Jacket potatoes with emmental, bacon, and vegetables in sweet chilli sauce

Before everything that has happened to me happened, I thought that medical care was fairly straightforward. You go to see a doctor, they review your symptoms and maybe do a few tests, then they tell you what’s wrong and how they’re going to treat it.

Of course there are things like cancer, where treatment is long and arduous and, tragically, not always successful.

Then there are things like my late father’s COPD, where there is no good treatment and doctors run clinical trials where some patients (again like my father) participate, knowing it will probably never help them directly but may aid some future stranger.

It was simple, though.

I never realised that you could tell a doctor your symptoms and they wouldn’t believe you: that they would tell you that you were mistaken, or exaggerating, or flat out lying. I certainly never realised that this happened often enough that it’s a running joke in the chronic illness community.

I never realised you could speak to four different doctors and have each of them tell you, with equal confidence, that the other doctors were idiots and their diagnosis was the correct one. And that they would be just as wrong as the others.

I never realised that sometimes the treatment comes before the diagnosis: that doctors will start medication to see how it affects your symptoms. If your condition doesn’t respond to the treatment in the expected way, it’s another diagnostic tool.

I never realised how much I would come to appreciate blunt honesty from a medical professional. If you don’t know, or if you’re guessing, please tell me that. Don’t lie, even if you think you’re doing it to keep my spirits up: I’ve had enough doctors tell me that there’s nothing wrong that I don’t appreciate any minimising of my symptoms.

And I never expected that the crunch of an apple would remain one of my favourite things in the world, over a year after leaving hospital where the food, while generally excellent in flavour, was 50 shades of soft.

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Medical musings aside, today has been another nothing sort of day.

I woke up very late, my body finally deciding it couldn’t delay catching up on sleep any longer. Mum was still in bed, feeling very unwell, with a headache that lasted for most of the day.

With nothing much on television, my laptop once again came to the rescue, with the coverage of the figure skating world championships proving more engrossing to mum than I expected. I haven’t watched figure skating in some time, but the basics soon came back to me, such as: if the skater is sitting on the ice, something has gone wrong. For some reason, there was a lot going wrong today, with many skaters having an unscheduled sit down mid routine.

Dinner was a “what does mum like?” special. Mum enjoyed it, which is good as she hasn’t had much fun otherwise today.

Now it’s The Masked Singer, with mum’s favourite presenter Ben Shepherd hiding somewhere under a ver impressive makeup job.