Consequently, I had not been a happy bunny during the previous four months, and it showed.

In fact, I was an angry young man.

I turned left out of the hospital gates and began walking. Perhaps, thought, I would see where I had got to by the time I became too tired to continue.

"Tom," shouted a female voice. "Tom."

I stopped and turned around.

Vicki, one of the physiotherapists from the rehabilitation center, was in her car, turning out of the hospital parking lot. She had the passenger window down.

"Do you need a lift?" she asked.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"I was going to Hammersmith," she said. "But I can take you somewhere else if you like."

"Hammersmith would be fine."

I threw my bag onto the backseat and climbed in beside her.

"So they've let you out, then?" she said while turning in to the line of traffic on Roehampton Lane.

"Glad to see the back of me, I expect," I said.

Vicki tactfully didn't say anything. So it was true.

"It's been a very difficult time for you," she said eventually. "It can't have been easy."

I sat in silence. What was she after? An apology? Of course it hadn't been easy.

Losing my foot had, in retrospect, been the most straightforward part. The doctors, first at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and then at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, had managed to save the rest of my right leg so that it now finished some seven inches below my knee.

My stump, as all the medical staff insisted on calling it, had healed well, and I had quickly become proficient at putting on and taking off my new prosthetic leg, a wonder of steel, leather and plastic that had turned me from a cripple into a normal-looking human being, at least on the outside.