The distance is the first thing Declan Keane mentions, before the diagnosis and before the surgery. Two hours each way, and in February that is a day gone.
Progress was not linear. There was a plateau around week nineteen that felt, at the time, like the programme had stopped working. It had not.
Nobody involved describes this as solved. It is managed, and managed is a job you do every day, indefinitely, with better or worse information.
We lose more people to missed follow-up than to the event itself. Not dramatically. Slowly.
Illustrative composite
The other half of the programme was a twenty-minute call every two weeks with the same practitioner. Not a different person each time reading notes. The same person, who remembered.
“Ask what happens after,” he says. “Everyone tells you about the operation. Nobody tells you the operation is the short part.”
