Eventually they start to remove drips and wires and tubing, that’s all removed. It’s difficult because they want you to start walking around as soon as possible because that’s what gets the lungs working. But it’s difficult because you’re connected to machines, and you have chest drains which have got very large kind of buckets on the end of them full of horrible fluid.

So at first walking around, you need help from a lot of the staff. But I have to say at the [hospital name], I don’t know about other centres, but at the [hospital name], the High Dependency Unit that I went on initially, they were angels. That’s the only way I can describe them. They were fantastic. It’s one nurse to two patients and it was wonderful. And anything I needed or wanted was there.

When I went down to the general ward, which is actually, it’s a heart ward, because they haven’t got a separate lung one at the [hospital name]. That was a different ball game. That was like, we described it as boot camp.  It was a ward with a lot of elderly people who’d had triple bypass surgery, open heart surgery. Nurses very few, too many patients. You rang the bell, you waited hours before anybody came and that got very frustrating because I actually ended up helping one of the old ladies on my side of the room because nobody came to help her.

And then I was angry then actually because I’d come from this fantastic place upstairs where everything was done for me, and okay, I was more independent but I’d still only just had a big operation. And I kind of felt quite neglected in there. And I just couldn’t wait to get home then really.