Date: 21 March 2016.

Location: My bed.

Day 1 of my incarceration: I wake up in the post operative recovery room and exchange 'witty banter' with my surgeon when he comes to check in on me. Later, I learn that this consisted of me slurring 'you did this to me!' In his general direction. The last thing I remember before going under is, naturally enough, a conversation with the anaesthetist that went something along the lines of, 'Skiing accident was it?' 'Yeah.' 'On the slopes or aprés?' Laughter, nervous because I know a big needle is coming: 'Skiing!' 'I see, I see. What's your aprés drink of choice though?' 'Umm, Aperol at the moment.' 'Cool. Now, in about a second you're going to feel like you had ten.' 'What do you m—' and I was out for two hours. My day gets significantly better once I recover from the most prominent of the after effects of a general anaesthetic — the bone-chilling cold, the dizzy, the shuddering waves of nausea — and then gets a lot better when I learn that there has been a mix up in catering and, not only do I get my after-surgery snack of coronation chicken sandwiches (how British am I getting?) at 5pm but that I also get my dinner of poached salmon and avocado salad at 6pm. Then I discover the movie channel and settle into a watching session that will, courtesy of weird restlessness and the nurses who have to come and prod me every hour or so, turn into an all night movie marathon of Beidget Jones movies and horror movies which, I quickly discover, are fun to watch fuelled by hardcore painkillers. I carefully eke out the sips of water I allow myself. Bedpans. Just.. please no.

Day 2 of my incarceration: Around 4 I awake from a brief nap with an unladylike snort. My IV is beeping. Devastatingly, I am out of painkillers. I ring for a nurse to come remedy this. With the ebb of painkillers and adrenalin, my lust for bloody movies seems to have also faded. I do what I can with the very early morning TV offering. Thank goodness for ITV. I snuggle in to watch Made In Chelsea. Christina, my fiesty Latina night nurse, bustles in and scolds me for rotting my brain. I grin woozily and continue to allow my mind to melt with stupid until breakfast arrives at 8am. The physio then rudely boots me from bed to test me on crutches on the stairs. I protest loudly, but it's actually not so bad. Then morning tea, then I'm discharged and mum takes me home to pass out.

Day 3 of my incarceration: My alarm goes off at 6.55 and I swear at it for having the impunity to do exactly what I've instructed it to do: go off at the exact same time every weekday. Then, smug with the knowledge that I don't have to get up, I go to roll over and sleep when – arghhh! — white hot daggers cut through my legs. I can't roll over. I feel rapidly less smug. I remember that I've just had a knee reconstruction and tears prick at my eyes. Furiously, in a pointless act of revenge on something undefinable, I open my iPhone and delete a cute, happy picture of Bunky and I on an Austrian ski slope that was taken minutes before my accident. I immediately regret it and fish it out from my deleted items. Clearly I can't be trusted to make decisions. I'm impossible. Trying to get me to spit out what I want for breakfast my poor mum is driven to treating me like a child: 'Porridge, sweetie?' A face. 'Is that a no? Eggs?' 'Gross.' 'Yogurt? Toast?' Head shakes. 'Smoothie?' I perk up. 'What kind?' 'What kind do you want?' 'I dunno.' Another face. I watch about a million episodes of American Dad that I've already seen and then make my Sims' world a better place. I doze like my cat.

Day 4 of my incarceration: A Thursday. I hate Thursdays.

Day 5 of my incarceration: I'm permitted out to see my physio. It is exciting. I have nothing to tell her — after all, I've been on my back with my knee above my heart for the last 5 days — but I babble on regardless, excited to have a brand new captive human to talk to. We work through half an hour of gentle exercise. I fall asleep in the cab home.

Day 6: Am simultaneously loving this new bedridden existence (cares, alarms, responsibility: what are they? How much tea is too much tea?) and absolutely despising my own sloth. In a moment of reckless boredom I make the huge mistake of googling a video of how surgeons execute a knee reconstruction. Don't ever do that.

Love

Alex

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