I’ve been thinking about writing this down for a couple of weeks, more or less since I had a proper catch up with a good friend over fish & chips. We got together on the back of a text message which felt hard to send at the time, it went something like “dude I could use a hug, things are a bit shit right now”.

I’ve been telling versions of the same story, with varying degrees of detail, to a few friends over the last 4-6 weeks. As my situation has evolved I’ve had to continue to find ways of coping, including getting a few private counselling sessions. Invariably the best way seems to be, ‘just tell people how you’re feeling.’

I’ve yet to decide if I’ll post this to my blog, but I had the idea after my last counselling session that maybe writing it all down would help me. We’ll see.

What I’ve been going through covers the main areas of life: work, health and relationships. It’s not all bad, but it’s fair to say there’s stress in all three.

Relationship

It started with relationships, and this is by far the hardest one to write about since it is the one that affects me most, and it doesn’t only involve me. Obviously. So I’ll try to strike a balance between too little and too much detail. I guess I only really want to give context for the cause of my anxiety, so perhaps a quick backstory and then a summary of where we are now…

As of about 2 weeks ago, it’s been sixteen years since my wife and I started our relationship. It was a tricky long distance start, her finishing up high school in Dallas, and me just starting foundation year at art college in Cheltenham. But we were in love and we just kept making it work. She always wanted to come to Europe and managed to make that happen, coming here for college to both be closer to me and get an illustration degree.

I’m doing my best to boil 16 years of history down to the simplest terms. My wife’s desire to travel and explore didn’t subside, while my desire to stay put and keep doing the job I love near friends and family stayed strong.

In hindsight it’s obvious to me I was closing my ears to the conversations about moving because I didn’t want to go anywhere.

In 2016 I realised (likely too late) that I would lose her if I didn’t commit to move. So we talked about it and I agreed to it. We talked about America, since we both have family there, there’s no scary language barrier, and we both love the North East coast.

Then Trump happened. The plan got scrapped. Maybe Europe? Then Brexit happened, the plan got scrapped.

I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it but I figured we’d tread water a while and wait to see what the situation would be after the brexit deals were made.

Much to my delight (and surprise), she suggested we stop renting and buy a house together. Maybe she’d changed her mind about wanting to live somewhere else. And she wanted to get married. Something I’d always figured we’d do if we could ever work out the logistics and money.

So, 14 years into our relationship, we got married.

2017 rolled around and after a lot of hard saving we bought a house, spent the summer renovating the downstairs, and slipped into a comfortable routine. Her freelance illustration/animation career had really taken off, she was working from home and I was commuting to my job in Cheltenham. It was a bit too routine for her. She still wanted to go somewhere, get some adventure, get away from our godawful English weather. I think maybe it bothers people more if they grew up with a lot of warm sunny days as the norm.

Without going into too much detail, she gave me the news she wasn’t happy back in May, a few weeks before her folks were due to join us for a summer holiday in North Wales. We decided to power through and keep it together to make sure they had a good time, which they did.

I decided (again) that I was prepared to move wherever so as not to lose her, and started thinking about going freelance sooner rather than later to prepare me for the change. But as the weeks went by it became clear that that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to separate.

Ever the optimist I didn’t really believe separation would result in a break up, I guess I took the news better than she expected because of that. She moved into our friend’s spare room, and started commuting between Cheltenham and Gloucester to continue working in her office in the house, looking after the dog while I commuted in the other direction to work. I compartmentalised my feelings about the separation in order to carry on working and existing without falling apart.

Work

The idea of going freelance, despite it maybe not being necessary anymore, got deeper into my thoughts and became something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

However, the idea of breaking the news to my boss, a guy who has become one of my closest friends in the 15 years I’ve worked there, was beginning to give me intense adrenaline rushes and stress belly-ache whenever I thought about it.

Eventually I built up the courage and talked to him, whilst also taking the opportunity to fill him in on my relationship woes. It was a double whammy conversation which made me feel so stupid for not coming to him sooner. He couldn’t have been more understanding and supportive and I felt like a huge weight was lifted. Temporarily at least, I still have the scary bit of actually leaving to deal with!

Lumpy Boob

Back tracking a short way, around the same time as my wife and I were going on holiday with her folks, I thought I noticed a hard lump in the top of my right breast. I wasn’t sure though, maybe it had always been there? A couple of weeks passed and it seemed more pronounced so it figured I’d make an appointment to get it checked out. That didn’t happen immediately though, first there was a trip to OFFF Festival in Barcelona so I made the appointment when I got back.

I was chastised by my Doctor for leaving it two weeks before coming in (I was embarrassed to tell her it was actually more like 4). She put me on the breast scan referral scheme which seeks to get you scanned and checked out within 2 weeks. She said they can usually tell you on the day what it is, good or bad, and that’s that.

I thought it best not to tell anyone, with my wife literally having only just moved out, why add this stress on? In 2 weeks I’d know what it was, I could manage 2 weeks.

The appointment rolled around and they scanned my boob, and scanned it again, and got someone else to have a look too. They weren’t really sure either way, so they did a biopsy and took 3 samples. Fairly gently too, minimal bruising. The kicker though: another 2 week wait for the results. Fuuuuck. I’m an optimistic person but wondering if you’ve got breast cancer several times a day is hard work.

I had a 2 day shoot for work up north a few days later and an early start to the day, a road trip with my boss and our camera op, another good friend. On the drive I started experiencing some bizarre deja-vu, intense hearing distortion which made me think I was about to pass out, only I didn’t feel faint. I’ve never had deja-vu in my life and I’m 37, so it was definitely not a normal feeling for me. It went away, but happened again at least once before we arrived at the shoot location.

When we got there I pulled my boss aside and told him what I was experiencing, along with the wider context that I was waiting for biopsy results.

I told him I hadn’t told anyone else yet, not my wife because of the separation saga, and not my parents because they were on holiday in Greece and I didn’t want to ruin it. As usual, I got nothing but love and support from him and could’t be more grateful for that.

I got through the shoot but in the coming weeks, the weird audio disturbances didn’t stop, they just got worse. And more frequent, up to 15-20 times a day for maybe 30 seconds or more I’d get a hyper intense hearing sensation mixed with deja-vu.

My folks got back from their holiday and I finally got to unload on them all the crap that was going on, with my relationship and my breast lump. Mum offered to come with me for the results, and when that date finally rolled around they kept us in the waiting room for an hour and a half, after which I was simply asked to put a gown on. Not a nice feeling. A few minutes later the actual doctor came in and explained the biopsy results were inconclusive and they wanted to get more samples. Oh FFS. Even worse, this time the four samples taken were really very painful and left me feeling like I’d been painfully stabbed 4 times, which I had. Here we go again for another 2 week wait.

Kicking the shit out of myself

At some point during this last two week wait to find out if I had cancer, I went to bed one Monday night, and I woke up face down on the floorboards next to my bed, my shoulder felt really broken, my tongue was swollen and there was dried blood on my bruised and swollen face as well as nasty scratches on my neck. I thought I’d fallen out of bed and really done a number on myself, but describing my injuries to the doctor on the phone she seemed pretty sure I had had a seizure. She made an appointment for me to come in the next day.

The doctor checked out my injuries. My shoulder wasn’t broken but I had dislocated it. It had popped back in by itself but it sure felt broken. My tongue was agony but other than that I wasn’t feeling too bad. He booked me in for an appointment with a neurologist and simply told me I shouldn’t drive for 6 months and I needed to tell the DVLA that I had a seizure. That was about it.

I took a couple of days off work and experimented with various methods of killing the intense pain in my mouth. I could barely eat anything, and for over a week probably had less than 500 calories a day. Over two weeks I re-dislocated my shoulder several times, it seemed to want to pop out rather easily and every time was hideously painful. It’s very hard to explain how much it hurts but suffice to say I’m very relieved it hasn’t done it again for a few weeks.

The Good News

My birthday came and went, still with the cloud of potential cancer over me, and then finally I got the all clear. It’s just a stupid, lumpy boob. Over 6 weeks of worry. The relief should have been more of a weight off, but the seizure and my relationship troubles dampened the joy.

More good news from the neurologist: anyone can have a seizure and with all my anxiety it was no big surprise it happened to me. I’d probably be fine but I was booked in for an MRI just in case it was something worse.

With that behind me I thought I could start to heal properly from my injuries, and concentrate on getting myself ready to leave my job, and still hoping for the best outcome with my relationship.

The Set Back

Four weeks after the first seizure though, another one hit me.

This time I bit almost all the way through the side of my tongue, and spent the next 48 hours in a total mental haze.

Another appointment with the neurologist and she explained that two fits is treated differently than one. After 2, you go on anti-seizure meds and you can’t drive for one year. FUUUUCK me sideways. This is getting ridiculous. Okay, I can deal with it, I’ve got myself a free bus pass, I mouth wash my wounded tongue 6 times a day and get back to work – I’ve got shit to finish before I leave!

A few days after the second one, I pushed my wife to talk to me about where her head was at with our relationship. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. In a nutshell, it’s over. She didn’t want to tell me until I had a chance to recover but I asked and she couldn’t lie.

This broke me into a lot of very small pieces, and made me experience the saddest and most mentally disturbing weekend I’ve ever felt. Alongside soul crushing grief of the end of a relationship I’ve been in since I was a teenager, I had 48 hours of audio hallucinations; my parent’s voices sounded VERY strange, as well as anyone else I heard speaking including myself. Alongside that, I had a distressing out-of-body experience which I can only describe as a feeling of watching everything around me feeling like it was all just a recording of something that had already happened, on a screen perhaps? But I couldn’t see the edges or remember what happens.

Thankfully it subsided by Sunday evening and by Monday morning was more or less gone. I went back to work and for the last two weeks I’ve just been filling my time with work or talking to friends and family, as well as a private counsellor, in an effort to settle my frazzled brain down and lessen the chance of another seizure.

I’ve come to terms with the fact I can’t drive now, but it’s no less annoying. I’m coming to terms with the fact I have 6 weeks left at work and then I’m on my own. I don’t think I’ve truly come to terms with the fact my marriage is over. It still doesn’t feel real that I had two full blown seizures, dislocated my shoulder and almost bit my tongue off.

Nonetheless, this is an accurate description of what this otherwise beautiful, heat-wave of a summer has been like for me.

The Silver Linings

But like Bradley Cooper’s character in Silver Linings Playbook, I’m taking it a day at a time and I’m looking for the positives everywhere, and there’s plenty of them.

Here’s a few:

– I don’t have breast cancer

– My health problems could be so much worse, but they’re not

– I got a free bus pass

– I finally lost the 4 kilos I was trying so hard to lose, and then I lost another 3 on top of that

– I love the NHS and all the saints who work there

– My friends and family are all amazing, and care a lot more than I realised

– My wife and I are able to co-exist, without drama, and I know my she still cares for me so much. She’s my best friend, and I know that when the pain eases she’ll still be in my life even if she’s not the centre of it.

– I can still ride my bike

California Therepy

In 53 days I will have finished work and I’ll be flying to California to stay with my brother and his family for two months. It’ll be a few weeks off followed by starting up my freelance editing and animation business. I’m pretty excited to get some real time off in a place I love, and hopeful that it’ll help me to reset my troubled mind.

Writing this out was kind of therapeutic, so I’m glad I did. Hopefully it was at least an entertaining read. Thanks for sticking with me while things have been tough, hopefully they’re about to get a whole lot better.

– Sera