Credit: Markku Lahdesmaki/Corbis

After that, my memories are patchy. Opening my eyes briefly: darkness. No pain, but my head felt wrong, as if it had ... changed shape. And I couldn't think properly. Like being drugged, nothing quite made sense. I couldn't understand what was happening…

Blackness.

An unknown amount of time later, a woman's voice, talking to someone. Her voice seemed to echo as though she were in a large room. She sounded calm and … familiar. Much closer to me there was a click-hiss, click-hiss noise that seemed to be making my chest rise and fall.

Blackness.

I felt a hand squeeze mine. I think I might have squeezed it back. Odour of plastic.

Blackness.

Raised voices. Some pressure, like a distant pounding on my chest. It seemed so far away.

Blackness.

A woman's voice, muffled as though speaking through a wall. The voice was somehow comforting.

Blackness.

My eyes seemed glued shut, but I could feel movement. I was being carried somewhere. I tried to shift my position, but was somehow being restrained.

Blackness.

I began to wake up more and more. Each time, I couldn't see anything, but often heard the same muffled woman's voice, and occasionally a man's voice in the distance. I began to try to move, weakly twitching my arms and legs. Sometimes I felt movement as something soft bumped into me. I vaguely realised that I was not breathing, yet this seemed to cause me no alarm.

Abruptly, everything around me changed. The woman's voice was louder. Other voices. Things pushed at me from all sides. I was being squeezed out of my bed like toothpaste from a tube. My head seemed as malleable as a balloon – I could feel it deform as I was pushed through a hole that seemed far too small. My whole body was squashed and stretched like a rubbery superhero and then … everything was bright and shockingly cold.

I couldn't see anything except brightness. Somehow, I was turned upside down and slapped vigorously on the back. Warm fluid came from my lungs and I took a breath of freezing cold air. With it came a world of strange smells as foreign as a Martian landscape. It was horrible. I screwed up my eyes and yelled. And stopped in surprise – the noise I'd made was a baby's scream.

Before I knew what was happening, I'd been wrapped in cloth and was being held tight. Not being able to move was surprisingly comforting. A second baby was crying in the room; I wondered who it was. I was passed to someone. Warmth through the cloth. The voice of the woman holding me.

My eyes still didn't let me see her, but I knew this woman. I'd last seen her, aged 79, in a hospital bed, drawing her last breath as cancer took her from me. It was my mother, young again. I cried.

My life had begun anew and fresh, bright days rolled by as though each were eons long. Every day was a new discovery of my limitations and losses. Of course I was overjoyed to see my parents and sister alive and well again.

But as the days turned to weeks, I felt more and more awake and alive, and I remembered more and more of my previous life. I heard the voices of my parents, and knew they must be speaking English, although I couldn't understand them.

But I could remember being an active human being who used to run a daily five kilometres, and now I couldn't even turn my own head. So every day I had to relearn these skills. Figure out how to think about the world around me. Re-learn the colours, sounds and smells of everything.