Two weeks ago, an ambulance arrived at my house in small hours of the morning and took me to Epsom General Hospital. On the way there, dazed by passing out, I imagined a short-lived visit. In my mind, they would keep me in for a few hours of tests. I would wait for some results and be home again with a box of pills and a resolution not to exhaust myself through illness by noon the next day.

Twelve hours later, propped up in my bed at home reading Ballard’s The Crystal World, I felt smug. I had been confident in my ability to imagine my future. I crafted it, forcibly shaped it and made it true. I had written my recovery.

That night, though, my self-belief was put to the test. Once again an ambulance rushed me to hospital, this time a face mask clamped tight on feeding me oxygen. Doctors were extremely concerned this time and their detached concern quickly tore down my faith in an easy battle with Covid-19. As the hours passed, and the sun came up outside, I realised my ability to fight disease, to bounce back against colds, flus, Covid variants was a fiction.

To survive the Covid pneumonia attacking my lungs, my body and psyche had to reimagine the person I thought I was. As individuals, we are predisposed to believe a future as fixed and definite. When we can’t do that, we get anxious. To cope, we force ourselves to make believe, to give us something to hold on to.

In fighting an indiscriminate illness, it was critical to reinvent what I believed my future could be. It was time to stop grasping onto something which was changing and take a more open-minded approach. The initial panic of wearing C-Cap to help me breathe presented a frighteningly brief image of life ahead from that moment. It required imagination to extend that.

Over the days which followed, instead of fantasizing a sudden improvement, or lamenting desperate times, I focused on how every cell in my body was important. I imagined each one like a word in a book. Alone they have shape but little effect, combined they create potential, hope and opportunity. At no point did I try to shape a destiny for myself. Instead, I allowed my body the space to write a new story, one word, one idea at a time. There was no need to force it. I simply gave myself the opportunity to imagine a new story for myself. A story in which I got well, slowly and painfully, but eventually.

I got out of hospital on Christmas Day, in time for lunch with my family. At no point up to that morning could conceive such a thing happening. My body imagined it could happen though and believed in the story it needed to write to get me home.

Recovery will be long and arduous, but I can foresee a future where I am recovered. I may never be quite who I was. I’ll be someone new, less rigid in how they envision tomorrow and more capable of leaps of imagination which fill the world with life.