I wrote this a long time ago, but I have never shared it anywhere or in fact, with anyone. It was hard for me to write and I share it here because it is an important part of our story that I haven’t really talked about before. That night sticks in my mind like a film, I can watch it play out. I can remember how it felt. It was a night that was both terrifying, but also full of hope, after an incredibly difficult time in my life. Without this experience, I think it is highly likely that I would never have bought a château and moved to France. It is evidence, for me anyway, that the light, more often than not, follows the dark.
It’s dark, the room lit only by the light from the corridor outside. I can hear the nurses gossiping and the restless sleep noise of the other women in the ward. I stare at the dark, panelled ceiling in the half-light, waiting for the release of tears to come, but they don’t; I’m too exhausted to cry. There is an oxygen mask on my face and tubes coming out of my arms, which are filling my veins with a drug that is making me at once icy cold and far too hot. A machine next to me beeps as it takes some kind of reading from my body. I have no idea what is wrong with me.
I feel terrified and euphoric all at once. Fearful of what the doctors might find, but overjoyed that finally, finally, someone believes that something is wrong with my body. For three years I have a been fading. My life has become grey and insular. It has shrunk to a tiny sphere of things I can manage to do.
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