I interrupted two nurses. ‘Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.’

They carried on talking to each other.

Again and again I was ignored.

I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.

Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.

No one would help me find her.

I ran down a corridor, away from the ward where my body was and into other wards, and then on again, frantically searching.

‘I can’t believe you’ve lost her!’ said the nanny who lives in my head. She arrived just before I gave birth to Jenny, her critical voice replacing my teachers’ praise. ‘You’re never going to find her like this, are you?’

She was right. Panic had turned me into a Brownian motion molecule, darting hither and thither, with no logic or clear direction.

I thought of you, what you would do, and made myself slow down.

You would start on the bottom floor, far left, like you do at home when something is lost for good, and then you’d work your way to the far right, then up to the next floor, methodically doing a sweep and finding the missing mobile phone/earring/Oyster card/number 8 Beast Quest book.

Thinking about Beast Quest books and missing earrings because the little details of our lives helped to root me a little, calmed me a little.

So I went more slowly along the corridors, although desperate to run, trying to read signs rather than race past them. There were signs to lift banks, and oncology and outpatients and paediatrics – a mini-kingdom of wards and clinics and operating theatres and support services.

A sign to the mortuary tore into my vision and lodged there, but I wouldn’t go to the mortuary. Wouldn’t even consider it.

I saw a sign to Accident & Emergency. Maybe she hadn’t been transferred to a ward yet.

I ran as fast as I could towards it.