Hourglass

 

Trigger warning!

Uncle Tim here.

In early December last year, my 9-year-old niece suddenly started hemorrhaging from her mouth late at night in the bathroom of her family home. Thankfully her parents were both nearby, however, she almost bled to death in their arms before my brother-in-law was able to somehow stop the bleeding while they were waiting for an ambulance to arrive. He almost lost a few fingers in the process when she began fitting and her jaw clamped down on him as he was trying to staunch the blood flow from his youngest child's (and only daughter's) mouth. He has bite mark scars on his hand now.

What followed this were several weeks of completely emotionally harrowing times for my immediate family during which time my niece and sister were airlifted from Hobart in Tasmania to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne with my niece in critical condition where she ended up having multiple CAT scans, MRIs, angiograms, ultrasounds and operations where arteries and veins were separated and in some places cauterised. While a few months on things have now improved, she is still not out of the woods yet and she has a team of people in Hobart and Melbourne looking after her case and will for some time to come.

For my immediate family, our relationships have been tested and strained in some cases and cracks have appeared in quite a few places. For me, my stress levels went through the roof, my anxiety and depression took over and dragged me down and my feelings of complete and utter helplessness and hopelessness became all-consuming. I also began experiencing insomnia and my work and personal lives have also been significantly impacted.

To add a little more fuel to the nightmare, 7 weeks ago, on my 43rd birthday, I was told my father was going to die. 

Since then, I honestly think that I have been one bad moment or experience away from a complete and utter breakdown.

Every living thing is going to die. That is a universal truth and there's no getting around that. I think that that knowledge can feel almost theoretical, cold even, for most of us as we go throughout life dealing with the day-to-day, the ups and downs, the petty grievances, the stuff that is shoved in our face demanding our attention at that moment, and that makes most of us almost separate ourselves from this fundamental truth of existence like we're just sweeping it under the rug or stashing it in an attic and pretending it's not there. Like it doesn't exist.

I'm no stranger to death. All my biological Grandparents are gone, and two of my Aunties and an Uncle are gone. I've lost people I was friends with in school, I've lost colleagues, I've lost people I've looked up to, I've lost people that I've been basically happy to see the back of and I've also supported many people that I care about through the loss of people very close to them.
For many years I also worked in the main trauma hospital for the South-Western Sydney Area Health Service where I spent most of my time in the ICU and Emergency depts as well as the general wards etc. I dealt with death firsthand on a daily basis as I used to have to help the nurses clean and bag the bodies, transport them down to the morgue and place them in those roll-out trays in fridges that you see on all the police procedural shows while checking their tags and the death register etc. I have had patients who were in ICU for months that I built a great rapport with die within a few minutes of me seeing and speaking to them, I've had trauma victims die in ER in front of me and I've seen so many grieving relatives of people that lost someone through natural or unnatural means so yeah, I have seen some shit in my time, to the point that when you work in that environment you are able to become detached from it. It is part of the job, it is a task you need to perform before moving on to the next thing. It is impersonal, it is cold, it is clinical. It is the natural outcome of living.

All the above goes out the door when it's one of your own.

My father is 87 years old, so all things considered he has had a great run so far! My niece however is still a child and has so much to see, to feel, to experience. Having said that though, how can you compare the lives of people you love? How can you think, even for a moment, that a long life is a life well lived so it's ok for them to go compared to someone who is still young and "innocent" and inexperienced in so many things?

I don't know and at this point, I feel stretched so thin emotionally that I feel hollow and that what little spark of joy in life I've been able to claw back on my mental and emotional health recovery journey over the last few years has been stamped out. I'm able to find some fleeting moments of peace and happiness when I'm with my girlfriend and her dogs but they are always shortlived as invariably we go our separate ways to our own places and I am alone again, trapped with my intrusive thoughts and am at their mercy as I just don't have the strength in me to fight them. So I do then what I always do when the depression has me. I shut down, I distance myself from people and situations, I stop taking care of myself physically and emotionally, I start fixating on things and I punish myself mercilessly.

While there is hope in the case of my niece due to her age, the people she has taking care of her and the sheer good fortune that this all happened when and where it did, in my father's case it is hopeless.

My father was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis 3 years ago, and it is a degenerative lung disease that has no cure. It is also what killed my Aunty, his younger sister, about 5 years ago and what killed a family friend about 15 years ago, a lovely woman that I'd known most of my life and that my mother had made her replacement maternal figure.

He has been on experimental medication to try and halt or slow down the progress of the disease since then as well as physiotherapy for his lungs and while he has struggled a great deal with side effects and other problems, he has soldiered on like a champ and just kept rolling with all the punches. We have all noticed a decline in the last 6 months where he is getting out of breath doing the simplest things and at his latest check-up he was told that the medications weren't working and the disease is still progressing and he now only has about 25% of his lung capacity left. It is only going to get worse.

People who are diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis tend to only live for another 3-7 years after they are diagnosed and yes, while I have known he had it, I've been able to live in a sort of blissful ignorance about it all besides the occasional update around test results, physio or medication changes. Blissful ignorance is not really the correct wording here, it's hope. I lived with hope and now All Hope Is Gone.

Don't mind me, I couldn't help but add the cheeky Slipknot reference...  😉

Rolling off the back of what I'd just gone through over my niece, plus work stress, plus some relationship stress, plus the massive health scare my girlfriend had about 8 months ago (another story for another time), plus dealing with some other remembered past traumas, plus my deteriorating internal state and you can pretty much guess how life has been for me lately. Add in some extra family relationship drama shit on top of that and you have a reasonably accurate picture of the state of play.
Complete and utter shitshow is putting it mildly, clusterfuck doesn't have enough Oomph to it...... I don't know, I think I would need to invent the words to describe it and it still wouldn't be accurate and wouldn't capture the rate of change it has gone through during all this time. So yeah, I've been a mess. My insomnia has become a lot worse and I've been so wound up that the slightest amount of stress has triggered the fuck out of me. I've been snapping at people I work with, I've been hyper-fixating on work, I've been unable to focus, I've had multiple anxiety and panic attacks, I've been engaging in risky behaviour and if I haven't been completely shut down I've been an emotional wreck. I've barely spoken to anyone in months now and I've even kept the majority of my support structure at a distance as I just haven't been able to deal with anything and I have been feeling like a burden. I am exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally.

Speaking to my partner in the last couple of weeks and (over)analysing my mental and emotional state like I am want to do, I realised that I have actually been in crisis for months now, the problem is that I was so wrapped up in it all I couldn't see it. Speaking to my doctor afterwards, he spoke about active and passive thoughts when it came to intrusive thoughts and suicidal ideation and while I knew the terms, I realised I didn't know their full implications. Having researched them since the discussion I have come to realise that I have been living in active mode for decades now which was a rather horrible thing to discover. The doctor also spoke about a safety plan, which he has done before, but this is the first time I have really taken it on board.

Last week I told my boss I needed a couple of mental health days, a phrase that I have never used in the workplace before despite the fact I've needed the support from them, and he graciously allowed me to take them and just shut everything out. I have also muted and blocked a family member on various services so that I don't have to deal with their shit and I have just spent the last 4 days disconnected and relaxing, as well as spending time with my girlfriend. Something clicked in my brain a few days ago while I was in the middle of a float tank therapy session (if you have never done it then you HAVE to! Fantastic stuff), floating in complete darkness with some very low meditation music playing and for the first time in months I am feeling more in control of shit instead of being my own, as well as others, punching bag. I'm still not sleeping properly but I've been able to have a little more sleep which has also helped. I don't necessarily feel ready to go back to work tomorrow but the thought of it is not making me irritable or feeling an immense sense of dread.

I don't know if acceptance is the right word to use here but maybe there might be moments of it here and there, and while I'm having, and will continue to have my good and bad days, I hope I'm on the way to some sort of resolve or peace over the matter. I don't know....... can anyone really "accept" the death of a loved one? You just have to deal with it and that's really it.... It's cold, it's fucked but that's really all there is to it.

Things have been off since my niece was rushed to the hospital, I don't know what's going to happen when my father dies but I suspect it's going to be a catalyst for enormous change, the prospect of which is frightening as I think it's going to fuck my family up.

So where to from here? I have no fucking idea but I am just going to try one day at a time for now. I don't know if I can be alright here but I'm going to keep trying to work on it. I'm making a few changes in my life to try and help me get through all of this and get some balance and I'm going to try to get more 1:1 time with my father and support him as best I can while also trying to take care of myself.

Tell your loved ones how much they mean to you while you still can and fuck off everything and everyone that isn't good for you and doesn't add to your happiness and growth. As the saying goes "Life is too short!" and while it sounds cliched as fuck, it's true.

Thanks for reading/listening if you've made it this far, I greatly appreciate it.

Big love and chat soon xx  🦘🐨

https://discord.gg/rRCmfk6QDe

PS.

No doubt this topic would have been as intense for you to read as it was for me to write (and believe me it was awful reliving all this shit over the last several hours that I've been writing but I just had to get it out!) so please take some time out for yourself to decompress and practice some self-love/compassion/gratitude or whatever you need to do. I find hugging pets really helps!

If anything that I have spoken about here has triggered you then please reach out to your support circle and/or any of your local support services for additional assistance. A few of us on the Family Style Discord group created a non-exhaustive list of support services for our member countries which is linked here if you'd like to check it out xx