It’s been almost 10 days since I was discharged from my 10-day stay in the hospital in Meran—the most scenic spot I’ve ever inhabited while convalescing. The most vivid memory I have is of the watch that lay directly in front of my bed. Sometimes I was sure at least 15 minutes had passed since I had last looked at it, but when I would check, I’d feel baffled to learn barely five minutes had transpired. Time seemed to move in this excruciatingly slow way and feeling cognitively challenged meant I couldn’t do very much to occupy my mind. I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t feel like doing crosswords or puzzles. Staring at the mountain, at dolomite rock, felt somehow more comforting. Because I had lost three days of consciousness, my home in Tramin seemed so far away. I wanted to be back, but I also knew it would be challenging to return half-healed to a toddler. It wasn’t up to me anyway. I had to surrender completely to the will of the doctors and nurses.

Since I’ve been back, though, I’ve been trying to rebuild the lost narrative. Never have I encountered such gaps in my memory. Never had I been sedated over a three-day span, with some general anaesthesia thrown in during the surgical procedure. As a writer, it throws me off to think about all the sensations I couldn’t consciously feel during that span. The severity of the condition I was in before my partner sent me to the emergency room scares me. When I wrote last week’s column, I hadn’t yet learned that my partner thought I was possibly having a stroke because the left side of my body was beginning to malfunction. Since the column was published, friends have messaged to tell me about instances they know of when people in a similar situation as I ended up with a half-paralysed face! I stopped reading about bacterial meningitis—what I was diagnosed with—because it was beginning to freak me out that I got so lucky, that too while pregnant in my second trimester.