Where do we go from here?

January has arrived with some unusual weather for the time of year, but nothing has arrived from the NHS, I’m still going through every day with some semblance of expectancy, checking the mail and my hopes are continually being dashed on a regular basis, it’s only now that I realise the roller coaster of emotions that I have been on, thankfully the lows have not been as bad as previous times and I think I can actually navigate the seas better than I have been of late.

Having made that grand  sweeping statement, I have discovered the lows that I do experience are as deep as they can go, Am I being touchy feely new age man?, I don’t think I am, over the last thirty years I have experienced some pretty bleak times with some dark thoughts, No I haven’t come to the bottom, the end of my rope or any of the other metaphors you can use regarding the emotional distress I have been suffering, I haven’t wanted to self-harm, or even worse, but the dark moods that cover me are soul destroying, and it’s really hard to get somebody who hasn’t gone through this to understand, you cannot quantify it, the feeling of desolation, the emptiness, the bleakness, it seems that I’m going round and round in crazy (there’s that word)circles, let’s just say I get a little down.

The timescale for treatment is mind boggling, maybe if I had lied and said that I intend to self-harm etc etc,(I have said this before and in reality I know this isn’t the case it takes the time it takes there are other people out there who issues not just me) I would be at least starting my treatment, I know that there is no magic wand, no easy way to resolve the issues that haunt me on a daily basis, trust me even when I seem to be the happy go lucky chap (yes me) on the outside at times I am reliving those six same minutes in my head that have been with me for over thirty something years, some people who know me I think look at me and go “what’s the issue”, at the moment it’s the cycle of thoughts I am having ,well what are  they? Well I have a tendency to think that it’s my fault for what happened (people tell me it’s not, I know it’s not, but try and tell my brain that) it’s my fault for not asking for help before, actually I did but all of the army doctors wanted to do was to give me copious amounts of debilitating drugs, not what I really wanted in the end. When I recently went for both assessments, both health professionals who did exactly the same assessments (talk about being careful, what did they think I was a loon or something) indicated that my issue was that I was a higher functioning patient (WTF) this apparently means that I can function and do quite complicated tasks, while suffering from various anxiety attacks or even deep depression, at the same time I struggle to do some of the more mundane things like fasten my shoes, use keys the type of thing most adolescents take for granted, ask my wife she knows exactly how incapacitated I can become (without alcohol) just trying to do simple tasks!

If you go back to the beginning of this book you will be aware that I have muddled on with my problem for quite a while, I’m not saying anything about the length of time; I’m not trying to set a world record, I know that some people (even some of you who are reading this) have probably suffered worse than me, but to be brutally honest I’m tired of this droning on in my head, I have had enough I would love to be able to be like a normal human being, to have a night where I have uninterrupted sleep, at this point my wife will say that I sleep the sleep of the dead, but if only that was true, I cannot remember a night where I haven’t at some point had a variation of my nightmare for want of a better word in living memory  (that takes me up to at least last Tuesday), I can actually tell you the date (February 28^th 1982)that the problem started, and since that day there is not a night where I have not relived the incident in graphic detail, some nights better than others and some considerably worse, and that’s not including the days where I have a tendency to seem as though in a daze (let’s not go there) where I am actually having a meltdown, People like myself have a tendency to be able to get the hell out of dodge and give my head a shake before the whole world and his dog realise that I’m a total head the ball. The fact that I have decided to write about it and make the whole world (and his dog) aware hopefully won’t make anybody think any worse of me. Actually I don’t care anymore what the world or his bloody dog thinks about me, the only people who concern me are my wife and kids then my friends then on a good day the rest of the world, I would like for my wife to have stop looking out of the corner of her eye, keeping an eye on me, to stop making sure that I am a rational (yeah right) functioning (barely) human being (now we are just asking the impossible).

The fact that I can make small random jokes about my “condition” I think means that I am for some reason finally being able to cope with it, putting my best foot forward and actually asking for that helping hand has batted away the little black cloud that usually follows me about and when it gets the chance it nips in and kicks me whenever it has the chance to do such a thing, it’s sneaky but it’s almost like I know when it’s going to happen thankfully since last May it happens on a less regular basis, that doesn’t imply that it sometimes doesn’t get me on the ropes from time to time, but I have a much better determination not  for it not to beat me.

Am I repeating myself? I probably am, here we are in January, waiting for something to happen (treatment wise) is it too much to ask, I asked for the assistance in May of last year, I was honest (what a fool) I didn’t exaggerate, I was brought (dragged) up as a good boy, I told the truth and here we are seven months down the road no further forward, I do however continue to try and educate myself I return to the memory exercises that I was taught after I came out of the army, they did indeed try to help, but I might as well have fought in the first world war for all the good it did the help that I received was the standard for the day thankfully it has improved another reason why I probably hung on before I asked for help again, that was the standard at the time and I gratefully accepted what was offered, Ok so I had to be dragged to the first few appointments, and the threat of being sectioned under Military law (because I was still under that jurisdiction as part of my discharge) and them to drag me off (and trust me those boys would have) and put me in one of their loony bins, they still had military hospitals in those days that goes to show you how long ago it was. 

So as I’m writing these chapters on a monthly basis for my own sake really, maybe in the vain hope that this looks like a some kind of road map to my problem, so with not a lot going on it appears that the chance of me completing this as a book itself will soon grind to a halt because if I publish this drivel you will all be clamouring for me to “sectioned” let’s keep my fingers crossed and the hope as high as I can, because at the moment the Chinese water treatment I’m receiving isn’t helping matters.