There is a black hole inside me that’s as big as, well, a black hole. My days are spent with my heart lurching between numb blackness and sheer terror.

Most of the time, I am operating on auto-pilot, with my insides completely blank. The moments when something pops to the surface, it’s usually when my rib-cage implodes and I feel as though I am being squeezed until I can’t breathe.

The trouble is that Rosie was many people’s idea of a nightmare dog in as much as she had to be with me all of the time. I cooked - she was between me and the kitchen cabinets, waiting for me to move or to drop something that she could hoover up. I was in the garden – she’d be there beside me unless I had to shut her into the house for biting the lawnmower. I was working at my desk – she’d be underneath it. I was walking about – her nose would be bashing into the backs of my legs as I walked because she couldn’t quite bear to be far enough away from me to give my clearance to walk un-bashed. I went to work or to Uni – she’d sit by the side of the garage and watch for my return. I’d sleep and she’d sleep too.

For me, the "nightmare" was the sweetest of pleasures and now it's gone. Now, I cook and there is no-one to hoover up the stuff I drop, I come home from work, there is no-one there, I go into the garden and am unaccompanied. I walk and don’t feel her behind me.

I throw myself into work – both the paid kind and the unpaid kind. I am tiling floors at the moment at home and each day, after a full day’s work, I come home and work until I’m exhausted on the tiling. I must be driving everyone who lives within half-a-mile of us bonkers. Working like a dog helps me to stop thinking about a dog. Despite pushing myself so hard and making myself so physically tired, I have not been able to sleep. I lie in bed willing it to come but it never does.

There is a pinprick of light in the near future, but even for that pinprick I am unable to feel excited. I am hoping against all hope that the imminent new arrival will help me to focus on the positive things in my world again, because it’s not as though there aren’t many, many of them, it’s just that the blackness has completely engulfed me.