‘I died,’ he said to a new doctor. ‘Briefly,’ she said dismissively as if you had to be dead a lot longer to impress her. Dr Foster, a woman, who didn’t seem to want to be on first-name terms. ‘But technically …’ he said, too weak to pursue the argument. She sighed as if patients were always bickering about their dead or alive status. ‘Yes. Technically dead,’ she conceded. ‘Very briefly.’
