It’s summer and, because of holidays, this week was the first week that I had physio for three weeks. Now, I have been swimming every day at 6am and am up to 800m each morning so I was really looking forward to her saying how much improvement she could see.

We did the usual range of movement measurements and to my dismay she said,       ‘There might be a fraction more movement but its plateaued – and in fact it has been at a plateau for a long time. ‘

Despite myself, some water leaked out of both my eyes.

I am an optimist, a positive person and this normally gives me loads of resilience. This accident has been a really interesting experiment in terms of sorting the optimists from the pessimists.

At work, I regularly come across people who want to hear about the accident and how I am – the most common reaction is ‘ Gosh, weren’t you lucky!” ‘Yes’, I reply, ‘I think I am really lucky, the skier that hit me could have broken my back or my neck or hit my daughter and he probably would have killed her’. We agree how fortunate I have been and I walk away feeling lucky. I am definitely surrounded by optimists in the office.

Others are a bit more considered. ‘That’s dreadful isn’t it, poor you, how unlucky. You must be devastated how bad your shoulder still is, it must be so frustrating for you, all the things that you can’t do’. These are the pessimists in life, you know them, those who suck the life energy out of you, dementors.

The fact is that I can now live life more or less as normal, I can drive, work, type swim. I can’t yet ride, brush my hair and so on – but I focus on what I can do.  I am a firm believer that everything will turn out good in the end and if things aren’t good then you’re not at the end yet.

‘You will get there’, my physio said, as she handed me a tissue. She told me that there are other options for me, but it is too early to consider them yet. ‘So’, she said, ‘ for now we will carry on, same time next week?’

So I carry on – because I am not at the end yet.