[13] Go Hug a Tree

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[9] Dinosaurs     

[10] No-one Even Noticed     

[11] Remember, Remember     

[12] New People, New Places

[13] Go Hug a Tree

In the middle of all these awful feelings, I would have done anything to feel better. The period was probably the busiest I had ever been in terms of trying new things. True to say a lot of them were things I clutched to in a desperate hope they would do some good, or that they could launch me out of this awfulness and in to something more bearable. In addition to walking more steps than I did the previous day, I adhered to all sorts of schemes and plans which promised to cure me in one way or another. Some were complete lunacy, like the time I read that dark chocolate can improve mood, and ate three bars of dark chocolate a day for a week. (No change in demeanour. More feeling sick).

I tried meditation. I’d never been anti-meditation, but neither had I been an advocate. To tell you the truth I’d never really tried it, but I was desperate, and I resolved to enter in to anything I tried with an open mind.

Initially, the meditation was short chunks of time – five or seven minutes of guided quiet-time, and I found pretty quickly that they were a peaceful part of my day. The only peaceful part of my day really; the rest of the time my mind felt so dark and my brain was spinning so fast there wasn’t a moment to spare for anything else. Those precious few minutes became a secret hideout for me, where I could stow myself away and none of the scary anxiety monsters or fearmongers could find me.

Sometimes I would bring myself back in to the room after a meditation period and feel the fear and sadness close in on me right away. Quite often the thought of re-entering that world was unbearable and I would reset the tape and do the exact same session again to stave off the evil. Sometimes it worked, other times the evil had already set up camp in my brain and trying again was futile.

A lot of the things I could have tried, and did try, were quite stigmatic; things practiced by very odd looking people who still used phrases like ‘groovy’, and ‘hip’. But I didn’t really care. I was going to try them and give them my full energy in the hope of re-establishing some balance in my life and maybe even a little freedom from the torment.

Meditation is one example of those things; if I’m honest, I was guilty of some pre-conceived idea of what it would be and the kind of people who practiced it. For me, the process of slowing down and noticing things seemed to work, so I kept doing it with obsessive rigour. I suppose the point I’m getting at is that I didn’t really care how wishy washy something sounded, or what pre-conceived ideas I had about it, I did whatever I could to make myself feel better.

Do whatever feels good. Do what makes you feel better. Try things. If hugging a tree makes you feel better; go hug a tree. If sprinting until you run out of breath makes you feel better; do that. If Jesus, Buddha, or the Prophet Mohammed works for you; talk to them. Shed any preconceived ideas you have about any faith, scheme or potion, and open your mind with the intention of learning about yourself and the world. Some potions will be nothing more than snake oil, some schemes nonsense, and some faiths unfulfilling. But something, something, will work for you, and you don’t have to resign yourself to the fearsome status quo because something seems a little too way out for you. 

[12] New People, New Places

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[9] Dinosaurs     

[10] No-one Even Noticed     

[11] Remember, Remember     

[12] New People, New Places

It’s been a few days since the last post. I’ve been on holiday, and the experience made me think back to a time when going on holiday seemed like the last thing in the world I would be able to do. ‘Me? Go on holiday? Absolutely not. Those kinds of things are for other people. I will be lucky to ever feel brave enough to go on holiday again!’

The thought of going somewhere I hadn’t already been was unbearable. The idea of meeting someone I didn’t already know; excruciating.

It sounds awfully pathetic, I know that. But when you’re in the thick of it there’s nothing pathetic about it. You do have some kind of sense that you’re being a bit wet, but the fear of everything is too big and you can’t concentrate on anything outside of yourself.

We had been to America the summer before all this happened. Three weeks of driving from New York, to Washington DC, and on down to the tip of Florida. They were three of the best weeks I had ever had, sharing this mammoth road trip with my fiancée. But now, paralysed by fear, I couldn’t even go to the Waitrose around the corner from our house, let alone go to another town. Another country was entirely unthinkable.

I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to enjoy new places again. The thought of going somewhere I didn’t know the surroundings, or the people, or the quickest way out was terrifying. I honestly thought I would have to spend the rest of my life going only to places I had already been, and even some of those places were questionable.

I started walking. I had left work by now, and I just started walking. I set up the health app on my phone and started counting steps. We had recently moved to a new area, and I didn’t know my way around at all, but I would set off when my wife left for work at around eight thirty, and just wander by the river and across the park and see how much distance I could cover. Or rather, how little distance I could cover.

I made it five hundred steps on that first day. That was barely past the Waitrose car park and in to the park behind. A woman was coming towards me with a dog, and she scared me. She was tiny. Her dog was tiny. Neither of them was threatening in any way, but that wasn’t how my brain saw it. My brain saw a hundred possible awkward scenarios, and a thousand things which would be devastating. The woman might say hello, and I would be forced to say something back. The dog might rub itself against my leg. The woman might not say hello and I would smile at her like an idiot and she would think I was crazy. I could say hello, but I might be left hanging in some awful unrequited greeting. All manner of terrible things could – and certainly would – happen if I passed this woman. So I turned around before she – or her tiny dog – could get anywhere near me and I went home.

Each day I set the app to count my steps, each day I took ten or twenty more than the previous expedition. All the time, my eyes were slightly funny, and it felt like my brain was on fire; an invisible fire to everyone in the outside world, with flames that flickered and licked the inside of my skull and occasionally convinced me I would die because I was too far from home.

But I forced myself out of the house each morning, and I continued to put one foot in front of the other. Five hundred steps became a thousand. A thousand steps became five thousand. Soon I was walking ten thousand steps before nine thirty each morning. I walked over 250 miles in two months, all along the same, well-trodden parks and river paths around my house. And the whole time I was totally scared to death.

[13] Go Hug a Tree 

[11] Remember, Remember

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[9] Dinosaurs     

[10] No-one Even Noticed     

[11] Remember, Remember

I sank down in to my seat with more anticipation than I had felt in a long time. People began to filter in and sit around me and my wife; some in the rows in front – the VIP rows, that they’d spent £5 more to sit in than I had less than two feet behind them. They did have wide faux leather arm rests though; my arm rests were thin, and covered with a simple blue felt-like material the same as my seat. They would get exactly the same view of the screen as we would, but I bet the superior arm rest gave them a warm feeling inside that I wouldn’t experience.

Spectre was finally here. Truth be told I had descended in to an obsession with all things 007 since Daniel Craig arrived, but much as I would love to pontificate, this isn’t the place for thoughts or theories on the re-booting of the Bond Franchise. Suffice to say I loved Casino Royale, and thought Skyfall was a masterpiece. I even seemed to enjoy Quantum of Solace more than most other people on the planet. So I was excited to settle down in the blue felt seat behind the Very Important People and finally see Spectre in all her glory.

Except as the house lights went down, something else rose up inside me. A sickly feeling. A hot face. A slight sense of claustrophobia. I knew what it was; I was about to come face to face with my own nemesis, my own Oberhauser, or Blofeld, or whoever Christophe Waltz turned out to be.

The trailers continued to play, with their trademark machine-gun cutting, as if the editor felt it necessary to include a small portion of every single camera shot from the entire film. Only all the trailers were silent. Or at least I thought they were. I could hear people shouting and I could even pick out the distinctive voice of the man who says ‘Coming soon…!’ in every trailer for every film ever. But it was all muffled, subdued, as if it was coming from the screen next door, not twenty feet in front of me.

And then it wasn’t subdued any more. Until now, it was as if I was stood at the dead end of a corridor and I could hear a torrent of rushing water somewhere close. Now, it was like that scene in the disaster movie when the water blasts round the corner and our favourite little character is fully doomed; sounds, colours, fear, all came crashing in, battering my head and heart, and I thought I was about to die in the dead end of that corridor.

How wonderful, I thought. It’s not like I’ve been waiting to see this film since the morning I sat like a goggle-eyed child watching the initial press launch. Why did it have to happen now? Why couldn’t it have happened when I was dragged along to watch the fifteenth instalment of the Hunger Games? Then I would have been glad to have something else to deal with.*

Anyway, the hot face continued, the sick-feeling got worse, and the walls of the cinema felt like they were an inch from my face and about to squeeze the life out of me. I remembered vividly the episode in the office almost a year ago, now if I didn’t get out of this cinema right now, I knew I would die.

Except I didn’t die. I couldn’t die just then. I was here to see Spectre, and I’d paid a monstrous £10.99 for my little felt seat. I took deep breaths; I relaxed every part of my body and told myself I would survive. Everything told me that I wouldn’t be alright, I would certainly die any moment, but I kept telling myself I would survive.

‘It’s a panic attack’, I kept saying. You remember these from before. You haven’t died from one before, and you’re not going to die from one now. Besides, there is popcorn, you like popcorn. Stay alive for the popcorn.

As much as I told myself this, and as much as I sucked in the stale oxygen that lingered in Screen 8 of the Vue cinema, I honestly didn’t think I would come out the other side alive. But as the trailers finished and 007’s latest adventure opened to the sound of beating drums in a glorious four and half minute non-stop tracking shot through the streets Mexico, everything faded and melted away. After ten minutes of total unbearable fear and certain death, as quickly as it had come, it had gone. I was back to being a normal, non-panicking human.

And what of Spectre? Well, it was a shame that the majestic opening shot was the best – possibly the only good – part of the film. The most disappointing thing was that my silent and terrifying panic attack in a cinema full of people was the most intense part of the whole evening.

*Before I offend any Katniss Everdeen fans, I should point out that this is said with tongue firmly in cheek. Also, my wife has never dragged me to any of the Hunger Games films. She is in fact a very nice girl who never drags me anywhere horrible. Actual truth – tongue no longer in cheek. Anyway, I’ve not seen any of them, nor have I read the books. But I did see a trailer for the last one and I kind of feel like I’ve missed out… Any thoughts…?

[12] New People, New Places  

[10] No-one Even Noticed

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[9] Dinosaurs     

[10] No-one Even Noticed

‘You’ll be alright, just be brave’.

‘Just get on with it’.

‘It’s just a little bump in the road, you’ll be fine before you know it’.

There were a million other phrases that friends and family would use to tell me it would be ok.

Admittedly some of them were stumbling over their knowledge of English vocabulary in some kind of awkwardness or another, trying to find something to say when they didn’t really know what to say. But honestly most of them just plain didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that I was in pain. Not physical pain, but an odd kind of mental anguish experienced by only a few.

I think that was the problem. None of the people I spoke too had any experience or point of connection to what I was going through. No-one except my wife, who sat with me day after day, night after night, and put up with it first-hand all the time. She couldn’t quite get her head around what was happening or how it felt, but she saw what it was doing to me and understood from there. But no-one else did, if I’m honest.

I felt sad, and lonely, like nothing would ever be enjoyable again, and like I was completely useless at absolutely everything. I couldn’t go to the shops on my own; I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I knew it would be awful and that the world would probably end. I knew I wasn’t capable enough, mentally or physically, to get out of the house and walk anywhere.

Had there been some grotesque abnormality on my face, people would have understood. Had I lost a leg or another limb, they would be able to see the pain I was in. But the reality was I had nothing ‘wrong’. People didn’t know that I could simply be sitting watching television and launch in to some kind of full-blown terror-panic-lunacy episode, where I would be feeling sicker than anyone in the whole world had ever felt in their whole life, and my heart would be beating so fast I thought it was going to explode. People wouldn’t understand how I felt like I was trapped in the burning wreckage of my body and couldn’t escape, or how the terror would rise up in my mind without a moment’s notice and cripple my entire life and my entire future. And I couldn’t explain it to them. I couldn’t find the words to explain just how terrifying it was. I still can’t.

And without any ability to put the fear in to words and make people understand how I was feeling, I was totally lost. It was as if my whole body was burning itself to death from the inside, and without any visible signs on my skin or my face, no-one even noticed.

[11] Remember, Remember     

[9] Dinosaurs

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[9] Dinosaurs

With all this going on I was conscious that I was missing work. I had all the official papers from all the right doctors, but I felt like I was letting people down. Not the horrible HR guy who kept sending me emails telling me I wasn’t entitled to this or that, but other people in my team and, in particular, my boss.

A few weeks went by and the whole funky-eye thing partially cleared itself, in the sense that I could now see again, but I still couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It was like I was daydreaming the whole time, as if my brain had removed me from society somehow in case I couldn’t handle it; which I suppose I couldn’t. I was still having what turned out to be panic attacks, including the violent shaking and shuddering first experienced when I was shipped off to my Dad’s for two weeks. And I was still terrified of everything; people, places, noises, dark rooms… absolutely everything put the fear of God in to me. I had no idea if this was as bad as it would get, or if it was only the beginning, but I kept telling myself that this was the bottom of the trough and at least the bottom of that trough was level from here. It was pretty bad, I thought, but at least this is the bottom of the trough. Or so I kept telling myself.

I thought I should probably meet with my boss to give him an update. I had been fairly removed from everything to do with work and I wanted to show him that I wasn’t dead, or completely shot to pieces.

We met in the downstairs conference room, just through those posh glass doors I had bundled out of a few weeks earlier in complete certainty that I would die any minute. I chose the conference room because I couldn’t face going upstairs, walking through the bull-pen style office, and sitting in his office with colleagues ogling and whispering outside. They would still ogle and whisper – people always do - but at least I wouldn’t be able to see them from the conference room.

My boss, we’ll call him John, settled in to one of the chairs, smiled, and started chatting away in his friendly manner. But something struck me as different today. John was, at heart, a sales guy. The kind of sales guy who says all the right things at all the right times to make you buy all the right things, and for the first time, I felt like I was being spoken to like a customer. His salesy complements and smooth demeanour were plucked from the ‘Relationship Building 101’ chapter of any one of the sales manuals which littered his office, and I got the feeling I always get when talking to a salesman; like I was being caressed and cajoled under false pretences in order that I buy something I didn’t really need for a price I couldn’t really afford.

He asked how I was and I told him the truth; I was having a bad time of it, but I liked my job and wanted to come back as soon as possible.

‘I know what you’re going through’, John said.

I was interested to see how he knew this.

‘Countless times I would sit up in the middle of the night on the phone to my son at University. He would be crying down the phone. He would have a panic attack two or three times a week’.

Interesting, I thought. Seems similar. Perhaps he does understand.

‘No reason for it; or no reason we could find’.

I looked in to his eyes as he was explaining this, and as he continued I saw something in him change. Any hope of him understanding and sympathising was snuffed out quicker than it had appeared.

‘I couldn’t understand how he could be so sad. I told him to pull himself together’.

In his eyes I could see disappointment. Sadness.

John talked about his son, the panic attacks, and everything else, and I could see he was angry about all of it happening. He was ashamed of his son. How could his son be this pathetic? How could his son – a member of his family, intended to carry on the family name – be so useless and so shameful? Why couldn’t his son just pull himself together?

As he spoke, his disdain for his son – and now for me - became more evident. To him, stress, anxiety, and mental health was a wholly imaginary term dreamt up by lily-livered, left-leaning, liberal creative types to explain their lack of confidence or testicular fortitude. This type of thing didn’t affect real men; there’s no way it could be in any way debilitating to anyone but the most pathetic of individuals, and the fact that both his son, and his recently hired, oft-championed new superstar were affected must have indicated a failing on his part.

His son had let him down. Now I had let him down. And he was angry about that.

Only once before had I seen this kind of anger before, only once had I seen someone struggling to come to terms with something they fully failed to understand, and something they believed was utterly wrong; when a closet homophobe discovered their eldest child was gay. In the face of dinosaurs like John, the sheer size and monstrosity of the mountain mental health campaigners must climb is unbelievable.

I didn’t know much about my situation; the panic, the fear, the anxiety were all things I would have to learn about over the coming months. But from that moment I did know that I was finished in that job with that company.

[10] No-one Even Noticed     

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors 

   

[8] I Feel a Little Faint

I would have to have a blood test, the Doctor said. She probably said it because my Dad was in the room, and he made a point of telling her he had worked in a hospital for forty years. He’s not one to throw his weight around, my Dad, but having spent two weeks looking after me he knew something was wrong and he wasn’t going to let this Doctor tell us otherwise.

I’d never had a blood test before. I’d had vaccinations at school, and been put under general anaesthetic when I had shoulder surgery, but I’d never sat there while someone took my blood. I wasn’t scared, if anything, I was quite intrigued. I didn’t realise I would bob up and down in such an unseaworthy fashion before finally capsizing with a thud on to the floor.

‘I feel a little faint’, I told Sandra, the big nurse who’d about finished collecting the second bottle of blood. I slumped back on my chair, hit my head against the wall, and then fell forward with all my weight and not even big Sandra could stop me from flopping off the chair and landing in a heap on the cold vinyl floor. She did manage to whip the needle out of my arm as I wilted, and I remember thinking how that must have taken some serious skill.

It wasn’t the sight of the needle, or the little vials slowly filling up with my blood, and it can’t have been the actual loss of blood; Sandra said I would lose a teaspoonful at the very most; I think it was the physical feeling, the very mild annoyance and discomfort of something sticking in to my arm where things didn’t normally stick. It didn’t even hurt, I was just aware of it in my arm, and I didn’t like it, so I fainted.

I woke up after I don’t know how long – seconds probably, maybe a minute at most. I was covered in sweat and big Sandra, was peering at me through small half-moon shaped glasses perched on the end of her nose. I remember wondering where I was and thinking she was a librarian. She offered me a biscuit and a glass of water and I apologised profusely. It was fine, she said, but it always happened to the fully grown men; never the ladies.

Anyway, the results of the blood test came and everything was fine. Absolutely everything was fine. Red blood cells, white blood cells, polka dot blood cells. All fine. I wasn’t diabetic, or anaemic. I didn’t have Addison’s disease. Citing these results, the Doctor refused to sign me off work again and told me to get up and get on with it. Not once did she mention anything about anxiety, or panic attacks, or low-mood, depression, or whatever you want to call it. I suppose looking back it’s quite apparent what was happening to me. But the Doctor never mentioned any of those words. Everything I know now points to all of those unused words. But at the time I couldn’t think straight enough to understand it, and the Doctor was totally useless.

[9] Dinosaurs     

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors

[1] The Day I knew I Would Die

[2] Shutdown     

[3] Not Dying, Apparently     

[4] Eleven Minutes     

[5] Throw Everything At It     

[6] Ivory Tower     

  

[7] Two Weeks, Twenty Doctors

While I was signed off, I went to stay with my Dad for a week or so. Partly so that he could look after this poor kid who couldn’t see anything, and partly to give my fiancée a break from having me there to worry about. She would still worry, I was sure of that, but at least she had some space.

My eyes were worse, I couldn’t see anything properly, I couldn’t follow what was happening on the television; it was like looking through a tiny window, and way off in the distance, something was happening that I couldn’t really focus on or understand. I couldn’t recognise characters on whatever show I was watching, even though they popped up every minute or so in a different scene, I couldn’t remember who they were or if they were good or bad. I just couldn’t hold faces, features or storylines in my head for that long.

My Dad retired a year or so ago, and he was enjoying his retirement – at least, he probably was until his 28 year old son arrived half dead. He made it his full time job to try to figure out what was wrong with me and went the rounds of various doctors near his house. He led me in to an opticians, which I don’t remember, and they said everything was fine with my eyes. One morning, after a particularly bad night, we decided to go to A&E again. We explained the eyes, and the dizziness, and the sickness and everything else, and the Doctor was convinced I had labyrinthitis - or Legionnaire’s Disease – a thinning of the fluid in the inner ear which makes people dizzy as a spinning top. She prescribed stemetil, which thickens said fluid and makes you altogether less wobbly. I took it. But still I wobbled.

I even saw a chiropractor, who told me that his silk tongue and snake oil would cure me. It was true to say I had nagging tensions in my shoulder and neck from a youth spent diving around in a muddy football goal, but I couldn’t get on board with his miracle cure of spinning my head right off my neck every couple of days for two weeks. Still, I tried it because I was willing to try anything that would make me feel better. Goodness knows how much  my Dad spent on those sessions.

Each evening I would call my fiancée and blub down the phone to her about how much I loved her and how much I missed her and all sorts of other odd ramblings. I did love her, and I missed her terribly. I also hated myself for putting her through all of this.

I was reduced to going to bed just after speaking to her because I was so tired and because everything ached and I felt exhausted. I woke up at 8am and couldn’t get downstairs before nearly nine. I would put eye drops in my eyes continuously in a desperate attempt to stop them spinning and itching. More often than not, within ten minutes of getting in to bed my breathing would quicken, and the world would turn in to an awful and menacing place. It was dark and sad, and I saw no light in the world at all. Faster and faster I would breathe and I would begin to shake. My Dad would come in to calm me down, but I would keep shaking and crying uncontrollably. I would cry so hard I started to make noises like some kind of angry sheep; it would have been hilarious if I wasn’t so despairingly bleak. The shaking would get worse; it became a violent shuddering that came in waves and left me completely exhausted, only to be hit with another wave a minute later.

It went on like this for almost two weeks. Then it was time to go back home, and back to my original doctor. My sick note was coming to an end, and I just knew she wasn’t going to sign me off work for any longer without a fight.

[8] I Feel a Little Faint