from now.

Afternoon gym was also becoming less unfamiliar. I was starting to recognise faces and understand the rhythm of therapy. The gym was two large spaces linked by a glass divide, and equipped with about ten pale blue physiotherapy plinths, which raised and lowered electronically. To a layman’s eyes, the landscape was hard to interpret, more like a medieval torture chamber than anything. There were standing frames and tilt tables beribboned with heavy-duty Velcro straps to bring paralysed people upright, jutting pulleys for carrying arm and leg slings, hooks hanging from mesh cages suspended over more plinths, two sets of parallel bars, a conveyor-belted machine with robot legs and a harness suspended over it, and various arm and chest weight machines. Plus, splendidly, like a piece of modern art, half a car – a Fiat cut off in front of the windscreen, which was attached nose-in to the glass partition. That was for the future, for those of us who were able. We could learn to transfer into driver or passenger seats, practising for a life outside.