So I prayed and people joined in and I visualised and wrote it down and visualised some more and poured myself into it and fucking hell, ED has perked right up and it scares me witless.

Really. It was almost instant. I am awash with multiple, various, intense feelings but I'm frightened to unpick them or talk about it. Living in the moment, grateful for the moment, but I've absolutely lost my footing, adrift in a stormy sea, holding onto my sanity with both hands (I stole that last metaphor from a book and I can't even remember which one, but it describes how things are perfectly).

I'm seeing my old CPN again on Friday, for the first time since I was discharged in spring 2010. When we made the appointment she said, "I'll see you then and we'll catch up with what's been happening since we last met." I don't often list it, but yesterday I started running things through my mind. Jeez.

In the years I was seeing H, ED was barely mentioned. She'd had MS for ten years but it wasn't doing much (that's in retrospect - what it did pissed her off mightily, but she still worked, drove her car, lived her life). She was a bit wobbly on her legs, but good to go.

My mother had just died as I finished the group (I got a couple of extra sessions with H and was then sent off into the world to live my life).

A couple of months later Barb died (my recovery buddy and soul mate - we chatted online almost every night for hours - apart from being sad at her life cut short and missing her like fuck, it had simply never occurred to me that I'd have to do this shit without her). Next I got a vicious virus and was knocked out for weeks and spent the rest of that year with post-viral fatigue, laid right up, but keeping quite steady, using the techniques I'd been taught, doing a lot of arts and craft - knitting in front of the telly.

Just as well I rested because in spring 2011 within a couple of weeks of each other, ED had a fall and never regained the ability to walk (necessitating a wheelchair, a ramp and eventually carers to get her out of bed) and YD had to spend a week as an inpatient on a psych ward. ED's bloke had that very week left his job and started as a self-employed franchise holder of a big company, having taken out a massive loan to set himself up. There was no way he could sort things out for ED. YD meanwhile was isolated, had had to take a year off uni and needed a lot of support, so I embarked on what turned into a year of scuttling up and down the motorway, sleeping on sofas and making endless phone calls to endless social service agencies.

By the autumn, things were a bit better with my daughters, apart from me being the only person who ever took ED out, so I was still on the motorway, up and down, week after week. The council discovered that YD had moved out back in whenever it was and I hadn't told them, so I'd been in fraudulent receipt of housing benefit for two people, which I had to pay back and just be grateful I wasn't being prosecuted. But I had to move, which I really, really didn't want to do as I loved my little house and my neighbour. But I had to so I did.

That's as far as I got - living here is all a bit blurry, but fuck it, I'm going to watch last week's Homeland on catch-up as the next episode is on tomorrow.

Laters xxx