Idlebones

Bad Days

I woke up last Friday morning with the distinct feeling that I hadn’t actually been to sleep. My eyes ached like they had been held open in a sandstorm, my back felt stiff and rigid against the bed, and my brain seemed to react heavily, and in alarmingly slow motion, taking a full second to catch up with my skull as I lifted it off the pillow. I ached and ached, and wanted to sleep again. I had been hit by a bad cold all this week, as had two of the lads I was working with, and had been sensibly going to bed early each night after dinner and not hanging around in the hotel bar. Until Thursday night, that is, when we decided to go into town for a few sociables to celebrate the end of a successful week.

Being far to sociable for our own good, we didn’t get to bed till after four AM, of course, and now, as I let the shower drill a single jet of warm water into my forehead in an effort to drive out the angry swarm of wasps I had in there, I was suffering for it. I skipped breakfast, (or rather it left me behind and bustled on with itself and the good people who had made the effort to make it downstairs on time), and headed directly to site, just in time to see that I need have bothered. As luck would have it, my attendees for my training session were called away on urgent table-moving, admiring, deciding against the idea, and replacing to there original positions duties, and I was able to rest my chin in my hands and close my eyes in peace for a while.

By 12.30, it was clear that no one was coming, so I decided to give my two colleagues a lift to the bus station for their connection to the airport, and then head for home myself. It’s a boring 3 to 4 hour journey, and the sooner I could get it over with, the better.

By 13.30, it was also clear that my colleagues had missed their bus, and therefore their plane, and I was going to have to a) run them down to Shannon airport, b) drive like Schumacher after the bus and try and catch it before it left the county c) dump them unceremoniously at the bus station and wish them well, or d) bring them back to the office and leave them, responsibly, as somebody else’s problem.. It was at this point, as I joked about the long walk from Galway to Shannon, that one of my poor stranded colleagues was introduced to his first ever anxiety attack.

One colleague in the passenger seat, screaming “bring him to the hospital, he’s having a heart attack!!”, the other stretched across the back seat, panting rapidly in clear distress with his numb arms held in the air like a broken robot, and me, a former victim of such horrible attacks, trying to keep things calm while trying to remember where the bloody hospital was. Watching the poor frightened face of the man in the back seat, I could suddenly see how I must have looked one Valentines day almost two years ago. He was a quite man, who hadn’t spoken much for the full week he had worked with us, and had come across as a very decent guy. And suddenly, in the back of my car, I could see in his eyes the terror of someone alone, far from home, utterly convinced he is about to die.

Because that’s the first thing that runs through your mind when it happens for the first time. And it stay’s there, making the heart beat faster, pumping the blood into the legs, readying you for flight, numbing your extremities and sucking the oxygen out of your brain as your breathing becomes more and more rapid, until someone tells you what’s going on. All I could do was try to explain to him what was happening, and why his fingers couldn’t grip his coke bottle, why his head ached and his chest was tight, to point out that there was no pain as such, was there? It’s just a tightness, wasn’t it? By the time we had him at the hospital, he had calmed enough to control his breathing, and was beginning to get some colour back in face.

By 11 that night, an X ray, electrocardiogram, a blood test, and several hours of just sitting in a wheelchair in a corridor later, the poor sod was discharged. Luckily, our company keeps a couple of apartments in town, so we were able to change his flight details and stay with him overnight while he got over the horrible day he’d just had. Eating pizza and enjoying a beer with me later, he revealed that his family have had a history of heart disease, and hence had feared the worst when the attack happened earlier that day. We sat and talked for hours about his family, and about my experience with anxiety, and about what I had done to try and beat it. I told him about the attack I’d had 18 meters under the sea (see blog!), and the Donegal Square window I hung out of once in Belfast, desperate for air and the sound of an Ambulance siren. I explained how the symptoms affected me, and how I had spent months avoiding certain situations I knew I couldn’t handle. How I would hide myself in the beer garden of the pub, because I couldn’t bear the thick, close air inside.

A week has gone by since my colleauge from Hondures has had his episode, and it still wanders round my mind. I remember the terrifying thoughts that that went through his mind, and mine. He was as scared then as I had been, no doubt. But I’d been through it. If you haven’t been through it, your either lucky, or its on its way, it some form, or in some way that hits you like a tonne of bricks. I wanted to be able to take it away from him, because I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Unfortunetly, sometimes, it just happens..

I drove home the next day, pausing only at loughreagh to bend my seat back and listen to Ben Folds, to calm my nerves, but more to take stock, and to realise that this time last year, this journey, me driving by car, would have taken so much more out of me. There used to be a time, for a while, where this was just the norm, so much so that I couldn’t even get a good nights sleep. Now, some days are just bad days. I felt knackered, and drawn by the time I got home, so I wandered of to my bedroom, and fell flat, prone, into the duvet, and slept for Ireland.