My father stopped speaking to me when I dropped out of medical school to care for my sick boyfriend. Five years later he drove over to take me home — and the moment he walked into our front room he stopped mid-sentence and said this can’t be real.

He has no family. His mother died when he was twenty-four and he was an only child of an only child, and his emergency contact card had my name on it after four months of dating because there was nobody else to put.

He came off the ventilator in the February. He came out of hospital in the April, and he could not hold a cup, or dress himself, or get from a chair to a walker without two people.

Guillain-Barré does not kill most people. That is the thing everybody says to you and it is true and it is not the point. What it does is take a thirty-year-old man apart and then give him back to himself over eighteen months, if you are lucky, if somebody is there for all of it.

There was nobody else there.