In a kind of fugue state, I wandered around the hospital’s long corridors, now largely empty, helplessly trying to find the consultant – a man who seemed to have become as mythical as the neurosurgeons in my own hospital – and eventually, despairing, unable to stand it any longer, I abandoned my wife and child and went home, where I smashed a kitchen chair in front of my alarmed parents and swore to sue the hospital if William came to any harm.
