Eventually me appendix burst and I was rushed to hospital in the early hours of the morning and I was in A&E in the waiting room and it was seven oclock before I got seen, and fortunately me partner had come with me and they said to me, you know, What’s been happening? And they did a blood test, apparently with your appendix your white blood count’s supposed to drop but mine didn’t, and they said, Have you took any drugs Well I reeled off all these anti-psychotics [laughs] I think he knew it might be relevant, and he said, this is gospel truth, and this nurse came back and said , Are you going to tell us the truth what you’re doing here? don’t waste our time And me partner was really kicking up a fuss and eventually this surgeon come and he did a rebound test, and it nearly put me through the roof and he says, This guy’s got appendicitis I, it was ten oclock in the morning I’d been there since three in the morning when I got admitted to the ward, I was placed on morphine, ten oclock at night the same surgeon come back and said , And we’re really busy in theatre we’ll probably just drain your stomach and send you home Then me partner said, You can’t you’re going to kill him And I was sent for an ultrasound then and me appendix had burst and there was an abscess on it. But it was three oclock in the morning before they actually operated, so I’d been there twenty-four hours, and as luck would have it I knew one of the theatre technicians, and he came to see me partner afterwards and he says, He was an hour from death He says, he, he said, It had all gone to peritonitis through his body He says, We opened up his stomach and we had to leave it for ten minutes because of the smell of the poison And he says, We washed his stomach out three times before we actually started work on it And I’d been out of hospital a week and the peritonitis came back, I got straight back in, and it’s just been an accumulation of event, it’s, it’s never been right from that point.

I mean there are times, I’ll be honest when I think, oh God, you know, I can’t cope with this, but I wouldn’t be without him. You know, I think any relationship, either talking to friends or whatever, you know, any relationship has its ups and downs. it’s, you know… We have that kind of extra dynamic and we, I think, in a funny way, having the extremes of experiences that I have had has made me a fuller person. If I have friends who are in trouble emotionally, if they’re going through a really hard time, I’m there for them. I can understand, you know, they can talk to me, and that is a gift. You know, that is a gift. And, without being, you know, oh I can solve anybody’s problems. No. But the friends that I do have I have such a deep relationship with them that we can talk about anything. I mean absolutely anything. And we support each other which is vitally important, and I think so many people don’t have that, you know.

One of the nicest techniques my psychologist taught me was the compassionate friend. Have you heard of that?

Yes. But say a bit about it?

Yes, I will do, it’s lovely. Because I’d go in and I’d feel awful and I’d feel very guilty about not looking after my son properly and I would have been down, and I wouldn’t have had much energy so I would have confessed that I hadn’t taken him out enough or done enough with him and things like that. And my psychologist would say, What would a compassionate friend say And I would always come up with the same answer and that was quite strange actually. I would say, I’m doing the best I can at the time And it would take the guilt away. It was just giving me permission to do what I do but not feel bad about it, and that was a really good technique and it’s one that I keep now, you know, you’re doing the best you can at the time, you know, and that is, has been really valuable for me. So I’m glad that I’m glad that he taught me that technique. Because it sort of saves you from the upset. And guilt’s quite a big thing when you’ve got a kid I think.

I still wasn’t handling my parents coming to see me at all, because it just made me feel worse, just made me feel like I was just how much I was distressing them you know in a way and I still didn’t know how to deal with them at all. So I still, I put up a bit of a wall, I tried to tell them like… I kind of felt that every time I’d start to feel a bit better they’d come and it would just set me straight back, you know, so any kind of progress I was making would just be completely like, just vanish. and so I tried to write to them to sort of say, you know I need to get better; I can’t do this with having contact with you I’ve got to do this on my own. My dad kind of took that, kind of, my mum totally didn’t was just angry you know, I don’t know felt rejected again.

At one point I was meant go to hospital for a day and overnight. I can’t remember the exact reason why, but I just didn’t like it at all, so I phoned my Dad up and came home. I didn’t even believe, like, because I was trying to get to see a doctor and they were just saying that you have to wait, and I was waiting like four or five hours it was ridiculous. I couldn’t see anyone. So I, and I couldn’t believe that they were lying, because at this time, obviously I thought everyone was, was against me, and I thought they, they were just doing it on purpose, made me worse. It did. That actually made it worse. So I really did thing they were just trying to make me worse. Even though they probably weren’t. It was just they were too busy.

And then when you said everybody was against you, did you also think about your family and friends?

No. Not really. When I went, I was in the hospital, I didn’t belI thought like when I phoned my Dad up to get him to pick me up from the hospital, that it wasn’t actually my Dad on the phone, even though I knew it was his voice, but I thought it had been someone from hospital winding me up. And I had to like ask him questions that only he would know, to prove that it was him. That’s like what I was thinking at the time. They were just winding me up.

I kind of got, the only kind of really support I have to say I got was from the other patients. So you know, there was many a time I was crying on the ward and no nurse came to comfort me. It was you know, for the patient. And there was one lady, I’ll never forget this, she went, she saw that I was crying, she went out, to the kind of drinks machine and she bought me back a can of Cola to cheer me up. And I thought that was just so sweet, and when you’re feel very like, vulnerable and very alone, and attacks, that kind of little bit of humanness and a little bit of compassion makes all the difference.