‘Love you too, Dad.’

Liv leans in to kiss me too. ‘Trust you to spoil our first Saturday off in weeks. Trouble-maker.’

I’d like to think she says it fondly. But if I’m honest, there’s the tiniest edge to her voice.

She takes my son’s hand and they disappear, back to the normal world beyond the curtain.

‘We’ll get you down to theatre pronto. You get the VIP treatment: we can’t be seen to kill off one of the stars of Hospital Live.’

Kill me off? It’s meant as a joke but the words bounce around my head as I try to stay completely still, fearing even too deep a breath might cause the wires to stab me right the way into my heart.

Apart from the kit tracking my pulse and respiration and God knows what else, I am alone for the first time in hours. Alone with my memories of this place: waking up from my coma, being readmitted after all my suicide missions. Watching Zoë die.

Fear is normal. I get that. But I’m more afraid tonight than I’ve been since I first got sick, and the only person I can imagine taking the fear away is Kerry Smith.

She might even be in this building, on duty, right now. If she is, she’ll be busy saving someone else’s life, so instead, I try to summon up the Kerry I knew when I was first sick, that girl who sneaked me out of the ward and bought me chips. The only other person on the planet who gets our joke about the jerks.

If only we could be back there again, in 2000 with all those years ahead. I would do it all differently . . .

Stop this maudlin bollocks right now, Joel Greenaway.

You have Leo and Liv, who remind you daily what you have to live for. They are enough.

I will come through this surgery and when I wake up, I will make sure I never forget how lucky I am.

Chapter 62: Kerry

1 August 2017

I’d never admit this to civilians because it sounds in bad taste, but within hours of starting my air ambulance training, I experience something like peace.

It’s crazy soon. Our trainers haven’t even finished outlining the curriculum, but I know in my bones that Tim was right: this will fit me like an XS latex glove.

‘We aim to get you competent to deal with whatever might be thrown at you. But even if you do this for ten, twenty years, there will still be a patient or a scenario where you feel utterly unprepared, or afraid, or out of control.

‘This year, PHEM doctors – and their colleagues – have faced some of the most challenging incidents in decades, at Westminster, London Bridge and the Manchester Arena. You can never be ready for something like that.