My Mental Health Story Part 9 - Is It A Trigger Point?

My wife is a blessing. She totally understands my problems, and although she must get frustrated at times, she never shows it and just puts up with the fact I have memory issues, and an important point for those living with someone who has anxiety, or indeed other mental health issues.

My story is a typical example of someone whose mental health problem has changed their life, as it did mine, with the anxiety happening as the result of an accident and not something they have grown up with. It changed my life; it changed how I was as a person, my memory, my sleeping habits, my moods, and more. And to me, my wife typifies how someone who finds themselves in her position needs to be.

Imagine you are in a happy relationship, with a partner who you love and who you gel with on nearly every aspect of life. Does that sound a bit soppy, a bit hard to believe? Well, that’s how we were pre-accident. Imagine in a split second that it can all change because your partner fell off a bike in Wales? That is how suddenly a life can change.

I know I was lucky; couples have had their lives torn apart by worse than my experience, a lot worse, and in one respect our lives didn’t change drastically, but my wife did have to accept I wasn’t the same, because I wasn’t. And yet from the memories I do have, she was the same. A caring, loving, and patient person along with all her other lovable traits. And a point to remember: people will change, and probably not for the better, and that can be hard to accept, and patience and understanding will be needed.

I am sharing my story simply to try to help people; if it can help people understand what a sufferer goes through and how their mind works, sharing must surely be good. Plus, to me, writing is like talking, and whilst I will never be the best writer in the world, it gives me, well, I’m not sure really, I suppose it gives me freedom to tell my story, and to me writing is a bit like talking to someone; if that someone is you, then thank you!

There aren’t too many stories really, as things might get a bit repetitive, but life goes on, and thankfully for me, my mindset has always been that there have never been any dark thoughts of not going on. I know others don’t feel like this, so I count my blessings in that respect!

However, one strange story I need to share was when I was still working as a H&S adviser, and it starts with getting up one morning around 5.00am to visit the loo and feeling just fine. That day I was due to drive into Birmingham to visit a couple of small business construction sites run by a company that had been summoned to sit in front of the HSE with my boss, as their H&S was that bad. On one of their developments in Burton-On-Trent, when visiting their site, the manager wasn’t there, as he was at Head Office in Birmingham for a meeting. The development was turning an old industrial building and its offices into residential flats.

Basically, there was no one in charge, and the business somehow used mainly foreign workers from the far east, who spoke very little English. Anyway, they understood ‘stop’ and ‘no more’ when I walked up onto the second storey to find them working on the edge of a balcony inserting railings, with no fall protection. And so you are aware, falling from height is the main cause of accidents in the construction industry. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing!

I phoned the site manager and left him a message saying had I been HSE, instead of his H&S adviser, his site would probably have been closed down. Within ten minutes he had phoned back saying he was on his way back to the site. This was one of the few times I actually felt really angry in my job, and I didn’t really hold back when I told him as their adviser, I was wasting my time; my advice fell on deaf ears, they didn’t care about H&S as long as the flats were being finished to sell, (as is a common theme in ALL construction sectors.) And so on and so on, but I didn’t hold back!

Anyway, that is the business I was going to visit; their standards of H&S were the same on any of their sites. That was until I met Simon, a new manager on a new site. He took H&S seriously; his attitude was very different from the other 3-4 sites in the business. If people didn’t like it, tough. It was his way or you didn’t work on the site – how refreshing for this company; however, he didn’t last too long, as he just got disillusioned with them, and with his qualifications and experience, he finished on a job Friday and started a new one Monday.

That part was to let you know the horrible day I had ahead of me, but I had been there before. Every month when I went to Birmingham, it was to their construction sites. And so I believe it couldn’t be a trigger for my anxiety, as I had been fine in the past, and there were no outstanding problems that had to be fixed, because all their sites need to be fixed all over. In the world of construction H&S, it was a s**t show!

Please remember here I use a scale of 0-10 to describe my anxiety levels, 10 being a horrible debilitating level that no one wants to experience. Anyway, after my loo visit, I went back to bed for an hour or so, until my alarm went off, and when it did, I got up, and my anxiety levels were at 9 or 10/10. The worst they had been in many a year, probably about 7/8 years, and I didn’t know why. How can they go from being at 0 to these high levels after a sleeping period of about 1.5 hours?

I nearly cried; I didn’t know what to do. I walked about, trying to work out why this had happened, what had brought this on. God, it was horrible; it was debilitating and, along with Lincolnshire, one of my worst memories of anxiety since my accident. I was despairing.

I messaged my boss and my customer and their managers to apologise, that I couldn’t get to work today as I wasn’t well, and I would re-arrange the visits. I really didn’t know what to do. It was now 7.00am and I was quite frantic; it really was a horrible, horrible time. However, rather than starting on something to divert my time, I did something totally conflicting. I went back to bed; I lay down still feeling horrible, and what did I do? Well, I did what we all do when we go to bed: I fell asleep, and I slept solid for 3 hours. Many reading this will think I have made this up, but trust me, I am writing to try to help people, not lie to them and fantasise.

When I woke up, I was absolutely fine; on my scale of 0-10, my levels were back at 0! This is another request for help. Can anyone possibly tell me how that happens? Because on that one I am totally lost. I told the story to the instructor on one of my mental health first aid courses, and he couldn’t shed any light on this event either.

I mentioned my planned day and the possibilities that the specific customer was maybe the trigger point, but as much as the visits were frustrating, annoying, and at times worse than that, it was just part of the job that had quite an autonomous and relaxed role. I know what I had to do each month, along with a few additional daily tasks passed down from the boss, and as long as I got them done, he didn’t care too much! And with my week being three days from Tuesday to Thursday, with every weekend a long one, what more could I ask for? My income paid more than some jobs that require working a five-day week, though I was far from being well off. With our joint incomes we were comfortable. And we didn’t have any worries. I have always known how lucky we have been in life.

But those visits were monthly. I had been before, and I went again, and this situation NEVER reoccurred, and this is why I cannot understand it, though let me throw something into the mix. Can dreams affect your mental well-being? Because I think they can. On that occasion I could not remember a dream, as often happened with me. But there have been mornings since when I have awoken to find myself feeling quite low and remembering part of a dream that wasn’t so good. It’s just a thought.

In that job there was always paperwork of some sort needing to be done; if I didn’t have any, then the boss did, so it was a later start for me that day, but at 10.30 I was sitting at my laptop, at the dining room table, with a morning coffee, working away and quite happy too. If you’d told me at 6.45 that is how things would be some 4 hours later, then I might have thrown something quite heavy at you!

Our mind can be a strange thing. Have you ever heard the story of the bum wanting to be the boss of the body? It's quite funny and available online. Personally, I think the head is the boss, but that’s me!

Thanks for reading

DJ