"It's happening round the corner.

 … Right now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced into something they don’t want to do.”

– Tracy Emin, artist with bed.

Life without a bladder is “pretty heavy”, she tells me. Today, for example, when she got in the shower, she had a lot of bleeding from her stoma. Then there’s the whole business of the bag, which needs emptying into a loo maybe “every 15 to 20 minutes, or it might be OK for an hour. For a lot of people with urostomies, they don’t go to theatre, they don’t go to cinema,” she says. If you can’t get to a loo in time, it can overfill and burst, which isn’t great, especially if it happens in a public place. If she wants to do something as simple as take a nap at home, she says, even that’s tricky. “It wakes you up because of the pressure” and, worst case, “The bag will just fly off, and then all the urine will go everywhere. It’s 500ml of urine in a small bag, which doesn’t sound like much.” (It sounds like plenty, to me.)

She has bowel problems on top of everything else. “You’ve got the blood, you’ve got the shit, you’ve got the pills – it really can get you down, because you can’t be free...