In the latter part of 2011, when I was 67, I remember thinking to myself: ‘This is curtains.’
I was in a hotel in Wicklow, waiting to join an Old Girls’ School Reunion. But I was plagued with breathlessness, night sweats, and horrible-looking phlegm.
There were paroxysms of coughing and feelings of exhaustion. A chest infection seemed to have developed into a chronic, if episodic, condition. I thought I'd be saying goodbye to the Old Girls.
As I'd been a heavy, and
