It wasn’t until we arrived at Taipei Airport that I realised just how very ill Bill was.  Watching him, as he got out of the cab, supported by Clive, all I could think to myself was: He’s a dead man walking.  My beautiful husband is a dead man walking.  I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. Everybody thought that Bill was on the verge of death.  In the hotel room, there had been strength, but now, nothing.  As friends shuffled him the long way down to the airport lounge, you could see that he was only just managing to keep himself upright, that all he wanted to do was to lie himself down and die. And, once in the waiting lounge, he sat slumped and bent and in a dead sleep, not only for the two hours that we were waiting to board, but for seven of the nine hours that we were in flight.

Every now and again, the China Airways flight attendant would ask me:

“Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I would answer.  “He’s just exhausted.”

But, throughout the flight, I wondered how we were going to get Bill off the plane.  It was 2009, the year of the great Swine Flu epidemic and airports everywhere weren’t letting anybody through who looked at all sick.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Bill started to wake up a bit.  He began making some intelligent responses to my questions.

“I think she’s bringing breakfast,” I said. “Do you want to eat breakfast?”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think it’s rice,” I answered.  “Do you want some rice?”

“All right,” he said.  “I’ll have some.”

Half way through eating the rice, Bill dropped his fork and looked at me.

“Oh,” he said, shaking his head.  “I’ve done the wrong thing.  Now, I’ll have to go and apologise to all those people.”

By the time we got off the plane, Bill was walking upright and with purpose, telling me where to stand to get the luggage off the carousel and where to go to get a taxi.  He was his old self again.

When he went to sleep early that night in his own bed, he slept for thirteen hours straight before he woke up.