Just going back to the football scores example for a moment. One of the greatest revelations from when I was first in hospital was when I was presented with a newspaper showing teams within each of the scottish football divisions. In October 2012, Rangers Football club went into administration and as a consequence of this they were relegated to the lowest division in Scottish football.
As a Celtic supporter I would normally have been jumping up and down and having a good laugh about this. But suddenly, it shocked me into the reality of what had happened. Yes, I'd forgotten that my father had passed away, even forgotten my daughter existed but for some reason these were things that could’ve just been shaken out of me and they’d return over time.
This though, to me anyway, represented something different. Difficult to explain, but this didn’t feel like it’d been forgotten. It was something that had never, ever, been there and it was easy to look back at the exact dates when this event took place.
It was something that had taken place smack, bang in the middle of my implotion. Something that was never going to come back. Something that had never been in there in the first place. I just couldn't, for the life of me, get my head around this at all and as I said, it was something that I must've been aware of at the time, even something that I would've celebrated but as I said, it had never been there.
Thinking about it a bit more just now, it would also have been something that would've allowed my friends to get their head around just what had happened to me. They'd hardly be expected to know what the hell encephalitis was, would they? They'd just know that Tony was in hospital, pretty ill, had eventually 'come to' and he was struggling to remember things. But he had no clue about what had happened to Rangers? Didn't remember it in the slightest? It wasn't coming back to him in any way shape or form?
This was serioous....