Reflecting on my 2025, from surviving sepsis through to publishing my book(s!)

 ° Please note this blog post features a lived description of sepsis, post-sepsis syndrome and PTSD - if you are sensitive to these subjects, then please consider whether the topic could presently be difficult to process and might best be saved for a later date°

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Well, that went quickly.

I’m sitting here on my son’s final day of childcare for the year in what will almost certainly be the last period of uninterrupted writing (and perhaps thinking) time that I will have for the next few weeks, so I’m doing what I would encourage my clients to do - I’m taking this space and time for me.

I will begin this piece by admitting that I’m feeling a bit tired. 2025 has been a year of incredible ups and downs for me outside of work, and I’m very much happier to be sitting here writing this from my desk at home rather than the hospital bed where I spent far too many weeks at the end of 2024. It feels a little self-indulgent to revisit that memory (not to mention unpleasant), but even the most cursory comparisons between my lead-up to the end of 2024 and 2025 reveal that this year is treating me much better.

Sepsis recovery

This time last year, I was in the very, very early stages of recovering from sepsis with months of strong antibiotics ahead of me, even after weeks of powerful intravenous ones. It was truly a miserable experience. January, February, March and April passed me by in a haze of medication and a PTSD diagnosis. It’s safe to say, I never want to go back to that place again. And here, almost a year on, I’m very fortunate to be able to note that I have not experienced any recurrence of sepsis and am approaching the one-year point from which likelihood of recurrence statistics become much more favourable. However, I did, and still do, struggle with post-sepsis syndrome and an ongoing impact on my physical mobility from the damage done to my foot by the infection that spread from my joints, to my bones and into my bloodstream.

Being chronically unwell is not totally new to me - I have had spondyolysthesis since my teens - however, having it be physically noticeable that I was unwell was. This time last year, I could not leave my house, go upstairs, walk or move around without a wheelchair. It was incredibly frustrating to lose mobility and autonomy in a flash, and the psychological impact will probably always be with me to some degree.

Grateful reflections

The only thing that I wanted when I was in the hospital was to be back with my son. He was 16 months old and a late walker, so he required a great deal of parental input. Then, when I got home, all I wanted was to be able to stand to pick him up, which he solicited constantly. It broke my heart to be unable to do that. Then, once I could do that, I desperately wanted to be able to walk him in his stroller; however, as the weather improved, I became more able to do it for short periods, using the stroller for support. Finally, what I wanted more than anything else was to be able to lift him out of his crib in the night when he cried and wanted comfort. It was the most heartwrenching feeling I’ve ever had to hear him call for me and to be unable to soothe him in the way that he needed.

Now, thankfully, I can do all of these things. Not without pain, not without consequences on my mobility for the next day or even week, but I can do them. And just typing out and recognising these things that I longed for and reflecting on how I do them instinctively now, without the angst I struggled with a year ago, makes me conscious of how the goalposts for the things that we want so very dearly change. And often we don't have the time or the inclination to reflect on just how grateful we are for them coming to pass.

Recognising how far we have come

It has made me think that it would really be useful to have some way of recognising just how far we might have travelled on a recovery journey - either physically or in terms of our mental health, or both - and how much I would have appreciated a structure to remind me of the changes that my healing body was going through. To point out to me how much it had achieved that I could be grateful for - even when there is still so much work to be done. In fact, that’s the point at which I find myself now. Even a year into my recovery, it’s still easy to stumble back into negative thoughts and feelings about why this should have happened and what I’ve missed as a result. I developed health anxiety under my umbrella PTSD diagnosis, and even now, occasionally, I will notice my hypervigilance kick in and start worrying about something that looks or feels like an old symptom that I thought had gone away.

So what better way to encourage reflection, appreciation and recognition than to write it down?

Anyone who knows me will know that I am in a serious, long-term relationship with the written word. I share the same ethos that Joan Didion did:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I’m guessing that there are lots of other people out there who feel the same as she did, and I do.

That by giving myself space, time and reverence for my feelings, thoughts and experiences, that I can come to know how I really feel about a thing - because if I rely on my in-the-moment, managing-101-tasks brain to do it, then it will probably struggle - because there are just too many priorities in my busy life vying for my attention at any given time.
Only by making time for myself, my thoughts, my feelings and allowing them to flow privately and freely on paper, can I summon my gratitude, so often buried under the next great want or need.

A workbook for those who are still going through it

So, for myself as much as those of you out there reading this who are also going through something challenging, I have been inspired to create something which will allow us to do just that. I’m going to create a psychotherapeutic workbook that will offer structure, reassurance, accountability and the space for quiet reflection and gratitude as we pass healing milestones and recovery targets.

It’s not a gratitude journal.

It’s a tool for figuring out how you really feel.

It will offer questions, prompts and enquiry into what the events that you’re going through really mean to you, to your past, and crucially to your future. It will encourage you to ask yourself some really difficult questions about why you might think the way you do, and illustrate what the consequences of that might be.

It’s going to be a way to access a therapeutic conversation directed by me, and delivered by you. You’re going to have the space and occasion to follow a difficult thought or feeling down a road and understand why you might have acted or be acting the way you do, and what you might be able to do to change that, if that’s what you seek.

I’m excited to offer this to you

And to myself - I know that if I had accessed a tool like this from the darkness and isolation of my physical and mental health challenges over the last year, that it would have brought me structure, a feeling of reassurance, and peace in knowing that I was paying myself and my process the due attention needed to come out the other side in the best place possible. I want to frame it so that it helps many people - the grieving, those healing and adapting to physical challenges, the new parents whose lives have changed unrecognisably, those struggling with enormous decisions, those on a mental health journey - basically anyone who has healing to do in some way, to take care of themselves and support their future wellbeing.

2026 is my year of publishing

In all honesty, I’m unlikely to get much time to sit down with this idea until January, and I find that hard. I’m full of inspiration and thoughts about what to put into this workbook in order to make it as useful and impactful as I can. And I know that I’m also reaching the tail end of my second edit of Confidential Grief*, which will be published in a few months. Clearly, I like to have a full plate.

But in the interim, I’m going to try to stay present and focus on the immediate, as I enjoy this end-of-year period with my son that I so wanted and needed this time last year.

And as I tuck him into bed on Christmas Eve, I will try to remember that previous me would have considered present-day me to be the luckiest person alive.

I must make sure I write that down...

Joyeuses fêtes
Laura x

*Confidential Grief is my latest book due for publication in early 2026. To be updated upon its release and other offerings from me, you can subscribe to my mailing list.