(Feel free not to read this– it was an exceptional situation and it's unlikely that it would actually happen to you.)

The second night after the operation the epidural stopped working.  I tried to press my call button but it had been placed just out of my reach on the table.  The pain got worse.  "Luckily" my loud moaning and groaning was keeping the lady in the bed opposite awake.  Finally she asked me if I wanted her to press her call button for me.  I moaned a yes.  Finally the nurse came to check the machine.  According to the machine everything was working perfectly – but there was no pain relief and, as the morphine wore off, the pain gradually got worse and worse, until I could feel everything.

I asked for a doctor.  The nurses gave me pain medication tablets to swallow, and finally I just cried.  I remember my surgical gown had fallen open so my breasts were exposed but I just didn’t care.  The male nurse looked appalled.  The female nurse was sympathetic, she held my hand and I cried even more.  Eventually I remembered that the epidural worked better when you are sitting up, so I made her get me into the chair – there was no way the pain could be any worse. 

Normally getting into the chair with the epidural working was agony, but there was very little difference between the pain of just lying there and the pain of moving.

They gave me more pain pills, but they had no effect, so I sat in the chair, crying, asking for a doctor, in agony.  Finally I leaned forward and the epidural started working again – the needle must have moved back to the right place.  I was leaning forward on a pillow and I feel asleep like that, my head drooping in mid air.  (Apparently they did call a doctor but by the time he got there I was passed out.)

A few hours later the world woke up and I threw up all the pain medication I had been given through the night.  It was gross and very painful.

When my surgeon came to see me he was livid.  He said the epidural had probably stopped working, which I kind of knew.  I tried to tell him that I was telling the nurses this in the middle of the night, but, at the point he saw me, I wasn’t making much sense as, because of all the pain pills and the epidural working again, I was completely high at this point (thank goodness!)

Unfortunately I was probably also high when the nurse asked me if I wanted to come off the epidural and go with oral pain medication.  All I knew was that I couldn’t take another night like that so I said yes.  I couldn’t take the risk that it would stop working again.  So they took me off.

I lay on the bed.  They took off the tubes, the heart monitor, the blood pressure monitor, the cables, and all that was left was the catheter in my bladder.

Then they told me that because of the amount of pain medication I had had the night before the only thing that they could give me was paracetamol and a hot water bottle if it got really bad.  (Reading this back make me really angry that these supposed health care professionals let me get into this state.  I’d love to tell you some advice that would stop you being in this position, but you have to trust the nurses and doctors at this point, and they let me down.)

I was in agony again.  I spent the day lying on my good side, crying.  My mother and sister were there at intervals to try and make me eat, to get me cold flannels.  It was horrible.  After being on morphine for two days I was suddenly on paracetamol.  All I could do was breathe in and out and know that it would eventually pass.

(I just want to say at this point that often in this book I have talked about how unsupported I sometimes felt, but I will also never really know what it was like for my poor mum and sisters to see me in this state.  I was "out there", the most I could communicate was that I wanted another cold flannel, all they could do was rinse the flannels out under the tap and take my moaning.  I know that they were always trying their best.)

I’m not sure if I got up that day.  I do remember it was my brother’s birthday and it was his turn to visit me and for me to try and smile while he was there.

And the good news is that it was the worst.  I have been in much pain since then, but nothing compares to that level of physical agony.

When people talk about "touching the void" they mean going beyond the normal human experience, or our own limits; it is defined as many things by many people.  I understood it a lot better when I watched the wonderful documentary "Touching The Void" about a mountaineer, lost, with a broken leg, who literally dragged himself down the mountain.  When I watched it some years after the operation I had to keep stopping it to have a little cry, it brought back that night to me.  In it, Joe Simpson, the mountaineer who broke his leg, talked about "touching the void" as being when he went beyond and finally realise that you are completely alone in the universe.  I know what he mean, but I disagree with his interpretation of the experience.  In the darkest moment in the middle of the night I found my way out, by sheer force of will in getting into a position where the drugs finally kicked in.  But even so, I realise, looking back, that I was never truly alone – there were dozens of people thinking of me and wishing me well.  My room was filled with presents, flowers and cards from family and friends to an almost embarrassing level (especially seeing as the woman in the bed opposite had none and no visitors except her husband.)

In the middle of the night I didn’t think of the cards and the flowers, but I knew the love was there.

And beyond that, I am reminded of a shockingly clichéd poster called “Footprints in the Sand” that goes something like this; a person says to God, looking back at two sets of footprints, “Look.  These were the hard times and that’s where you left me alone.  See there is only one set of footprints.”  And God says “There is only one set of footprints because that’s where I carried you.”  There was nothing outside of me, because at that moment God was in me.

I felt alone, desolate, in the middle of the night, but when I look back I know that was when I was truly being carried.