The Day I Had My Penis Removed

...and Other Minor Administrative Changes to My Body

It is the morning of the 20th of January. eight days since my operation.

In precisely two hours, a lovely, lovely nurse is going to come into my room and remove a catheter from my body, after which I will attempt my very first wee all by myself. To say I have some trepidation about this is a slight understatement. Still, we have successfully managed a number of poos so far, which feels like an important early milestone. No messes, no disasters. A quiet, dignified success. Sorry if that was too much information, but if you are reading a diary entry, you know what you signed up for.

Yesterday, after what I can only describe as a misinterpretation of the phrase “short walks”, I returned to my hospital room and lay down on the bed, only to notice that my legs had swollen to a degree that could generously be described as comic. My feet, in particular, had taken on the appearance of small, little piggy trotters. The nurses came in, looked at them, took photographs, exchanged concerned glances, and firmly instructed me to get back into bed, remove all compression items, elevate everything, and most importantly, stop moving.

It turns out that crossing sixteen lanes of traffic and doing a leisurely circuit of a shopping mall does not qualify as “a little walk”, no matter how persuasive one’s internal logic may be at the time.

So today I am confined to bed. The legs are up. The world has narrowed to the view from my hospital window and the gentle, regimented rhythms of recovery. Having exhausted the available news cycle, including the increasingly surreal business of Donald Trump musing about Greenland and complaining that Norway never gave him a Nobel Peace Prize, I find myself with time. And with time comes reflection.

I realised this morning that I have not written a proper diary entry in a while. Not a piece with an argument, or a framework, or a thesis. Just a record of how things have been. How we got from the 12th of January to now. What this experience has actually felt like, day by day, body and mind together.

And if you are ever going to write a diary entry, surely this is the moment.

My original plan had been to stay at the W Hotel right up until the morning of the 12th. Check out, get a taxi, check into hospital, surgery. That was how it had worked with my previous FFS, so I had simply assumed this would be the same. I had not, as it turns out, checked this assumption with the surgeon.

Bollocks. It was not the same.

He wanted me admitted on the afternoon of the 11th. There are a number of things you have to do before a vaginoplasty that you very much do not have to do before facial surgery, chief among them the rather undignified business of completely emptying out your system. Think colonoscopy-adjacent. Medications, preparation, waiting, and the slow dawning realisation that this is all happening whether you feel ready or not.

So I packed myself up and traipsed from the W Hotel to WIH International Hospital in a taxi. Bangkok taxis continue to confuse me. You sit there watching the meter tick up thinking, surely this cannot be right. Forty-eight? Forty-eight Baht, apparently? Which is basically nothing. I could live like a little princess here, I think. A Cork taxi driver would want €40 euros for this, this cost around €6. I never quite get used to that.

I arrived, checked in, and was taken up to my room. It was exactly the same room I had for my FFS. I vaguely recognised the room number. The view was identical, yes this was the room. The sense of déjà vu was so strong it was almost comic. Saying “déjà vu” doesn’t really cover it. It was more like stepping into a loop.

I walked into the bathroom and there they were: those funny little containers for the shower gel and shampoo. I remembered them instantly. Months ago, after my FFS, I had sat on that very toilet making little videos, slightly swollen, slightly stunned, saying over and over again, “wow… just fucking wow… wow.”

Standing there now, I had this strange, quiet moment of recognition. Same hospital. Same bathroom. Same containers. Entirely different surgery. Entirely different stakes.

After a few hours of settling in, unpacking, and laying out the frankly heroic quantity of food supplies I had brought with me, reality began to set in. This was partly because I know the WIH hospital menu very well by now, and it is not what one might generously describe as expansive.

Each day, a very pleasant woman comes around with a small iPad and invites you to select from the same dreary list of options. The difficulty, for me, was that whenever you are having anything facial done, you are restricted for the first few days to bone broth. Literal bone broth. So even though something like pork fried rice is hardly a culinary event, it shines like a Michelin star when compared to the prospect of three uninterrupted days of broth.

This time, however, there was no ambiguity. Bone broth it was.

“Can I have a smoothie?”

No.

“Can I have a different flavour of bone broth?”

Yes.

Progress.

I was delighted to discover I could choose between chicken and vegetable. I made my selection with the solemnity of someone choosing wallpaper they will be forced to stare at for days.

Chicken broth and water, 3 days of this

Shortly afterwards, a nurse appeared carrying two small bottles and a set of instructions on exactly when to take them. This was colonoscopy-adjacent territory. Clean-out territory. The sort of thing that comes with a tone of voice that says, you may not enjoy this, but it is happening regardless.

And dear reader, this stuff works.

I was under strict instructions that by 10 p.m. that night, everything needed to be, shall we say, complete. So complete, in fact, that I was required to take a photograph of the final visit to the toilet. By this point, I had a clear aesthetic target in mind. Chardonnay. That was the goal. Anything darker, and they were going to have to resort to more extreme measures to clean me out, so I was determined.

Too much information?

For the first three hours after taking the prep, nothing happened, which briefly made me anxious that perhaps I was immune. Then the action began. And when I say began, I mean it committed.

I was up and down to the toilet roughly every three minutes for the next three hours. I am not entirely sure I achieved Chardonnay. I definitely, definitely achieved something closer to pear cider. Made with real pear.

Apologies. That was a Stuart Lee reference. But it felt accurate at the time.

I tried, desperately, to get some sleep.

But the clock was ticking, and I knew I was scheduled for surgery at 10 a.m. the next morning. For the first time in days, there was nothing left to do. No logistics. No packing. No instructions to follow. Just me, alone in a hospital room, with my thoughts finally given free rein.

And my mind went everywhere.

Not in the crude, internet sense of “will I regret this?”, because it isn’t that simple. It really isn’t. The question was more fundamental than that. Do I fully understand the profundity of what is about to happen? Am I actually grasping the magnitude of this change, the scale of the shift in my body, my identity, my lived experience?

And then, inevitably, my thoughts narrowed to the most blunt, unpoetic question of all.

How alive is this thing going to be?

Is it inanimate? Is it responsive? What does it feel like? What is it? What am I actually waking up with? I realised, quite suddenly, that I had no reference points at all. No internal model. No analogue. Nothing in my lived experience that could be used as a comparison.

The result was not panic exactly, but something adjacent. A tightening. A slight sense of becoming overclocked. I don’t do this often, but I could feel myself tipping into a kind of internal hyper-alertness. Sleep was now impossible. Absolutely zero chance.

So I got out of bed, trotted down the corridor to the nurses’ desk, and said, very plainly, “I can’t sleep. I’m going to need something.”

They nodded, as if this were the most unsurprising request in the world, and a short while later I was given a tablet. Some sort of benzodiazepine. Xanax, I think. One of those drugs you usually only encounter via adverts for deeply questionable online pharmacies.

Whatever it was, it worked.

The edges softened. The thoughts loosened their grip. And not long after, I fell asleep.

I woke on the morning of the 12th with one very clear priority. I wanted a shower. Desperately. I did not want to spend the next however many days feeling dirty, and if I could claw back even one day of feeling clean, that felt like a small but meaningful victory

I brought in an armada of food for both the cupboard and the in-room fridge that I remembered from the last time. There was no way I was gonna rely on hospital food this time.

.

The staff had already anticipated this. A nurse brought in a tiny bottle of orange liquid labelled Hibiscrub. I recognised the word instantly. I have no idea why, except that my mother is a retired nurse and was extremely verbose about her work when we were young. Certain words clearly lodged themselves somewhere deep and never left.

So I showered. Carefully. Thoroughly. Washed myself down with the orange liquid and stood there for a moment afterwards, clean and human. I wanted to put on moisturiser, maybe do a few other small rituals, but I hesitated. With cheek implants happening as well, I wasn’t entirely sure what was allowed, so I left it. This was not the morning for improvisation.

Not long after, a nurse returned with a surgical gown. To my mild surprise, it was actually rather decent. None of the humiliating backless nonsense we’re used to at home, with strings that promise dignity but never deliver it. This one was a front-crossover, almost kimono-like, with the hospital logo embroidered on the chest. Proper cotton. Nicely made. I remember thinking, well, this is quite civilised.

On it went. Then the hairnet.

I went into the bathroom, carefully tucked every last inch of hair inside it, and looked at myself one final time. Then I returned to the bed and lay down.

I thought I had a little longer. It was around 9:30, maybe 9:40. I started frantically texting people. “Thirty minutes to go.” “Fifteen minutes to go.”

I recall sending this image out to a few people 30 minutes before surgery....

It was not fifteen minutes to go.

The nurse appeared early. “We go, go, go.”

Honestly, that was probably a blessing. Had I gone right to the wire, I think I’d have been far more nervous.

I was wheeled onto the first trolley, taken to the lift. I smiled at the nurses, said goodbye, and we went down from the eighth floor to one of the lower levels, I think the fourth, where the operating theatres live. There’s always that little bump-bump as the trolley crosses the threshold of the lift. I remember staring down the corridor as operating doors slid past, one after another.

This was the fourth time I had gone under for transgender surgery, and I felt calm. Ridiculously calm. I know how odd that sounds, but it felt like, we know this path. I have walked this corridor before. I am prepared for this.

Writing this now, I can feel myself welling up a little.

I knew what was coming.

They wheeled me into the holding area just outside the theatre. The familiar drill began. In came my surgeon. Then the surgical assistant. Then the anaesthetist. Exactly as before.

I recognised the anaesthetist instantly.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Your face is etched into my memory,” I said. “The eyebrows. The smile.”

His English was astonishingly good, which meant I could explain everything in detail. That I wasn’t nervous. That I was fine. That I understood what was happening. And they were, as always in this hospital, incredibly tactile. Someone was stroking my arm. Someone else was reassuring me. “You’ll be fine. We’ve got you.”

I think someone hugged me. I’m not entirely sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There is a deep, human warmth here that always catches me slightly off guard.

Then, in the way hospitals always do, something baffling happened. A second trolley, identical to the one I was already lying on, appeared next to me. I shuffled across onto it, thinking, is this some sort of departmental boundary thing? A costing thing? No idea. This always happens. And then off we went.

Inside the theatre now. Things become a little blurrier.

The gown comes off. My arms are extended out to the sides. You always feel vaguely like Jesus on the cross at this point, or a patient in an old asylum being restrained. I give my usual warning about my right shoulder, which has had surgery in the past. It can’t go fully horizontal. They adjust it without fuss. I’m always grateful for that. Otherwise, I live in fear it’ll dislocate mid-procedure.

Then I feel the anaesthetic enter my left arm.

It is icy cold.

And then comes that first heaviness. It’s very hard to describe. Almost like metal flowing over you. Dense. Smothering. A weight that gently presses your consciousness down and away.

And then I’m asleep...

---

When I came back to myself, it was 10 p.m. I think there must have been a clock on the wall opposite me, but I registered the time very quickly, and with it a single, slightly dislocated thought: that was a long time. It felt as though an enormous stretch of time had passed, and yet nothing had happened at all.

I didn’t feel altered. I didn’t feel different. I didn’t feel like anything had been done to me.

I remember falling back asleep, then waking again, over and over, with the persistent conviction that nothing had occurred. That I had simply been unconscious, paused, parked somewhere outside of time. At some point, perhaps a couple of hours later, I became aware of vague sensations in my face. A sort of scrunching feeling around my cheeks. Slight numbness. A hint of pain. And I remember thinking, oh, they’ve at least done my cheeks.

Then I noticed something else.

My lower body wasn’t moving. It couldn’t move.

And then I remembered the nerve block.

This had been optional. An extra. I had paid for it. The explanation was that it would make the first couple of days dramatically easier in terms of pain, and that I wouldn’t feel anything from the waist down. Knowing that intellectually and experiencing it are two very different things. The absence of sensation was total. Not numbness exactly, but absence. As though that entire region of my body had been politely switched off.

I don’t have much conscious memory from this period, and I’m very keen not to do it an injustice by inventing detail where there is none. What I do vaguely remember is being wheeled back into my room, and that deep, unmistakable sense of stillness when the trolley finally stops rattling through corridors and lift shafts and comes to rest.

IVs were connected. More morphine was administered. After that, everything becomes foggy again.

The 13th of January exists mostly as a blank.

My only clear memories from that day are oddly abstract ones. The knowledge that I felt nothing. That the pain was entirely blocked. That I couldn’t really move. And that I was safe. We’ve been here before, I remember thinking. This is familiar territory.

There was a nurse with me constantly, twenty-four hours a day. In the early stages, this is a godsend. I always come here alone. There is no family member sitting by the bed, no partner, no relative. Nobody. And so, quietly and kindly, the hospital assigns someone to fill that role. She did everything a loved one might have done. Watching. Helping. Being present.

I drank water constantly. I’m very good at that. And she was equally good at replenishing it. Another bottle. More water. Another bottle. More water.

Then came the bone broth. So thin it could be drunk through a straw.

I have very little memory of any of this now.

The 14th of January is also hazy, though I do remember Dr Sahatad coming in with an enormous bunch of flowers and a card that read, Happy birthday, lovely Stevie. He smiled at me, stayed for a while, and brought photographs taken by a professional photographer during my previous visit to Thailand. They are extraordinarily kind to me here.

I remember being told that the nerve block was wearing off now, and that morphine was beginning to take over pain control. If I’m being completely honest, the level of pain remained quite low.

By the 15th of January, things began to sharpen. I started to become Stevie again. Impatient. Restless. Eager to get out of bed. I knew this was the day it would happen, and I was genuinely excited.

I don’t recall the exact time, but I do remember nurses coming in and explaining very carefully how I was to move my legs. They had to stay together. Knees almost pinched. No spreading. That would be very bad for the stitches. I had a vivid mental image of a cushion being torn apart if I did the wrong thing.

I was incredibly tense.

When my feet finally touched the ground, the sensation was extraordinary. My legs felt useless. Heavy. Profoundly fatigued. As though they belonged to someone else. A kind of semi-paralysis.

Nonetheless, I managed to walk unaided, much to the alarm of the nurses. “Careful, careful, careful,” they kept saying as I shuffled towards the bathroom.

All I wanted was the mirror.

I needed to see what state I was in. What they had done to me. This felt like a liberation. It meant I could brush my teeth properly. Stand. Exist upright.

Over the next couple of days, normality returned slowly. Incrementally. By the 17th of January, I was no longer acutely ill. I was… killing time. That odd phase of hospitalisation where you are neither patient nor person, just someone waiting.

That was also the day my nurse asked, “Is there anything you want from the shop?”

Coffee. Oh my God, coffee.

The fatal mistake was noticing the word coffee on the hospital menu once it reopened a little. I ordered one. It arrived. Ice cold. Thai-style iced coffee. I hate cold coffee. I was devastated.

She eventually managed to secure me a packet of instant Nescafé, a slightly elevated version rather than the absolute bottom rung. I asked her to put about five spoons into a small cup. It tasted terrible. It was glorious. Caffeine had returned to my bloodstream.

From there, I began to improvise. I remembered the tricks from my last visit. You can order boiled eggs. If you are clever enough to also acquire a green salad and some dressing from the 7-Eleven around the corner, you have instantly hacked together a respectable meal.

By the 18th, I was probably consuming far more calories than I ever would at home. That’s hospital life. There is nothing else to do, so you make friends with the packets of Werther’s Originals on the bedside table.

I got my laptop open. Worked out YouTube on the TV. The days blurred together. Endless Harry and Paul. Far too much Sky News. Tiny Desk concerts. David Bowie. Prince. A failed attempt to rewatch Three Body Problem before remembering halfway through that it descends into utter nonsense.

At some point, I started thinking about Substack. About doing something marginally more constructive than this endless YouTube festival. I began drafting a few pieces. Some too esoteric. Some simply not very good. The drugs were clearly still interfering.

And then, on the 18th of January, the nurses came in and told me the drain was coming out.

I hate drain removals.

I have hated them ever since I was sixteen and had one removed from my shoulder after reconstruction surgery. It was agony. It was Live Aid. Francis Rossi was singing Rockin’ All Over the World. I was screaming all over the ward. Ever since then, drains have lived in my nervous system.

This one, thankfully, wasn’t too bad.

But it gave me my first proper view of what was there.

And that was the day everything was unveiled.

Once everyone had left the room, I sat there and began to write. Immediately. Almost frantically. I wanted to capture the moment because it was the most profound thing that has ever happened to me. And, if I’m honest, because I was quietly terrified of what I now had downstairs, and of the overwhelming significance of it all.

I realised that if I spent a couple of hours writing, I could delay looking again for a little while longer.

What follows is a separate, standalone essay, written at the time, about the great reveal. It is deeply personal. I hope it isn’t too much. I’ve read it back many times since.

This is it...

Today was the day I was finally going to meet my vagina.

It didn’t begin ceremonially. It began with lunch.

I was sitting in my hospital room, eating, when a nurse came in and asked if I’d finished. I said yes, and she said, very simply, “I’ll call the surgeon now.” There was no buildup, no dramatic pause. And then, within what felt like barely two minutes, the door opened and in they all came.

The surgeon first, followed by a small group of nurses, calm and purposeful, and with them Sally. She was there in a professional capacity, part of a medical consultancy making a film, something I had already agreed to be part of. I knew her already. We weren’t strangers. She came straight to my side and took my hand, and encouraging me the whole time. That mattered more than I realised it would.

As they came in through the door, I already knew the drill. When you first arrive in hospital, you’re a bit coy about getting naked. That disappears quickly. I didn’t hesitate. I just said, “Shall I get naked?” They said yes.

So I did.

I stood there with three nurses, completely unselfconscious, while they admired my boobs and told me how fucking amazing they were. They are pretty fucking amazing. I’m much less coy now because I know that when I get naked, there isn’t going to be a penis anywhere. That knowledge changes everything.

They instructed me to lie back on the bed and spread my legs apart, so I did.

This was my hospital room. My bed. My lunch tray was still nearby. And this was apparently the moment.

And then they began removing the dressings.

There was something wrapped around me that reminded me vaguely of what a sumo wrestler wears, a broad, crescent-shaped band holding everything in place. There were plasters running all the way up my stomach, and as they peeled them back it actually hurt. Not sharply, but insistently. I noticed it.

Then I felt the whole moon-shaped band come away.

And with it came something I hadn’t expected at all. I felt fresh air there. Down there, in a place I had never felt fresh air before.

Then I felt a finger touch something I had never felt before either. “Wow”, “jesus”, “THAT’s sensitive”.

At that point, the number of holy fucks increased. I was just repeating it over and over, quietly and uncontrollably, holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck, as sensation arrived before I had any words for it.

And then someone handed me a mirror.

At first all I could see in it was the bed. I lifted it slowly, inch by inch, almost ceremonially, as if I might frighten something if I moved too quickly. The whole time, without planning to, I kept repeating the same words under my breath, like a mantra that had arrived fully formed: holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck.

As the angle changed and the mirror finally caught my body, I realised something unexpected. You don’t really see your own vagina the way you imagine you will. You don’t see everything. From that vantage point, what you see is the smooth rise of the pubic area, the gentle mound of bone and flesh, the suggestion of something deeply intimate rather than a clear, explicit view of it. That surprised me. I see now how little of your own vagina you ever truly see.

Nothing looked shocking. Nothing looked like a war zone. It was swollen, yes, tender and new, but unmistakably a vagina. My body did not recoil. My mind did not panic. I just lay there, still murmuring holy fuck, trying to understand that this was no longer an idea, no longer a future hope, but something real and attached to me.

As they cleaned me, they touched a place near the top, and my breath caught before I could stop it. I gasped. It was completely involuntary. The surgeon said, “That’s your clitoris. Can you feel everything?” And I said yes, because I could. Holy fuck I could feel it clearly. He said I had very good sensation, and I believed him immediately, not because he said it, but because my body already knew. Oh wow!!

What surprised me most was how diffuse the sensation was. It wasn’t just one point. It wasn’t sharp or isolated. It spread. The skin around it felt alive, responsive, warm. A kind of glowy, cosy pleasure that didn’t demand anything from me. It simply existed. I could already sense where pleasure lived, and that recognition alone felt extraordinary.

They put a small panty pad in place, almost comically ordinary, and that was it. Apart from the catheter, there was nothing dramatic about the moment. I was just lying there, in my hospital room, with a pad, in my body.

Later, even thinking about it, I noticed something else. Just imagining being touched there made me feel warm again. Not aroused in a frantic or external way, but lit from within. A quiet, glowing sexual happiness that seemed to come from my centre rather than from something happening to me. Pleasure no longer felt like something hanging off me, separate and awkward. It felt integrated. On me. In me. Part of my core.

I had been surprisingly ambivalent about vaginoplasty before all of this. I knew it mattered, but I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine loving the result. Now I think I am going to really like having this body part. It feels like a lovely thing to have. Not because of what it represents, but because of how it feels to exist with it.

What changed most, though, wasn’t anatomical. It was something quieter and deeper. I no longer felt like I had to excuse my femininity, justify it, explain it, soften it for others. I wasn’t trying to be feminine. I simply was. I have a feminine body. I have feminine genitalia. My body was no longer arguing with my mind. Something long unresolved went quiet.

I don’t yet have perfect language for what that means. I keep wanting to say it was profound, and maybe that word is overused, but I don’t have a better one yet. What I know is this. Something fundamental settled. Something that had been suspended for decades finally came to rest.

And I met myself there.

I’ve just read that back. Wow

And I’ll be honest, there is a slightly vertiginous feeling in having to continue after something like that. How do you follow a moment that profound without trivialising it? That was an extraordinary day for me. One I suspect I will never really top. And yet time, inconveniently, does not stop.

Since I wrote those words, life has continued. The catheter has been removed. And with all the knowledge in the world that this is a far less poetic moment, I can report, with some confidence, that having a catheter removed from a vagina is noticeably less unpleasant than having one removed from a penis. There is simply less distance for it to travel. This feels like an important data point.

The first thing I wanted to do afterwards was put on knickers that did not look like they belonged to my nana.

I had a matching black Victoria’s Secret bra and bottoms set tucked away, and I put them on together, quietly, like I was getting away with something. I stood in front of the mirror and just stared. I genuinely could not believe this was me. A huge, almost incandescent glow came over me. This can’t be real. And then immediately, what if it is?

A small, suspicious part of my brain went looking for the downside. Maybe I look ridiculous. Maybe I actually do look ridiculous. What if this is some sort of elaborate dream? What if it isn’t as good as I think it is?

And then another, calmer voice answered: I don’t care. You can’t take this away from me.

I took a few photographs. Just for me. For posterity. I sent a couple of silly videos to people I trust. And then, inevitably, reality knocked on the door again.

The nurses returned with a reminder. I had about four hours to produce some urine. No wee-wee meant catheter. And at that point, I had barely drunk anything, because earlier I’d been trying to avoid the exact opposite problem. I had only just started properly hydrating.

And then I remembered something else I had completely forgotten.

I had agreed to be filmed.

In marched a small documentary crew, which in 2026 terms means a few people, some very compact equipment, and an astonishing ability to fill a hospital room. For the next ninety minutes I answered questions, smiled, and did that peculiar documentary thing where you are asked to walk slowly from one place to another so they can cut it in later, all while a small, increasingly anxious part of my brain was thinking, I really need to drink some water or someone is going to reinsert a tube into me.

Once they left, I got serious.

Bottle after bottle of water. I think I was on my fourth 500ml bottle when I noticed something. Not a desperate urge, not the old familiar alarm bell, but a subtler signal. Do I want a wee? I genuinely wasn’t sure.

Someone explained to me that everything down there is rewired now. The old signal might not fire the same way. You may not feel it, but you probably should try.

So I did.

I sat on the toilet. And within about thirty seconds, I was weeing.

Holy God.

If yesterday was profound, today was its strange, absurd little cousin. I am one of the few people on earth who has spent decades standing up, holding a penis, and weeing out of it. And now the sensation was coming from somewhere entirely different. Much lower than I expected. Nearer to my arse than seemed anatomically plausible. I briefly found myself wondering how women’s bodies fit all of this into such a small area. There doesn’t seem to be the real estate.

What surprised me most was the sensation of relief, or rather the lack of it. As a man, the relief begins immediately. As a woman, it didn’t arrive until about halfway through. It felt unfamiliar. Odd. Not worse, just different. And since then, every trip has been the same. I’m sure I’ll learn it. I already feel like I’m beginning to understand the new signals.

I also noticed something else. When I went for a short walk outside earlier, I wanted to go afterwards, but I felt I could hold it. Properly hold it. There was no panic. No urgency. That alone feels like a small miracle.

And that brings me back to the present.

It’s 19:58 on the 20th of January. Donald Trump is still talking about Greenland. I am as baffled now as I was this morning. Is the President of the United States genuinely contemplating invading the territory of another sovereign NATO member and simply taking the land? It feels no different, in principle, from what Russia has done in Ukraine. I find myself rubbing my eyes at the news, wondering how this can possibly be real. The world appears to have lost its grip on itself.

In more immediate terms, I have two more full days in hospital.

After that, I move to the apartment I’ve rented. I’ve just been sent the access details: passwords, codes, instructions, all very automated. It turns out it’s on the thirty-third floor of a tower. The view, I’m told, should be spectacular. I hope so. My vertigo is already bracing itself. I hope I can actually enjoy it rather than spend a week clinging to the walls.

The view from my new apartment is spectacular. You could convalesce in worse places....

Work resumes on Thursday. I have a presentation to give to what is still called the Design Authority on the 28th, trying to get a piece of software over the line. My attention will turn back to diagrams, arguments, trade-offs, and delivery schedules. Life, such as it is, reasserts itself.

Normal life begins.

Only now, it begins with me fully inside it.