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‘What kept you?’ Mrs Bennett would cry.

Rosebud, ever insouciant, was having none of it.

‘What do you think this is? BUPA?’ she cried. ‘I tell you, you’re lucky it isn’t. I’ve worked in private hospitals and they bill you for every single pill you take. Even a paracetamol. Youse are lucky youse are here and not there.’

Apart from when the staff came to turn us onto the other hip on a four-hourly rota, we were then undisturbed until the morning. That was the theory. Nights change when you are in hospital. In fact, as I was to learn, nights change forever when you are paralysed. Any joy went. Your favourite sleeping positions ceased to exist, partly because you could not feel them and partly because you could not achieve them on your own. You adopted the protocol position you were put into – on one hip or the other, pillow wedged into your back, another under the upper knee, more pillows stuffed into the bottom of the bed blocking your feet from going into a flexor spasm downwards. Thus comfort was outsourced: someone else arranged your limbs and your torso in a way which was safe for your skin and for your tubes to survive unblocked. Your frozen hands were put into customised splints, the fingers strapped flat against the formed plastic so they could not contract, and all autonomy was removed. You could no longer scratch your nose, let alone pick it. The private geometry of your night, your ability to cuddle into shapes practised from childhood, was gone for ever: a very personal autonomy to lose. Meanwhile, the hour hands stuck, as if glued, to the face of the clock – T.S. Eliot’s ‘Only through time time is conquered.’ Peace was as lost as paradise. The nurses’ station on night shift was notoriously noisy; there were a handful of the staff who seemed unable, or disinclined, to lower their voices as they sat chatting. When buzzers rang, they would push back their chairs, the metal legs screeching on the floor. Weirdly, my paralysed bladder used to spasm at that noise: a peculiar sensation – somewhere deep inside an insensate body, in a dormant vital organ which contained a foreign body, a catheter, there was a horrid jump of indignation at the discordant pitch. Imagine. I could hear with my bladder! Was it transmitted via my ears, down some remaining nerve pathways, or was it a vibration in the air that affected my bladder alone, its catheter acting as a misplaced aerial?