How and when ...

... to write about the story of these past weeks?  Maybe don't write at all? Just pick up the thread as if this hiatus doesn't exist.

But then, in time, we'll forget the details and wonder: "Did I really sell the car while you were in intensive care?"  So this is for us, in a few years time and we'll be able to say: "Oh yes, that's what happened, and we got through it".

A story that began some time last autumn - a visit to the GP following a weekend of feeling unwell, cramp in a leg that didn't go away and Tod's concern that, whilst wanting to lose some weight, he was now in something of a downward spiral.

The cramp?  A deep vein thrombosis, sorted with blood thinners and support stockings up until Christmas.

The losing weight?  Sufficient reason for an MRI scan.  The pleasant young man emerged with the results, no cause for alarm, but an interesting, somewhat unusual horseshoe kidney with a "mass" on the left-hand side that needed removing "at some point".

In a leisurely way appointments were made with a charming urologist who spoke good English and reassured us it would be very straightforward - the "mass" was external to the kidney and still on the small side. More scans were taken and blood tests, all of it to fit round the urologist's holidays and our own, intended to be a trip to Spain to see a friend in May, which we cancelled at the last minute.  The Spanish desert in May with temperatures already forty degrees was not going to be a pleasure.  We'll go in winter.

And finally we inched to the beginning of June - Tod's admission to hospital coinciding with the arrival of friends from the UK, staying for a week. I'd told them nothing before they arrived, fearing they would cancel, not wanting to be "in the way". In fact their being here kept me sane, someone to leave Bertie with as I set out, someone to talk to after I'd been to the hospital. They fed me, played silly card games and let me share my terrors.

The nice urologist promised to phone me after Tod's op and then left me with no news for all the afternoon, while I imagined the worst.  In the end, I got in the car and drove to the hospital an hour away and found my way to Intensive Care.  The friendly nurses on the desk said I could see him and I walked into something out of the worst kind of medical drama.  Tubes, wires, flashing lights, beeping sounds, bottles hanging from a stand, with clear fluids dripping steadily, bottles under the bed draining urine and blood and in the middle of it all an old, old man who looked like my father in his final days. Even more painful, Tod didn't want me there. The hardest of lessons, when someone is struggling that much, the last thing they need is a visitor. So I left and came home to the safety of friendship.

Gradually, over the following days, there were signs of progress and then, over the weekend, he told me he'd collapsed after having  his first shower - six people round his chair, straight to MRI for a scan, to discover he'd had a pulmonary embolism. That meant back on blood thinners and support stockings.  

Except that he needed to heal from his operation and suddenly he wasn't and he was bleeding internally. By Monday, he was back in the operating theatre being "cleaned up" inside.  And then back in Intensive Care again where he felt safe and I was back to driving home with my heart in my mouth and no friends to comfort me as they had gone home.  I sent cautiously optimistic emails to everyone and wished I felt as confident as my words tried to convey.

And selling the Skoda?  We took it in for service before Tod went into hospital and a few days later I got a call from the garage to come in and see them. I took our friends with me, he understands cars, she speaks good French.  In fact the message was stark and straightforward - one of us had put petrol into the diesel engine. The clear implication was it would cost a great deal to put right, with no certainty that long-term problems wouldn't emerge. Over the week we talked of the alternatives and I asked whether they would buy it, unrepaired.  In good nick, the car salesman said it would be worth 5,000 euros.  Unrepaired, he offered 4,300 euros. Tod, too frail to want to be bothered with it all, agreed to let it go and the view from friends was "bite his hand off".  We'd always had an uneasy relationship with the Skoda. I hope it found a good home.

Fresh guests arrived in the cottage and took care of Bertie as I continued my trips to the hospital.  The urologist warned it would all take longer as Tod had had two operations and two anaesthetics in a week.  Tod was weighed and he'd gained nine kilos in two weeks - this was a man who had been in intensive care for days eating nothing and then being offered not much more than potage.  His feet beneath the stockings were puffy and his thighs doubled in size.  Again, I feared for him. Phlebitis. But gradually the daily blood thinner injections and the support stockings did the job and he began to walk the corridors and the stairs with the aid of the kinesiologists. And he returned not just to his normal shape but someone a good bit skinnier.

They moved him into "rehabilitation" for more "kine" and he decided he'd had enough of looking at hospital walls and that he would heal better at home in his own bed, looking at beautiful countryside and being fussed over by his wife and his dog.  They let him go, reluctantly, the head kinesiologist saying "he won't do his exercises" not understanding that a walk down through our field and back up again, with Bertie in tow, would give Tod more joy and more healing than any hospital staircase.

For two weeks we were visited twice a day by local community nurses, for injections of blood thinner, to check the state of his foot-long scar and to reassure he was making progress, but it would take time.

It has, and it will.  It's only two months.  He's had the ok from his urologist that he can "resume normal life" - which for him is getting back on the mower, keeping the pool clean and walking Bertie.  Forty-five minutes, up through the woods and then back down across Alain's and Phillipe's fields. This is a man who five weeks ago was just able to walk the length of the ward corridor. He is healing.