I was watching a TV programme and someone asked a man whose son had been murdered how he was doing and he said “fine, for 10 seconds a day – then I remember that my son is dead.”

This is an excellent description of grief or PTSD where you don’t just suffer it once, that sense of dread keeps recurring in waves again and again.

Every day I wake up I feel fine for 10 seconds and then I move and the realisation, shock and horror of having my leg amputated occurs again and this still occurs many times a day as I ‘forget’ and then realise again.

I guess it fades as you ‘internalise’ the knowledge enough that it becomes who you are – and like grief of any kind it’s always going to be there and you teach yourself to not pick the scab.

You can’t ever really get it unless you’ve been there.