Pulse(6)

I had almost cried out with joy.

And I’d felt foolish.

But, by that stage, feeling foolish was one of my lesser worries.

Twelve months ago if you had given me a broken leg, a punctured lung or a ruptured spleen, I would have known exactly how to fix it, but a chemical imbalance in the brain and the impact it has on mental function had been a closed book to me.

Not that I really knew any better now, in spite of some extensive research, with me acting as the guinea pig.

During the year I had been referred to two different gynaecologists, an endocrinologist and, in desperation, a psychiatrist. I also had so many blood tests that the veins in my arms were like pincushions.

Yet not one of those eminent physicians could point a finger and confidently say, ‘This is what is wrong with you.’ Each of them had their own opinion, and that seemed to vary with each successive set of blood results.

‘Ah, yes,’ my endocrinologist would say, studying one of the readouts. ‘Your thyroid hormone level is too low. We need to boost that.’

So I would take a pill every night. However, the next test would show that the thyroxine was now too high but my testosterone was too low. So another medication would be prescribed.

And so it would go on.

I was now taking a nightly cocktail of a dozen pills, plus applying various patches and creams, and still I didn’t feel well.

It had taken me quite a while to accept a diagnosis of depression.

How could I be depressed? I had a loving husband whom I adored, two wonderful kids doing well at school, a nice house, roses in the garden, two cars in the driveway, a purposeful career and no financial worries. What did I have to be depressed about?

‘It’s not about what you have or don’t have,’ the psychiatrist told me. ‘John D. Rockefeller was the richest man there has ever been and he suffered from depression. Acute anxiety caused him to lose all the hair on his body.’

Was that supposed to make me feel any better?

It certainly had me scrutinising my hairbrush each morning to see if I was losing mine. I would lie awake for hours at night worrying about it. In fact, I had become a chronic worrier. I could worry for England about an entire range of things over which I had no control, nor any need to control. The whole process simply made me immensely tired and even more anxious.

Some days my mood was so low that I had difficulty getting out of bed. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and wish the whole world would go away.

But I had kids to get to school, a husband who liked his breakfast, and a job where people were relying on me to keep them alive. So curling up was not an option.

But, all the while, I was trying to keep my condition a secret – a secret from my children, from my mother, and especially from my work – not an easy task when I was surrounded on a day-to-day basis by highly trained and observant doctors. Indeed, there had already been a few questions asked, questions that I had successfully sidestepped and left unanswered.

‘Why don’t you just tell them?’ Grant often asked. ‘I’m sure they would understand and be helpful.’

Would they?

According to the Mental Health Foundation, some form of mental illness affects about one in four of the UK population.

So I was not as alone as I felt.

However, there was a stigma surrounding it, with many imagining that those with a mental disorder were likely to be violent and dangerous.

But perhaps the real reason I wanted to keep things a secret was because I believed that it would make me appear a failure and a liability, and I had a dread of being a disappointment.

I feared that, even if I didn’t lose my job because of it, my colleagues would look at me in a new light, one that wasn’t supportive. They would begin to doubt my competency and fitness to practise. I would be written off and downgraded at a time when my work was the only normality in my life, the rock to which I was still clinging.

Hence, here I was in the linen cupboard, hiding away while my mind played tricks with my body.

Panic Attack had always seemed to me to be a bad term. I didn’t particularly feel that I had been panicking about anything. The symptoms simply appeared out of nowhere at times of stress. Perhaps Stress Attack would have been a better name.

Either way, the effect on my physical well-being was pronounced. Apart from the shaking and the tingling, my heart was pounding in my chest and I was hyperventilating. Both those things tended to make me even more stressed, to the point where there was a positive-feedback loop with every new symptom reinforcing the problem and making the situation worse and worse. I felt I was spiralling down ever faster into a bottomless pit.

I forced myself to breathe slowly – in through my nose and out through my mouth. I knew from experience that the attack would pass. Sometimes it would take just a few minutes, on other occasions it could last for hours.

I didn’t have hours.

I repeatedly told myself to get a grip, but telling someone with a mental illness to get a grip was a waste of time and even counterproductive.

I couldn’t get a grip any more than someone with cancer could somehow get a grip and use their free will to initiate a cure.

Depression is a disease, but one of the mind not the body. There is no fever, no bleeding, nothing that shows up on X-rays or scans, indeed there are no visible signs whatsoever. But it is a disease nevertheless. It is like a worm that gets inside your head and burrows through your brain, eating your self-respect and laughter, while leaving nothing but frustration, pain, loneliness and misery.