When the Plan Falls Apart

You can do everything right and still end up back in hospital. That is the bit that took me longest to accept, and if I am honest it is the bit I still have to remind myself of.

When you are careful, when you follow every step properly, there is a part of your head that quietly believes you have earned an exemption. You have put the work in, so surely that buys you something. Then something goes wrong anyway, and the deal you thought you had turns out to have been entirely imaginary.

The first few times, I took it personally. I went back through everything looking for the mistake I must have made, because a mistake would at least have meant the world still made sense. Sometimes there was one, and that is genuinely worth knowing, because you learn from it. But often there was not. Sometimes it simply happens. Blaming yourself for that just adds a second problem on top of the first one, and the second one is the harder of the two to put down.

What helps is having a plan for the bad weeks rather than pretending they will not come. Know who you ring, and when. Have the bag half ready so you are not hunting for things at the worst possible moment. Tell the people close to you what to expect, so they are not scrambling around trying to work it out while you are not in a fit state to explain. It sounds pessimistic when you write it down. It is actually the opposite, because once the bad week is handled and planned for, you stop bracing for it during every good week.

A setback is not the whole story going backwards. It is one hard week in a long run of them. And whatever it feels like in the middle of it, you have got through every single one of those so far, which is a record worth respecting.