Dickens understood the personal impact of serious illness

I am currently reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Mid way through the book I came across the following passage about a serious illness that overcame the main character and I immediately related to it.

• "I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance. But, this was not the effect of time, so much as of the change in all my habits, made by the helplessness and inaction of a sick room. Before I had been confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance, where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore."

I have personally experienced this Dickensian observation of illness on numerous occasions in my serially repetitive major depressive episodes. At times these experiences had lasted months on end but thankfully it is now usually contained to a few weeks and sometimes, mercifully, only a few days.

Dickens also understood the return from illness to strength. I immediately related to a passage on recovery which, unfortunately, I have only partially experienced to date. I hope for the day ahead when the recovery is complete.

• "By and by, my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with so strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were done for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a little, and so on to a little more and much more, until I became useful to myself, and interested, and attached to life again."

To become useful to myself (and family) again is my hearts desire. And to be fully attached to life again is a yearning I harbour beyond comprehension. What I cannot do in full I now do in part and in part to its utmost. My life is yet a poor shadow of where I long for it to be but it is where all my strength can muster and where all my strength can maintain it.

So my recovery is the walking of a fine line, like walking on the absolute edge of precipice, where a marginally over exuberant effort to be myself and be attached to life again can see me go over the edge and sink back into the depths of the depressive mire of my illness at a moments notice. I hate this disease and what it does to me and my family. But I am fighting and, I believe, slowly winning.