Another heavy session in a sleep-deprived state. R arrived and I immediately said ‘I’m sorry if I am a bit distant today. Last night was difficult.’
‘Sleep wise?’
‘Yes, in spite of my best efforts.’

We talked some more about that, and then I said there were some things about September 2007 that got lost in that moment when I couldn’t speak after ‘We nearly lost her three times in the back of the ambulance.’


I repeated the phrase a couple of times, intending to talk about certain other aspects, but each time I tried, I couldn’t form the words. I ended up saying ‘That would have been enough. It was more than enough, as somebody who has actively avoided medical TV programmes or fly on the wall documentaries, but they told me everything.’


‘You’re safe, Lost. I can see that this is really difficult for you to talk about.’
I started talking about something else, and R gently brought me back to the topic at hand. ‘Before you started talking about [...] you were saying, ‘We nearly lost her three times in the back of the ambulance.’ Do you want to go back to that?’


At this point I’d grabbed my pebble, and was intending to just blurt it out.
‘We nearly lost her three times in the back of the ambulance. They then told me everything about what had to be done to get her back. We nearly lost her three times in the back of the ambulance....this is an 8 out of 10’


‘I can see you trying to hold it together. You don’t have to.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t get the words out. R seems to accept that I need to speak about these things in order to regain...
‘Yourself?’


‘If I can’t talk about it, they still have power, even though they are no longer in my life.’
‘It’s like a cycle that repeats.’
At one point I said ‘I just want it out of my brain!’
R took some extra time at the end of the session to make sure that I was safe before she left.