I am beginning to understand why religious people do it. Why they choose to believe in a story which revolves around a benevolent god and his son, or whatever it is you pick or are born into. It is a lot easier to go through life if you are convinced that there is something more afterwards. I know a lot of bereaved parents, and they all take comfort in their belief that their child who is no longer here is somewhere else, somewhere they can't reach us but can occasionally send signals. I hope with all my heart that that's true. I'd love to believe that there is a place I will go, where I will meet Jude and I'll see Alice and Richard again but when I am brutally honest I know that I just won't. I know that it ends. Every day that I am healthy (so to speak) is another day closer to the day that the infection comes back and I am trapped back in the cycle of hospital visits, hoping that we can kill the bug again and I am granted a little more time. It is a funny thing, in my position. I feel instinctively that I will be dead in less than a year, and I cannot give any good reason apart from that it is in my gut. It is like there is a time bomb inside me, but no one actually knows just when it's ticking down to. I'm acutely aware of every twinge inside my abdomen because it could mean I wake up in the morning desperate for morphine and am back in hospital before I know it. I still haven't done everything I want to and I feel like I'm wasting days. And I'm caught between trying to fit everything in before I'm sick again, and yet not becoming exhausted and bringing the illness upon myself.

Do any of you really know how lucky you are, to have the luxury of time? To be able to procrastinate, put things off and know that odds are, you'll probably get the chance to do whatever it is later. I have got to start writing things down, making sure that my voice is heard. I keep repeating that I'm not afraid to die and that's true, but I am filled with a mixture of anger and sadness that is like quicksand and it is taking every ounce of strength that I have not to sink. Please don't waste your time. See everything you want to, be with the people you love and be frivolous and wise and sensible and stupid and whatever it is that you want to be. Everything you feel is valid and everything you are is important. Everything.