Often my body still feels next to useless, as though it doesn’t really belong to me, and even now as I write here, the pain in my fingers and my hand and my arm and my head is immense. I’m concentrating so hard on such a seemingly simple task.

Yet the biggest hurdle that remains in my bid for recovery isn’t physical, but mental – I need to learn how to be me again. That will be my hardest task. Perhaps an impossible one.

I’m lucky to be alive. Or so I’m told. I don’t feel lucky…

I remember those moments when Ben tried to kill me with absolute horrific clarity, yet memories of the events leading up to then, and the weeks that have followed in this place, are so much more patchy. Non-existent in places, though things are coming back to me all the time.

The best way that I can describe it is that my memories of the last few weeks are like rivers and streams. The smaller, more distant streams are just snippets. Someone’s voice, calling my name, but no image to go with it. A vision of a recognisable face, without any sounds or context.

The streams sometimes connect, sometimes become longer and clearer; eventually the streams in my mind form rivers that are longer still and flow more naturally. I remember conversations, I remember moving, I remember doing things. But how much of it is real and how much is my mashed-up brain playing tricks on me I just can’t be sure. And it scares me.

I’m told that much of what I said and did in the first few weeks after I woke from my induced coma was incoherent. I talked nonsense. I had no idea where I was or what had happened. Frequently I thought I was still in the middle of a murder investigation. That the culprit was hiding in the hospital and I was undercover and had to go from room to room looking for him. Other times I was at the police station. I’d been knocked down by a madman trying to escape. I had to get back up, to run after him before he got away.

I guess that’s not too far from the truth really.

Any time I got over-excited, or refused to return to my room, I’d get more and more angry, more and more uncontrollable. I’m told several doctors and nurses were needed to physically restrain me, such was the power and focus in my body and my demented mind. Frequently I was strapped to my bed so that I couldn’t hurt others, or myself.

I can’t pinpoint where my memories, those rivers, actually tell the truth of what I’ve been through over the last ten weeks. My thoughts now, my actions, feel lucid and rational. At least to me. Yet that doesn’t make this experience any less frightening.