If it's not brain damage then it means that the cancer is still there, squeezing her brain and ultimately sure to trigger new seizures. If that happens it means two things:another course of mania inducing steroids and that the radio-therapy has done NOTHING. And, in fact, it could mean another thing too; that Kelly refuses further treatment because she was right all along and that her quality of life would have been much better without all the "treatments" she's received over the last 18 months. She would not have been harrowed, her soul destroyed, her mind scrambled and she could have enjoyed her life without encountering the failings of the world: the mendacity of the law, the inequality,cruelty and institutionalised ineptitude of of British health care and my own failure as husband, lover, protector and human being. I had hoped she would never find out. But a crisis has no secrets.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo Orange

We had our own room behind a paper curtain and we waited as you do in hospitals. They are centres of excellence for waiting and I've put in a lot of hours waiting in hospitals at one point clocking up a 12 hour stint in A & E that was so boring and frightening as I worked my way from five in the evening to five in the morning that I became spaced-out and hysterical, laughing like a nervous jackal as the doctor showed me my own femur through the green hole in my leg. So we waited. Gradually doctors arrived, did various stroke tests, banged Kelly with wooden mallets and went away again. Then an oncologist arrived and did the same thing with slightly more authority.

A begged egg sandwich and a cup of tea arrived, stolen by a friendly Dub nurse who looked and sounded like he could have roadied for The Boomtown Rats. He then took us to the ward on the 11th floor. And then I had to leave Kelly for another night in hospital in her Guantanamo orange pyjamas.

It was hard to leave. Not least because the Royal Free locks all but one of it's exits at night- I wandered the corridors for the next twenty minutes, clattering up and down the corridors, like "The Prisoner" without the fanfaring bongotastic theme tune, angrily shouting and laughing hysterically at the shit art on the walls, somewhere between imperial period MacGoohan and a helium filled Alexis Kanner. There was nobody about, every exit was closed to me - it was a ghost hospital!

Eventually, desperately, I span around a corner and almost crashed into a man ferrying a corpse on a trolley. I have never been so please to see a man with a dead body in my life.

"Please," I said, "please, is there a way out of here?"

"Over there," he said, gesturing over his shoulder. And he was right. I followed the thumbs rule, headed out through the double-door and into the icy night. Belsize Park on a freezing Sunday evening, with no taxis, trains or buses in sight. It was a long walk home.

Back in the Jug agane!

A sunday afternoon. Kelly and I attempt to watch the Ewan McGregor/Pierce Brosnan film "The Ghost". McGregor's accent is ludicrous, the script is a doddering exposition and when Kim Cattrall turned up I knew that something was wrong. And not just with the film. Kelly had already told me she was having difficulty dealing with her depth perception watching film, as cameras tripped in and out of focus it was hurting her eyes. The clincher came when she asked me to change the volume for her. Now this was extremely odd. Kelly is very nuch the practical hands-on one in our marriage. For her to ask me to do something vaguely technical, and pressing a button on the remote is about the limit of my technical sophistication, should have been a warning sign. A more obvious warning sign was when she started saying "erm" repeatedly, the sort of noise you make when someone makes an off colour remark in a social situation or when you're trying desperately to remember a word. And in fact it was the latter - though Kelly wasn't trying to remember a word but ANY word - nothing would come. Suddenly she let out a low gutteral moan and threw herself against the back of the sofa, her eyes rolling back in her skull, her teeth clamped shut, her body rigid as a table. I jumped up and grabbed her by the shoulders begging her to look at me, to acknowledge me. Slowly her body relaxed, curling like a passion fish onto her side. At last only her teeth remained solid, gritted. I thought for a moment. I could only think for a moment, from moment to moment. I thought about her tongue, how she might have bitten it in two or how it could have curled back in her mouth, choking her. But she wasn't choking and there was no blood in her saliva. I ran off once I was certain she was still breathing and phoned an ambulance. When I came back, jittery and sick with sweat, she was still lying on her side, but her eyes were open. I lifted her up and she smiled, her eyes were slipping in and out of focus, her recognition fading, the pupils expanding and contracting as her face seemed to cloud over in confusion.

"Do you know me, darlin'? Do you recognise me?" I said grabbing her arms.

"Love you" she slurred, grinning like a happy drunk.

"But do you know me? What's my name?

A levee broke inside her head. Words tumbled out: phrases, sounds, strings of disordered language patted out. "Bronagh and the bird-bag" was mentioned as were "the tablet, the tables of the tablets". It was language loosed from its moorings, a scatter-shot of attempted speech.

"love you," she kept saying. "love you" She had no idea who I was but she knew she loved me.