A month is long enough for your life to change. A day is enough. Ten minutes.

After leaving the hospital, I watched the first episode of “Love Island” alone in the flat we shared. Chris’s insides had been gracefully diverted; on the right side of his stomach he now had an ileostomy, in which the small intestine becomes external . Before the operation he had taken glee in describing his soon-to-be-changed body as “an indoor water park where the slides go outside.”

Such a turn of phrase is characteristic of him, this man I love.

There were also many tubes inside his body, pushing in fluids and taking others away. Twice within five minutes he grabbed his nurse urgently to introduce us. “This is Sophie!” he said, euphoric with opiates, his eyes strange and piercing, an oxygen pipe in his nose. “I love her!”

“I love you too,” I said.

On the bus home, I thought about how “Love Island” would be there for me, six hours a week for the next two months. It would mark almost exactly the period of his early recovery to whatever would come next.

As the hospital days continued, I started to invest my energy in buying new furniture and assembling it alone in front of the contestants, whom I had started to think of passionately and protectively as friends, children even. Their vulnerability made me feel as if I knew them. I wept for them with genuine emotion that I was afraid to express any other way, because when I did I usually ended up lying on the carpet in our hall, hyperventilating.

When a design flaw meant that a screw would not fit where it should in a shelving unit, I had to get resourceful. There was nobody to help me, and it was 1 a.m., the bodies of the contestants lithe and bikini-clad, their voices on a low volume so I wouldn’t wake my neighbors.

I broke down and cried for 10 minutes, and then I used a shoe to hammer it in. It was as if I were on an island too (my own personal “Love Island”!) with my water bottle and the small matters of survival that I had to solve in isolation, where I was marooned. But my life would have certainly been sad to observe, so I was glad that my new friends could not see the tragic person on the other side of the screen.