I always knew I would. Deep down I knew I would find myself back here. Eventually. It started as the outlet for the pseudo-philosophical, navel gazing ramblings of a teenager trying to work out the world so why not revive it for my late 20's as I try to reassess that very same world and my own psychological make-up with more wisdom and experience than that fresh faced idiot that started this blog. I am quite literally an entirely different person than the smug git who thought he had it all worked out. I prefer myself now. I'm much more humble. Probably the humblest.
So what has truly sparked this need for one-sided dialogue through a medium usually reserved in the modern era for cake recipes? Well my mental breakdown of course!
Trigger Warnings: mental health issues, death and self harm.
I felt those might be needed. I like now to think of others more than when I started this blog. This blog used to be so focused on myself. To be fair to myself, I was a teenager and they're notoriously bad at stepping into other people's shoes. Although saying that, this blog is still all about myself and this post uses the word "I" more times than all the other posts put together. Oh well.
Those trigger warnings are probably quite scary for those that know me, love me, are acquainted with me, once met me at a party and so added me on Facebook (which is the only place I can bothered to share this incidentally) or happened to stumble upon this blog. First off, I will start by saying I am happier now than I have been for a number of years. I feel lighter. I see the world differently. Frankly, I actually see the world now and not just the inside of my own head. I can talk about how happy I am (and I will a bit later), but to truly appreciate light you must consider darkness or some other appropriately mysterious sounding, zen crap. So here's the darkness (sadly not the band The Darkness who shot to fame with their hit single "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" released in 2003).
I was diagnosed with panic disorder at the end of 2020. I had been having panic attacks, severe anxiety, had been sleeping badly with strong, vivid dreams that would wake me up and leave me feeling as exhausted when I woke up as I was when I hit the pillow. I had been working long, physically and emotionally draining shifts as a nurse in an elderly care facility. During 2020 I watched 9 of our residents die in a fairly short space of time. Interestingly none of them from SARS-CoV-2. All from illnesses, infections or just getting old, worn out and giving up. I had been working on that ward for a number of years and, with it being a long-term care facility (end of the road care essentially) I had come to know the residents intimately. I had cared for them and had begun to really care for them. And then I watched them die.
Here's something they don't tell you about death. Life is not a light switch. In movies and other media, people say their last words, take a last breath and then close their eyes and lay their perfectly made-up face back on their pillow and then the music swells and there's a fade away to a funeral where everyone looks sad in their best clothes. It can happen like that, that someone passes quickly and quietly with no fuss and they make for a great looking corpse, but I can tell you now that I've seen far more of the other type of death. Death that takes weeks. Death that travels up the body in waves. Death that leaves the face gaunt and hollow as the person starves, no longer able to eat. First their feet change colour, they get paler, they get colder, but only at the edges. Personified Death is often depicted with a scythe, but actually he uses a paper shredder on it's slowest setting. It creeps up on you. There was one resident I knew didn't have more than an hour when I brushed against his face and his nose was cold, but his cheek was hot.
The slow death is far from painless either. I had a resident where I barely needed to keep track of when she needed her next morphine shot. I knew it was coming up time for the next one because I would hear her crying from down the corridor. Eventually she did get a continuous pain medication pump, but before that I was the one to keep topping her up. After she died, we removed the feeding tube that was inserted directly into her stomach. Black pus and bile and poison poured out of the hole. She had effectively rotted from the inside over a period of about two weeks. We could smell it on her breath days before her body finally gave in.
We also often had residents that had truly died long before their body realised. I watched people mentally degrade, lose their faculties and personalities, lose the ability to walk and talk and eat and be left as human shells. We did have some people that kept enough of their awareness to ask us to kill them. They would tell us they wanted to die everyday and we would reply that the coffee was coming at 2pm.
Have you noticed I changed to "we" after starting off using "I"? I think this is part of how I coped with these situations, one of my defense mechanisms. I talked about our team, I talked about a collective not as an individual because confronting these things alone is just so hard. I leaned heavily on my coworkers and, because they are some of the best people I have ever met, I did receive help and support. It wasn't enough though.
After the deaths of 2020, other issues going further back and numerous intensely stressful situations during that year, I was full of anxiety and burning out. I got my diagnosis, tried to take things easier, and then, in January 2021, Covid finally got around to visiting us. In the space of 4 weeks, it killed 6 residents. The first death was unconfirmed as Covid because she died before she could be tested. I took her temperature in the afternoon because her bed was soaked with sweat. She had a high fever. I booked her a Covid test, came in the next morning and was told she had died in the night. Death is not always slow and expected. Sometimes it hits you like a truck. I had to call her daughter.
Due to a series of circumstances, I was often the only carer on duty that had been on the ward more than once or twice during our corona virus epidemic. I knew the residents intimately, their routines, their likes, their dislikes, and so I had to give directions of care for the cover workers drafted in to fill holes in the schedule that was at this point akin to Swiss cheese. I was often the only one with the sign in credentials for ordering medications and food, so had that on top of all of the regular and now extra duties. I was constantly being turned to and relied upon because I was the one with experience on the ward. I was constantly waiting for the residents that tested negative to inevitably turn positive. I was watching and waiting for the next person to die. It was Hell.
Some Covid killed outright. Others "technically" didn't die from Covid as they had "recovered" from the illness, but the recovery had taken a heavy toll. It took the strength out of them. One was always at high risk. He had already had a long history of health problems. He said I was his friend. He had greeted me every time I walked into his room with a loud "Joseph! My friend! How are you!?" He was always smiling. He went downhill after he caught Covid. He started getting morphine injections. I got on shift and was told he would need a shot soon. I didn't go and see him right away. I got some other tasks done, then got the injection ready, went to his room and he was dead. I knew as soon as I opened the door.
In preparing a dead body, one of the tasks is wrapping gauze around the head and jaw to keep the mouth closed before rigor mortis has a chance to set in. This can be very difficult. The gauze is often slippy on the hair and hard to tighten sufficiently. I called for his body to be picked up, but did so before I prepared his body. I realised this was a mistake and so started hurrying to get him ready to go. I was struggling to hold my friend's mouth closed and wrap the gauze at the same time. It kept slipping off his head and I was rushing because I knew they were going to arrive to take him away soon. When they arrived, I was still halfway through wrapping his head. I hadn't got the gown on him properly. I hadn't covered his face properly. They said it didn't matter, they could take him as he was. He had been going to hospital multiple times a week for years and each time when the paramedics would load him on the stretcher for his appointment, they moved him swiftly, but as gently as possible. I would often be at the end of the bed to help hold his feet together and lift his legs safely onto the stretcher. This time it wasn't gentle because it didn't need to be. They just dragged him onto the stretcher. I stepped forward to hold his legs again, but I was too slow and he was already in motion. Then they took him away.
All of these things and more, deep cuts and little paper cuts, tore me up. I found myself obsessing about death. I had seen so much of it. I had lost count of how many people since I started working as a carer had died. I had lost count of how many bodies I had personally seen. I would look at people of all ages passing by in the street and try and guess what they would look like old, withered, dead. I looked through the records we kept to find and list the names of as many people as I could that had died, to give them names and remember their faces. I put together a list of over 40 names.
Going to work, thinking about going to work, became a sickening ball of dread and anxiety that hung in my gut. I wished I would develop a cough so I could have time off while I was tested. I didn't want Covid, I just wanted an excuse to not go in. I wondered sometimes how long I would get off if I twisted my ankle really bad. I found myself stood, waiting for the lights to change, cars and buses passing by, at a crossing not far from work. I was going in for another shift and almost shaking. I thought "What if I walked into the road right now? No! That could kill me and I don't want to die. What if I just stuck my leg out? That might just break my leg. I could get a fair few weeks off if my leg was broken. Even if I wasn't hurt, the experience of being hit by a car might warrant some time off...".
That was probably my lowest day in my entire life and I'm thankful for it. I didn't sink any lower than that. I never did harm myself, I never felt like I wanted it all to end, I just didn't want to go to work anymore.
My coworkers and boss were very understanding and supportive. I started on medication which didn't seem to do much. My dosage was upped and I had two weeks off which I said was "to adjust to the new medication" when it was actually because I could not face going in again and now had a cast iron excuse (which is stupid because severe anxiety is good enough on it's own). Those two weeks... were incredible. I felt happy. I felt free. I felt endless opportunity opening up in front of me. I was amazed. The medication had worked wonders! I was so giddy I was almost manic. And then the two weeks were up and I had to go back to work.
Almost to the second of walking through the doors on my first day back, the anxiety crashed in on me again. It was like I had never had the time off. It was crushing. The medication was not the reason I had felt so happy, being away from work, the stress, the anxiety, the constant reminders of past bereavements had been the real medicine. My contract ended in September. It was only just turning to May. I wasn't going to make it. I knew then that I had to quit. This was not only harming me, this was unfair to my colleagues that I had taken to avoiding for the most part, only interacting when absolutely necessary. Most of the time, I was burying myself in my phone, constantly scrolling from a funny picture of a cat to a news story about somewhere far away to a gif of someone falling over to another mindless piece of content that I could use to distract myself from the present moment. My go-to phrase was "Kaikki hyvin". "Everything's fine". A complete lie. The thing that hurt me the most was that I could see it was hurting my ability to give good care. I wasn't in the present moment. I was on autopilot. I wasn't able to give my full attention to the people that needed it. I had to quit.
So I quit.
It wasn't, and still hasn't become, the magical cure-all that has now freed me from all anxiety and worry, but just knowing I now had an end in sight helped so much for my final two weeks. My mood improved. My anxiety reduced (after a few days of intense anxiety because I had actually pulled the trigger and said I was leaving). A few times, I was almost tempted to think "Maybe I was too hasty, maybe I could carry on", but I got reminders during those two weeks that this was not truly a choice, but a necessity. I opened the drying cupboard one day and was suddenly confronted by a blanket that was owned by my friend I talked about before. Suddenly seeing it there in the drying cupboard was like taking a punch from Tyson to the gut. I stood and stared at it for what felt like 20 minutes, but it was probably only 1 or 2. "Joseph! My friend! How are you!?" Another reminder that I was making the right decision came on my last day. I walked into the room of a resident to ask if they wanted a cup of coffee and used the wrong name. I used the name of someone that had died. I needed to get out and so now I am out.
My medication was further upped and I feel I am now much closer to "normal". As is evidenced by this post, I am still working through all of these... things and I will hopefully also be getting therapy. This post is basically me breaking down what I've been through for myself, but, nevertheless, I am now happier than I have been for a fair while. I see future opportunities. I can breathe.
I'm still somewhat uncertain of my future in nursing. It's hard to know if I'm going to carry the anxiety to other work places or have I now left it behind. Nursing is so diverse that I feel it must be possible to find something in nursing that isn't going to destroy me. I recognise how incredibly lucky I am that I could just quit my job, knowing that I am, for the moment, financially safe and that there are an ocean of jobs available to me in this field that is forever in need. It's a very privileged position to be in and I recognise it's not the norm.
For those that are in their own dark place. I want you to talk to someone. Believe me, I know how hard it is. It might be that you don't even realise something is wrong yet; you get so used to saying "kaikki hyvin" that you believe it yourself. I've been there. More than once in fact. Talk to someone. Please. It helps. It doesn't have to be me, but know that whoever you are reading this, I will listen. You don't have to have seen or experienced the same things as me either. Don't compare what you are going through to others because it's you that is going through it, not them. It's not trivial if it's not trivial to you. You matter. You also don't have to be having your darkest possible day to talk to me or someone else. Venting and expressing yourself is necessary and healthy. Don't bottle things up. Stop and consider how you feel. Explore how you feel and understand how you feel and then share how you feel with someone you trust. Don't push it down, it will just condense and harden and drag everything down with it. It's difficult, and it will hurt, but it is so worth it and you are worth that effort.
Peace.
