I made myself get up at 5am even though I had nowhere to go (Varadkar would be so proud)

There were warning signs back in April, signs I should have paid attention to. I was in hospital, about to go under general anaesthetic and I was playing a bargaining game with the surgeon. 

“But how long do you think I’ll have to take off?” I asked him. “I know you said I would need a week to recover, but I work from home so surely I’ll be back at my desk within a couple of days?”

Spoiler alert: I was not back at my desk within a couple of days. Additionally, I found the whole concept of ‘doing nothing’ except sleeping and allowing my body to heal almost impossible to bear. In the four months since, I have taken exactly one-and-a-half days off. I was facing deadlines and in my efforts to meet them, I felt constantly exhausted and yet still unable to sleep, lying awake at night buzzing like an exposed wire. When I submitted the book for copy-editing, I decided to spoil myself and go on a mini-break instead of turning around to start working on my other novel immediately. This is how I found myself in Castlemartyr Resort, being told that a scheduling mistake had been made and my massage appointment wasn’t ‘in the system’.