Five months, five days
So far, I have had to update my firewall and virus protection, install 34 Windows updates (not to mention countless other program additions), remember how to use Wordpress, fiddle about with my wireless set-up, try and figure out how to type on a laptop keyboard again after weeks and weeks using a tiny BlackBerry (a more difficult skill to reacquire than I thought it would be), and look at my website on a proper computer screen for the first time in almost half a year.
And that’s just the geeky stuff - never mind just sitting here and remembering how much I love my flat and generally reacquainting myself with life outside the grim corridors of a hospital.
What I think I am trying to say, and failing to find the words to adequately communicate, is that I am home. After five months and five days, I am finally home. I got in the door (in a most undignified fashion courtesy of a collapsible wheelchair and two ambulance men) and promptly burst into tears with relief.
It’s not all over - not by a long shot. Now that I’m back here, I’m more or less trapped until I’m a bit more mobile. But I have had to fight the blinkered medical professionals of the NHS to be allowed to return to my own home, so you can be quite sure that I am bloody well going to be appreciating every single minute of it. There are physiotherapists to be booked, a regime of strengthening exercises to tackle and, at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, another stay in hospital for prosthetic limb fitting and training. But right now, I just wanted to put something here on this site - and then I’m going to go to bed. I need to sleep for two or three days, without being constantly disturbed by the atmosphere of a hospital ward and coughing, snoring patients.
I have many many people to thank for their support, understanding and friendship over the past months - bloggers, non-bloggers, friends, people on the other side of the world. I also need to say to them, to you: don’t go away, because I will undoubtedly need you again. I have some stories to tell. I have frustrations that need to be aired. All that and more is to come. Maybe.
Primarily, however, I want to get back to being me, and one of the ways in which I aim to do that is by writing again. Thinking again. Taking a tour round my mind and my thoughts, the way I used to. Just as soon as I can get my fingers to properly co-ordinate and locate the Shift key.