In March 2020, as the pandemic rumbled into our lives, the writer and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen contracted Covid-19 and was hospitalised, spending 40 days and nights in a coma. Before he was sedated, a doctor asked if he would sign a piece of paper that would let them put him to sleep. “Will I wake up?” Rosen said. There’s a 50-50 chance, the doctor replied. “If I don’t sign?” he asked. Zero.
The truth, he later learned, was that the doctor had no idea whether Rosen would become brain-dead as a result or not. When he awoke, he was a different person: unable to speak or walk, and with foggy vision and hearing in only one ear. “I am not who I was,” he tells us in Getting Better, and yet “I am still that person, it’s just that something big happened to change me”.
