Sorry...what's it called again?

I don't want to trivialise anyone else's challenges (challenges? problems? issues? not sure what you're supposed to say??) but if a consultant sits you down and tells you that you have cancer (I find it quite funny that I always forget that this has subsequently happened to me as well!) at least you can walk out and go tell everyone about it, yeh?

Over those first few weeks I must've driven everyone bloody mad asking them how you pronounce it. And this was before getting round to trying to comprehend 'what' it was. In my defence, 'Auto-immune Encephalitis' was just a wee bit of a mouthful to prounounce, never mind remember.

But there you go, they had to break it to me that I had something that i'd never heard of, didn't know what it does or did, and into the bargin it was something that my wife, family and friends had to remind me of each time they came up to visit and it also goes without saying that they didn't know bugger all about this either before this moment.

"Great! That's just great!! Now where the hell are we? Eh??!!"

Extra points if you can identify where the quote comes from but where the hell I was in life terms was almost impossible to work out at this juncture. I can say though that I was 100% confident that i'd have to take a few weeks to recover and then somehow get back to work and carry on as normal, with a bloody good story to tell everyone back at work. But looking back the fact that I couldn't remember how to say what it was probably wasn't a great sign to begin with.

Peeling all of this back though to this initial stage that had to be faced, it was quite simply that 'something' had happened. I'd never spent a night in a hospital before and although I would've been excused for being ever so slightly concerned, I was more gutted that this 'record' of mine had been broken.

A bit naive I guess. Naive in a number of ways but in particular, and perfectly natural, most of us assume that whenever we do end up in hospital, once we've been briefed on the situation, we'll be able to have a pretty good guess as to how serious it is, how long we're most likely to be in there and what treatment we might have to recieve before we do get out. At this point it was more, 'we think it's this', 'we're going to try that' and 'how long is a piece of string?' when it came to getting out. It was a bad sign that the people who were best placed to know what was happening were still in the dark at this point, though on the ever so slightly bright side, I was not in any fit state to know what was happening either.

BTW, the quote's from Jaws! What a film...