I don't know if anyone read my piece last week. Apologies if you commented after I wrote this, but at time of typing I have no idea. Anyway, if you did, you'll understand the significance of me saying that I was right. It has been suggested that, in order to have surgeries open the hours our Government wants, GPs should work 84 hour weeks. 84! Just to put that into some sort of mathematical context, there are 168 hours in a week in total. That means that we would be asking our doctors to work half the time they have altogether. If we allow them a generous six hours sleep a day, that means the total number of hours they have left across the week will be, you'll be delighted to learn, 42. That means get up at 5 in the morning in order to be at work for 8. Work through until 8 in the evening. Then you have three hours to get home, have something to eat, relax and see your friends or family, and then it's bed at 12, and up at 5 again the next morning. And we expect these people to be motivated, mentally alert and in sufficiently good shape to be able to diagnose and, where necessary, treat for 12 hours a day? I think not.

Anyway what wasn't what I really wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to talk about that I was woken up at 3 o'clock this morning, by my wife, who had been having memories. Let me try to be clear, because this is a little confusing. My wife, as you may know, was abused as a child. Many of the memories of this abuse, as well as other things that happened to her during this period, are still locked away in her brain. Sometimes they break out in her dreams. Except of course they're not dreams, they are her brain releasing recollections of painfully real events. You may also be aware that, often, when abuse survivors remember incidents of abuse it's immediate. They feel as if it had just happened and they are consequently distressed. At the same time, though, the memories are already fragmenting somewhat in the manner of a normal dream. My wife finds she can't always remember when she wakes what she remembered in her sleep. Sometimes she can't even remember the fact that she had memories, much less what details they contained. But once the memories are starting to slip out, it is usually good for her if we can get them, like thorns, completely out so that we can start to clean the wound. This work tends to start at something like three in the morning

So I am tired. I have just woken up. I am trying not to think about the fact that in another few hours I will need to be properly awake. Mercifully at the moment one of the few advantages of unemployment is that I can adjust my schedule a bit. I don't as it happens, need to be up at 7.30 am, but my wife's sage advice is that if I keep the habit of getting up as normal then I won't have to break myself in again when I start a new job. Once I am working though, I will have to be up at a reasonable hour even if I have spent an hour listened to my wife recalling childhood experiences so unpleasant that she has blocked them out for 30 years. Right now, however, I have to put that out of my head. I need to stop yawning, stay awake, pay attention, listen, understand and try to help her deal with this new knowledge.

Then there are the memories themselves. None of them are nice. None of them are things you want to be told were done to anyone you love, or anyone at all, really. Some of them really aren't very nice at all. Needless to say, I have no intention of repeating any of them here, for several reasons. But I listen to them, and I try to reassure, to support, to do whatever it is that seems best to me to do, when I am only thinking about 30% as clearly as I normally would. Last night, this took an hour. It's been a while since I had to do this, so the shock of new mental images is somewhat vivid. But we got through and, I think, she felt a little better for having shared them, and got them out of her head. I'm not totally sure how I feel. Tired. Stressed. Shocked. But, at least, with the knowledge that whatever she has ever had to go through in the past she will never, EVER, have to go through it again, just a little relieved.

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