Not long before, I had a brush with death that left me full of fear. But going back into a hospital transformed my mental health

If you watch an orthopaedic surgeon straddling a patient on the operating table, swinging a hammer into their pelvis with all his power, it becomes an indelible image.

I stood, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 17, at the very edge of an operating theatre watching a hip replacement. Bone fragments settled on surgical drapes like confetti; a scene that, without kind voices and lack of murderous intent, could have been from a Dario Argento film: repulsive, abject, thrilling.

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