She's in the sitting room, wide awake on the sofa. 'You all right?' He still gets anxious at the slightest deviation from normal behaviour.
'I can't sleep. I've been lying awake most of the night.'
Nothing wrong, she insists. No pain, no dizziness or palpitations, in fact she feels fine, except for being driven barmy by lying prone for hours on end, thoughts racing, while trying not to disturb her husband. 'You should've woken me up,' he scolds her.
How would that help, she reasons. 'That's just two of us awake instead of one. I decided to get up and read my book.' She's curled up on the sofa like a pet cat, with a novel open on her lap.
This becomes a new routine. It's weird but it seems to work. They go to bed at the normal time, she sleeps for a couple of hours or so, then she leaves him alone and tiptoes to the sofa to read. Usually she comes back to bed after another couple of hours. Sometimes she gets a little more sleep.
Insomnia is an unwelcome novelty, they've both always slept like babies. The good news is that she's eating like a starved octopus. Breakfast has never been so exciting - fruit juice, tea, cereals, yoghurt, toast, bananas, oranges, soon she'll soon be demanding boiled eggs and kippers. And it's gratifying to see his evening meals being downed with such pleasure - put anything on her plate and it's gone in moments, she's lifting the saucepan lids hungrily to see if there's more. At last he understands why his Mum turned her ten-year-old son into a fatso, feeding an octopus is fun.
For a while. Slowly the doubts creep in. Should she really be this hungry all the time, when she's not getting much exercise? Won't she start putting on weight?
And the night-time routine goes badly wrong once or twice. After she's come back to bed from her early-morning reading session she sometimes fails to get back to sleep at all, not even a doze, and it drives her crazy. She lies open-eyed in the darkness thinking about things, worrying about what's happened and what will happen next, listening to her husband breathing, snoring and muttering peacefully, counting the minutes till she can reasonably turn the light on and start the day.
It must be something to do with her medication. Is this inevitable, is it a problem they're going to have to live with? They make an appointment to see their family doctor. He listens with sympathy, agrees it's probably the medication and offers to provide a sleeping pill but recommends, as a better alternative, a natural sleep aid from the health food shop, a herbal infusion.
They try the sleep potion, last thing at night. Not as nice as Ovaltine or cocoa laced with brandy, but undoubtedly better for you. It helps just a little. Her first sleep session of the night lasts slightly longer now. Or so they try to convince themselves. You have to go on believing that everything is getting better, it's how they've survived these last few weeks since everything changed.
One morning he rises to the surface from sleep a little early, around six-thirty, and realises his wife is flopping from side to side like a fish gasping for oxygen. 'You all right?' He sits up, full of alarm, switches on the bedside light. No she's not, she's not all right at all. She's saucer-eyed awake and frantic.
'I've been lying here for hours,' she screams. 'I can't do anything, I can't go anywhere, I can't read, I can't talk. What can you do when you're in bed? I'm going mad.' She is, she really is. She's raving. Wild with fear or fury, it's hard to tell which. He tries to calm her down.
It takes ten minutes to pacify her sufficiently for them to get up, get dressed and have an early breakfast. This really won't do, the herbal potion is getting them nowhere. They take action, make an appointment to see the doctor again that same morning. One of those magic medicines is keeping her awake most of the night and it's making her ill, even if it's keeping her alive as well.
They make a list of her medication along with their best guess at what everything's for. Starting with the cute little syringes with which he injects her every day. No doubts about the function of this one: it's an anticoagulant to prevent blood clots and strokes. Gold star there.
Aiding this clearly indispensable function is a mild aspirin that she takes once a day. Then there's a pill to reduce her blood pressure and another to calm her over-rapid pulse. It's all about blood, one way or another. The one in a green box is a statin to prevent her veins and arteries from silting up with fatty deposits.
They've covered five medicaments already and they all seem pretty logical. The next is more puzzling. This one is a little plastic pot containing capsules made to special order in Tenerife. The accompanying leaflet is unusually evasive about what it's for. It does have, the text claims, anti-inflammatory and immuno-suppressive actions. Could that be to limit the damage caused by her stroke? It can be used for many diseases, the leaflet continues, where your doctor considers it appropriate. Mmm. They get the impression that even the leaflet isn't quite sure what this stuff is about.
It can also enhance, they read finally, the patient's general sense of wellbeing and desire to eat. Ahah! There it is. This has to be the one. They've cracked it. Fundamentally it's a pick-me-up, a tonic. And judging from their experience, one that would get a nest of zombies up and dancing. She's been walking around on a drug-induced high.
Doctor agrees. Give it up, it's done its job, she doesn't need it any more. When they get home he transfers the little plastic pot of encapsulated happy powder to the back of the cupboard, pending the results of doing without it. That night she sleeps like a cherub the whole night through. And the next.
Another milestone successfully passed. The only downside is that she's back to picking at her meals again, he's lost his all-consuming octopus to devour his cooking. Now he knows how his Mum felt when he announced he was going vegetarian.
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