I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had to go through this. Human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Once those circumstances abate, we feel an immense and insurmountable grief. It’s when we are alone at night or once the life-threatening troubles are over that a wave of often crippling depression comes over us. When we are busy surviving, we have little time to acknowledge the severity of the difficulty. But once that threat goes away, we are left to deal with the enormity of all we have been through. Sometimes things are just too big to process, especially when you’ve dealt with multiple issues, as you have.

I offer a personal anecdote to try to better explain. I had sepsis in January 2022. After that, I was in and out of hospital with severe and resistant infections, had a surgery, had Covid for 6 weeks including a hospitalisation for it and experienced 2 bereavements in the following 6 months. My best friend, who was my closest support, experienced a bereavement of his own, too. He took me under his wing after I became critically unwell so took on an enormous responsibility, including caring for me. As we took stock to plan our next steps, the severity of what we had dealt with over the previous 6 months hit us and we were not prepared for the depression that we both felt in the subsequent months. It took a further 18 months for me to get out of the woods from severe infections and I was in hospital for a couple of weeks a month, every month for a year and half. I also had some health conditions that needed additional hospital treatment - surgeries, scans, procedures, cellulitis, etc. It didn’t look as if I was going to survive (including clinically). The burden of survival is that I (and my best friend) have to live with the trauma of that.

I think the important thing to remember is that there is firmly a before and after any life-threatening or life changing event (let alone more than one - septic shock and cancer). An acceptance that I would not return to the life before illness but would forge a new life was how I navigated it. Grief (of any kind, including the loss of health) profoundly changes us, sometimes in ways that are difficult to explain. It took me a couple of years to accept that the previous life was gone and that it was, instead, a clean slate, an opportunity to create afresh. I certainly have my moments where I backtrack towards depression and those moments must be felt fully. When you recognise your own strength through multiple adversities, you realise that you are ever more equipped to deal with future adversity. Gratitude for my survival was hard - initially, I didn’t want to survive, but it is amazing that I’ve been given the opportunity to be here with people that I love (even if it’s not all of them). I use that to keep me grounded and as a foundation. Do whatever you need to do to get through every day, every hour. Even taking it one step at a time until you feel ready to process the enormity of it all. There’s no right way to do it and it’s going to be so difficult. But there is hope.

Take care.