Good to hear.... rest and hope your feeling lots better soon x

Hi Peppy

Congrats on the success of your procedure and best wishes for a steady recovery.

You sound like you have had one of those six months that leaves you feeling wiped out and in a place where you are looking around at the world as if it doesn't belong to you any more. Life does that sometimes. For some of us life does it more than once. The turning upside down of all our fixed points can be hard to take.

Other people won't understand...if you try and think it through you yourself probably don't really understand either - but how could you? You were told that you had something that could cause you to effectively drop dead, then a few months later some people went poking around in your brain and hey presto it's all going to be ok now...that is some rollercoaster and most people don't get to have a go on it!

It is a lot to process, especially in this day and age when we are all expected to live forever and look and act like we are going to. To be confronted with your own mortality, especially when young, is not something our culture knows how to handle any more. Three generations of our amazing NHS and improving medical attention means that people don't experience death these days anything like as often as they used to - and they don't know how to deal with it when they do.

For yourself you need to give yourself time to get your head round what has happened. You have had a lot of shocks recently and you will have been 'carrying on' (a peculiarly British disease) and your emotional, physical and spiritual self needs time now to assimilate all of this. You are indeed blessed to have survived, but you may find all of this changes you completely and that can feel quite scary as it happens. Try not to be afraid of the 'new you' as she emerges - she will be stronger, more rooted and more aware of her place in the world, both its importance and its insignificance, and be a better person for all of that. Let her grow, and embrace her.

As for others, just try and cut them some slack. They don't get it. They won't get it. They can't get it, and frankly you wouldn't wish your nearest and dearest into the position where they could. It may be fine when you get through the other side for most of us, but its usually some kind of hell getting here. So leave them in their not-knowing and try to accept that they won't understand, but appreciate their attempts to try. It is (really, it is) kind of people to relay their stories about Aunt Carol who nearly had this or that happen. It is an attempt at empathy and even when it leaves you thinking 'What on earth has that got to do with what I have just been through?' you have to look for the underlying sentiment and just forget what they have actually babbled on about.

You need to rest now what with all that poking about in your head. The trouble with the intravenous procedures is that it can feel like nothing much has happened. I was lucky in that respect on some ways - I ended up with a 3 or 4 week long migraine post op so wasn't fit for anything. However you feel, act as if you have had brain surgery - the full drill into the head type - since, with the exception of the external additions of a bone flap and skin sutures on your head, what has happened inside your brain is pretty much the same. Do expect fatigue and pain. Do expect to need to convalesce (a forgotten art). And do expect to think about all this and for your thinking about life the universe and everything to be different from before. And know that that, like you, will be ok.

'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.'

Blessings