At the exact moment the first case of the Coronavirus was contracted in Wuhan, China, a litter of puppies was born in Zhifang, a town just 16.39 miles from the epicentre of the deadly disease. On 31st January 2020, when two Chinese tourists tested positive for Corvid-19 in Rome, in the quartiere Monti, a neighbourhood…

Anyone who knows me well would probably describe me as having an upbeat, sunny disposition, devoid of cynicism. But, even my sunny-side-of-the-street personality is being tested at the moment. I am not by nature an anxious person which, given my circumstances, is undoubtedly a good thing, but Coronavirus is just beginning to fray my nerves…

The adult ICU at the Royal Brompton hospital is a kind of ICU on steroids. I was in a room that, I guess, was about twenty feet square. The air in the room is changed regularly and kept at a slightly higher pressure than the air outside the room. I had a highly-trained nurse with…

  Back in September, just before Polly and I went on our cruise, I had been visited by the Compass Assistive Technology Service, usually referred to simply as the Compass Team. If you have read my previous posts, and particularly Things are Rigged, you may remember that, in early July 2018, I had lost the…

  My transfer to the Royal Brompton meant that I began to turn, if not a corner, then a long, slow bend in the right direction, albeit with a few trip-hazards along the way. I came to inside a white room, still beset with the, now familiar, combination of hallucination and pain. I lay on…

  I spent a week in the St Helier hospital ICU where doctors and other staff struggled to stabilise me enough to make a transfer to the Royal Brompton safe. It was, I can state without a hint of hyperbole, the worst week of my life. Despite being heavily sedated, I was in a great…