I'd never really been to the doctor for anything other than the routine stuff, once a year at most. I couldn't remember the last time I even had a cold. Sitting in the waiting room that morning I felt awful but I still felt like a fraud. I wasn't struggling to give up smoking, I wasn't a domestic abuse victim, I didn't have cancer- none of the posters on the wall applied to me. What was I going to say when I got in there? I tried to rehearse in my head but it just sounded like someone else far away...'I need some time off', 'I broke down at work this morning', 'I'm not coping very well', 'I think its triggered by long-haul flying'...it was massive in my head but sounded so thin and self-pitying saying it out loud. I felt ashamed even though deep down I knew there was no need. Asking for the time off work, the 'fit note' was the hardest part even though that was what I really needed- why did I find it so difficult to ask for what I needed? In the end I was signed off work for a week and prescribed anti-depressants. One week was never going to cut it but at that point I had no idea of the rollercoaster that sodding filing cabinet had got me on....that overloaded filing cabinet was now teetering at the top of the stairs looking at me with a raised eyebrow wondering what I was going to do next...
I lay on the sofa for a week. A huge brown leather three-seater that my grandparents had bought me as a moving-in present the year before. I don't think I opened the curtains; the TV was just doing its own muted thing in the background; Sainsbury's bravely delivered to the door; getting dressed definitely didn't happen; I was waiting for the anti-depressants to work; I couldn't hold a thought in my head; I wanted to just be still and quiet. Invisible and temporarily absent from the world.
Mentally I felt in a fog, sliding into that clichéd black hole- the overriding image in my head was trying to get over a high wall and watching my hands almost reaching the top and sliding back down. Couldn't I be any more original? Not to mention the that fact that getting flashbacks to struggling over six foot walls under the weight of an oversize bergan on the assault course at Sandhurst really wasn't helpful! I didn't want to go out and when I did the anxiety got me. Supermarkets were overwhelmingly chlaustrophobic and I would have to leave, unable to cope with the other people around me, unable to make simple decisions about what I needed to buy, unable to cope with the pressure of the checkout and the expectation of me to engage with the world in ways which everyone else seemed so able to take for granted.
Physically, I was weak, tired and run down. I had mouth ulcers; I wasn't sleeping and when I did I'd wake up with a jump as though a creepy Minion had just appeared in my room; my skin rejected all contact with jewellery; talking about things I didn't even realise were mildly stressful gave me a rash all over my neck; and I was pissing clear- completely, 100% clear and the whites of my eyes were white, white, white. I was a full-on adrenalin repository!
Psychologically- no idea. Loop the loop. I wasn't recognising myself in the mirror. I blamed the Citalopram. It could stick its nausea, its weird warping of my taste buds and its mirror tricks.
I went cold turkey.
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