CALMzone

Those of you based in the Thames Valley area might be interested to know that a new CALMzone has recently been established there.  CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) is a registered charity that exists to prevent male suicide in the UK, which is the single biggest cause of death in men aged 20-45.  They offer a free, confidential and anonymous phoneline and web chat service between the hours of 5pm and midnight, every day of the year.

The Thames Valley branch is the third in the UK, the others being in Merseyside and London - probably because they're all such depressing places to live (sorry) - and will allow more men in the Berks/Bucks/Ox area to access local support.  So if you, like me, frequently find yourself roaming the Thames Valley landscape like Cathy across the moorland, pining for Heathcliff or your sadly misplaced mental health, do keep them in mind.

Find them on their website at https://www.thecalmzone.net/, or phone them on:
0800 58 58 58 (Nationwide inc. Merseyside and Thames Valley)
0808 802 58 58 (London)

In other news, this week I'll be curating the Twitter account for Mental Health Voices over at @MH_Voices.  If you have any topics on the... topic of mental health that you think should be discussed, drop me a line here or there.

Happy International Tea Day.

Every day is tea day for me.

PropranoLOL

Today marks two weeks since I have started taking these accursed pink tablets, and while I have not yet suffered any rectal bleeding, scaly skin or complete stoppage of the heart, the side-effects are beginning to make themselves known in the most unnerving of ways.  I keep getting incomparably dizzy every time I rise from a sitting position, and invariably go wheeling away in the wrong direction before I collide with a wall or a small child and am sent back on the right course.  Today, on getting out of bed, my legs took me a full eight feet across the room until I managed to pinball my head off a shelf and collapsed into the door.

That is not to say they have been entirely ineffective.  The heart palpitations have on the whole receded, apart from when I was being hunted by the stalker, but I remain hopeful that his current absence from the shrubbery in my front garden will continue.  Unfortunately, the debilitating dizziness is making me wonder if I am in fact suffering from another brain tumor, and rather than a side-effect it is instead a hint at my impending doom.  Time will tell, I suppose.  I'll likely be dead by Christmas.

I don't find it very funny.  I think they were poorly named.

Apparently this man suffered from terribly scaly skin but just sort of went with the flow.

Good show, sir

On certain days of the week, my work takes me to a learning centre for young adults with disabilities.  This can range from autism and cerebral palsy to severe anxiety and rare genetic disorders.

These are some of my favourite days, as the students are lovely and they don't send out the same waves of negative judgement towards me that the other pupils do, like last Thursday when I heard one mutter to another that my hair was sporting a 'shit dye job' when my hair colour is entirely natural, bizarre as it may be.  There is no collaboration between it and my eyebrows.  It's like they're born of different parents.

Today, after a very enjoyable maths lesson - the first time I have enjoyed maths since the age of sixteen when I was forced out of the AS class due to sheer incompetence - I was approached by one of my colleagues on the way out.

'I thought you did wonderfully today,' she said.  'The way you worked with her was just perfect.  If you can make her laugh and get her to do her work at the same time then it's really something special.'

Now I spend a good deal of my time working myself up into a hysterical lather that I am about to be fired, so this was music to my ears.

Too much music.  I burst into tears.

'What's wrong?' she said.  'I thought you'd be happy.'

'I am,' I told her between sobs.  'I'm very happy.  I just wasn't sure.'

'Wasn't sure of what?'

'If I was doing ok.'

This lady is around my mother's age, and proceeded to coo over me in much the same manner, which I very much appreciated even if the show of such genuine affection did make me cry even harder.

'I'm sorry,' I said eventually, once the gift of coherent speech had been returned to me.

'Don't you worry,' she said.  'You're doing a very good job.'

And off I went.  And I haven't had anything to drink tonight.  Apparently that's what feeling good can do to you.  I can't believe I'd forgotten.

Tea-drinking instead.  Fewer episodes of crippling depression, more of insomnia.

Marks and Spencer is changing its name to Gethsemane

Yesterday brought little relief from the imminent threat of death by stalker.

In fact the whole day was interminable.  Work brought two hours of psychology, where my entirely redundant presence requires me to sit and listen to lessons on unethical psychological experiments.  It is all very interesting, but I left the class, once again, with my soul in turmoil at the terrifying fragility of the human condition and the precarious hold by which society maintains its stability.

After work, I thought it might be nice to go to Marks and Spencer, because I am in mortal need of new headphones.  My current pair are on the cusp of explosion, and I really do require headphones so I can't hear the horrible things the students are probably saying about me on the train.  I was rather disappointed to discover, however, that not only is the biggest M&S in the fucking south entirely barren of headphones, but they provide a very misleading pair of earmuffs that really got my hopes up for a moment.  I then got lost trying to find the toilets, and ended up wandering around the labyrinthine children's section for ten minutes like a paedophile overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice.

When I eventually located the elusive bathroom, I found myself unable to use a urinal as there was a gentleman there with his underage son, and I had already made myself look illegal enough so I was forced to go darting into a cubicle.  Rather unpleasantly, the toilet I elected to take refuge in had a poo floating in it, and in locking the door I thereby became responsible for the poo.  Even though I had not put it there, to exit the cubicle and leave it languishing to be discovered by another would have left me feeling humiliated and ashamed.  So after I completed my wee I flushed it away, and it went without a fight, which makes me wonder why the horrendous fucker who dropped it from his rectum didn't deign to do the same.

I made it home without being arrested as a child-snatcher, but as soon as I had the temerity to relax, fate swooped in to snatch the calm away.  The phone rang.  I answered it.  'Hello?' I said.  But nobody said hello back.  Nobody said anything at all.  I waited about ten seconds until I realised it must be the killer continuing his vendetta against my already fragile psyche, and slammed it back into the receiver, my calm shattered for the night.  The whole affair is taking a dreadful toll on my health, and last night I found myself unable to sleep due to a crippling bout of heart palpitations that left me lying wide-eyed in the darkness convinced I was teetering on the brink of mortality.  And then, when they eventually stopped, it was so unnervingly sudden that I thought my heart must there and then have ceased to beat, and I had already begun to plunge headlong into the dark inevitability of death.

And now I've washed myself with some new-fangled mint-scented shower gel, and it's just too fucking minty.  My balls are burning with freshness.

The only thing that could top this off would be bombing Syria.

The balance of humanity hangs on a thread.  The propensity for evil is in all of us.

Old MacDonald had a murderous grudge

I wasn't slaughtered the other night but the situation has hardly improved.  The whole affair has sent me into a state of perpetual tension, and I keep swinging between hysterical excitement and a morbid fear for my life.

The stalker's car has not reappeared, nor any corporeal sign of him, but today there was a noise in the hall.  It was about five seconds of a nursery rhyme, I can't remember which one exactly because I was so taken aback, but I think it might've been Old MacDonald Had a Farm.  The noise was reminiscent of a doorbell, but I would not be caught dead with such a ridiculous doorbell and there was nobody on the step who could've rung it anyway.  I am positive it came from inside the house, but I searched high and low and failed to find any device that could possibly have made such a sound.  I didn't even find an intruder lurking with a machete in the larder primed and ready to cleave my head from my shoulders.

Needless to say, I am a nervous wreck.  I can hardly leave the window, and every passing shadow makes my heart go spasming around my ribcage.  The gin has had to come out, and my quivering hands keep shaking it out over the carpet.  Even going into the back garden for a cigarette has become a mammoth task of infinite courage, but it is the only thing providing any comfort now.  I feel certain someone is toying with me, and if it is their plan to bring me to the brink of insanity then they are doing a stirling job.

The only other possible explanation is that the house is haunted.  This does not make me feel any better.  Every time I get sleep paralysis I convince myself that a demon is about to pop out of the wardrobe, and while I have not yet been spirited away to the Netherworld, I fear it may only be a matter of time.

I don't want to be dragged to Hell.  I'm Catholic.  I've earned Purgatory at worst.

With a stab-stab here and a stab-stab there.
Here a stab.
There a stab.
Everywhere a stab-stab.

Elementary, my dear Watson

I went.  I did it.  I managed to make it to the cunting doctor and it was absolutely fucking fine and now I wonder why I was so absurdly frightened of it.

I didn't go into too much depth, because I didn't want to overwhelm Watson with my staggering amount of maladies.  I didn't even mention the skin cancer, although it's going to have to come up eventually, being as it's still latched to my back like a deadly limpet and I am starting to get shooting pains like it is burrowing into my spine.  So we stuck to general anxiety and depression, and I even managed to restrain myself from weeping, which is a considerable feat for me under far more minor circumstances.

One of the prescribed narcotics is a month's worth of propranolol, which she said should keep my heartrate beneath an explosive level and with luck reduce the inordinate amount of panic attacks.  At least it should help me get through a day at work without having to curl up in the bathroom and hug the toilet roll until I've summoned up the strength the face the children.  Once the month is up, I'm to go back and let her know how I'm getting on with them.  She also suggested looking into this mindfulness shenanigans, which seems to keep cropping up but I know little about it.  I believe I may have acquired a copy of it though, as I recall my sister sent it over after receiving it during some medical trial she was participating in.  Unfortunately, it resides upon my old laptop, which has voided half its screen.  But there is definitely something on there called 'ulness,' and I can't think what else might precede that apart from 'mindf,' unless it was 'balefulness' or 'frightfulness,' both of which I suppose I might be apt to say even if I can't think for the life of me why I would have saved a document as that on Microsoft Word...

After receiving the prescription I immediately went to sample the goods, and immediately after that I made the somewhat poor decision to sample the side-effects.  I had queried Watson about them and she had mentioned the usual; nausea, headaches, dizziness particularly, but on perusing the propranolol pamphlet I noted a number of exceedingly disturbing symptoms that she had failed to alert me to.  Namely, rectal bleeding, scaly skin, and complete stoppage of the heart.  As it is, a number of hours have passed since taking them, and while my heart still beats, I am burdened by the constant knowledge that each next beat could be my last.

That, however, is not an uncommon fear and I am growing quite used to the notion of my own mortality.  As long as I do not linger on it for too long it no longer overwhelms me with incomprehensible terror at the idea of an eternity in darkness.  Now it merely gives me a sudden surge of horror that is roundly quashed by that delightful part of my psyche that tries so hard to keep me sane.

I suppose they can't be all that bad.  They're pink and they end in 'lol.'

The rectal bleeding has yet to put in an appearance.

The money issue - Alcohol Awareness Week, Day IV

My mother has always been the first to say that I am not especially good with money.  Frankly I think she is prone to exaggeration, and seems unable to forget the incident at Ascot many years ago when I, at approximately aged five, exclaimed that I had brought my 'paper money' to the races.  My parents, in their naivety, assumed I meant Monopoly money or chocolate coins, until I drew it from my tiny pocket and revealed that I had mysteriously acquired thirty pounds.  Rather than ascribing this to my youthful innocence, Mother appears to believe it was early evidence of a frivolous nature and poor financial acumen.

But I have never been one to spend more than I have, and to this day I refuse the use of a credit card lest I go mad with the power of it.  Indeed, up until recently, I had for many years been surviving off an overdraft, and while that meant I was never truly 'out of the red,' I was beginning to pay it back and it was fairly easily managed.

But devastation struck just a few months ago, when the fateful combination of alcohol and anxiety and overdraft collided and then collapsed in on itself like a neutron star of despair.

I'd gone for a night out in Reading with my 'new friend,' and was close to, but not too close too, my overdraft limit.  There was some horrible dancing and I had a small tussle with the DJ when he refused to play Come On Eileen on the grounds that it was 'too old,' but I survived the night and that puts me in good spirits.  When the morning came, and I woke with my mouth feeling much like the inside of a teapot, I carried out my usual tradition of searching for every item I took out with me, lest I was mugged but was just too arseholed to recall.  When the debit card failed to appear, I commenced an increasingly panic-stricken search until I was forced to accept its loss and call the bank to cancel it.

Unbeknownst to me, some cunt had cleared me out the night before and taken me over my limit.  So with each passing day my account was bleeding fivers to HS-fucking-BC, until it got to such a state that they cancelled my overdraft and finally deigned to get in touch.  Now I have a quite morbid aversion to phone calls and I only make them if it is an absolute necessity.  I also have a morbid aversion to serious banking and the combination of the two left me paralysed with fear.  So, instead of doing the reasonable thing and contacting them to untangle the mess, I pretended the problem did not exist and went about my business.  Two further letters they sent me went straight to the back of the drawer, unopened.

And then one day, after over a month of scraping together the last of a building society fund I had previously squirreled away, I received the most ominous-looking letter I have ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on.  I tried for a good half hour to peer through the envelope for clues using a torch, but when I failed to glean any legible information, I consigned myself to death and tore it open.  There, I was greeted with the imminent threat of bailiffs coming to take all my shitty goods if I failed to pay back the full £2000, forthwith.  Which of course, I could not do.

The anxiety by this time had grown stupendous, and I had about one hour's sleep and six panic attacks over the next few days.  I was given half a day off work after vomiting in the car park.  I had to dash out of the classroom after inexplicably bursting into a fit of hysterical laughter.  I was surviving off a diet of whiskey, and the only fruit and vegetables I got was the dry ginger mixer and slice of lime.

I eventually realised that I was never going to be able to make the phone call, so my options were limited to either launching myself in front of the Reading to Waterloo South West train service, or going to the branch in person.  I certainly gave the former serious consideration, because £2000 is a lot of money when you don't have it and there was little question of me asking my family for help.  But the train pulls in quite slowly, and I did fear I may just be dragged along the track for a while, and left maimed but alive and in devastating pain.  So I chain-smoked a good ten cigarettes, and turned up to the bank.

They were lovely.  It took half an hour with the staff and then a charming lady on the phone over in India, and it was sorted.  I set a doable payment plan and the bailiffs were called off and everything was fixed so quickly and simply I couldn't believe I hadn't done it before.  I imagine the stress of that period has taken a good year off my life, and it was sorted in one, easy morning.  While I cannot blame the episode entirely on alcohol, it certainly served to demonstrate what a terrible companion it can make with mental illness.  I might not have stopped drinking, but I have at least starting opening my letters from the bank.

I'm all about the paper money.

He's back

In a fit of moral devastation at my abhorrent cowardice the other day, I marched myself round to the doctors' surgery this afternoon to reschedule the appointment I had previously cried off.  I thought about phoning but I get nervous and tongue-tied on the phone sometimes, and it gives me too much opportunity to slam it back onto the receiver and once again achieve fuck all.  Besides, their 'hold' music is absolutely, utterly diabolical.  It puts one in mind of a violin and a kitten stitched inside the stomach of a still-living man who's just been thrown off a cliff.  And is on fire.  And everything in his stomach is on fire.  It's quite poor music, essentially.

So I arrived at the doctors' and apart from the receptionist sporting a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, all was well.  The only slight blip in the conversation was when she asked for my name.

'Cecil,' I said.  'Cav-'
'Oh yes.'  She widened her eyes and tapped something out on her keyboard.  'Cecil.'

I can't imagine what she was typing, but the more anxious part of my brain - and that would've been about 90 per cent, at that particular moment - told me it was probably a covert and denigrating message to Dr Watson to alert her of my reemergence.

'He's back.  What's he got this time?  Probably a terminal case of housemaid's knee.'

Perhaps I should be flattered that I have reached such a level of notoriety at the doctors' that I no longer have need of my surname.  A bit like Elvis.  Or Madonna.  Or Jesus.  Unfortunately I believe that may primarily be due to the fact that there are very few other Cecils in the area, as the name is considered unfashionable and shit.  Would that my parents had had the same consideration.

The appointment is booked for next-next Tuesday, which is an early finish at work and thereby gives me some time to summon up the sad, tattered rags of my courage before I force myself out of the house and begin the slow march on.  I haven't bothered to write it on the calendar this time, gargantuanly-nibbed pen aside, because it did fuck all last time and this time it feels more like it's inscribed into my very psyche.  If I fail again, the disappointment will be frighteningly severe.

So I'd better just suck it up and go.  Maybe after a whiskey.  Or two.

Or three.

I bet he never got housemaid's knee.

It's a nightmare

I don't know if it's a symptom of anxiety or simply goes hand-in-hand with it, like strawberries and cream or methadone and a crippling heroin addiction, but I seem to suffer from an ungodly amount of nightmares.  I would assume it is not a symptom, as this has been a lifetime curse and anxiety has not, even if I have been of an uncommonly pathetic disposition since the day I was shot screaming from my mother's womb.

On the upside - if there is an upside to this - there doesn't seem too much Freudian grimness about them, because they're often concerned with the most generic of monsters.  Often witch-like things with hanging faces and rotting skin, which pursue me until, in dreaming, I consign myself to death and give myself over to the creatures.

Evidently I even take my cowardice with me to the dreamworld.  I'll likely still be frightened when I'm dead.

But of course, once I've woken I can't possibly return to sleep in case a monster pops out from under the bed or slithers down on me from the ceiling.  Once I was convinced one was staring at me from the wardrobe, and I was on the brink of tears until I switched on the lamp and realised it was just my straw hat propped at a jaunty angle.  This is not the first time that a straw hat has frightened me nearly to death, but that is a tale for another day.

Unfortunately, I think there's little I can do about them.  That said, I've lived with them for years with no terrible side effects, unless you count the debilitating mental problems, but I'm not sure I can exactly blame the nightmares for those.  Not sure I can really blame anything for those.  But if you have some sneaky trick for coping with nightmares, do let me know.  So far all I do is make sure the straw hat is safely tucked away.

Alarmingly, I do live quite near an 'Elm Street.'  I never go.

Drugs

So I'm having a bottle of wine again.  I shouted at my computer and then cried because the internet was being slow and I was trying to email work.  I feel ridiculous and therefore I am having a bottle of wine.

But one thing I can say in my mental health favour is that I no longer take drugs.  

That is, no longer.  I used to, primarily in the heady days of university and then for a good few years following it.  And as it was in grades, so it was in drugs: only class A.

No, that's a lie.  I got a 2:1.  Or a B.

I've never been hugely into weed.  I'm paranoid enough as it is and that green, pungent bastard only serves to tip me screaming over the edge.  Last time was in Amsterdam, and while the best part of the evening was lovely and I laughed about those tiny bananas until my face hurt, it ended, as ever, in tears.  I darkly recall lying in my lumpy hostel bed with my arms in the air, mouthing nonsensical words to myself to convince my unbalanced cranium that I was not, in fact, suffering a stroke.  I also once had sex after weed and it was a languid and disheartening affair that confirmed to me I am not well receptive to its charms.

Perhaps magic mushrooms would have been more appealing, if I had not ill-advisedly taken them directly before an international flight and spent three hours shivering at the airport, foaming at the mouth with tic-tacs and vomiting fluorescent-yellow bile that I self-induced with three fingers down my throat.  As it is, I have declined to partake since.

Ketamine was a one-off affair.  Having learnt from the mushroom venture, I took it at home with a friend, with no flights to catch and no high balconies in the vicinity, and we watched the news.  We took ketamine and we watched the fucking news.  I don't know what the hell we were thinking but I should've guessed from the absurdity of the idea that it was all going to end hip-deep in bollocks.  The Queen was on.  I fail to remember what the report was about, because I became rather distracted when she crawled out of the television.  Much like The Ring she hauled herself, nightmarishly, out of the set and, being only about two foot high, dashed about the back of the sofa and concealed herself there.  I searched in vain for many hours; she was nowhere to be found, and I could only assume that she had hidden herself in the larder, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

As it is, I have failed to discover her spot and am forced to accept that this Miniature Queen is still loose and biding her time in some dark corner, two foot tall and full of malice.

Cocaine was the only thing I took regularly, due mainly to being friends with a dealer when I was a mere slip of seventeen, and therefore on the 'mates rates' that sounded so delightfully cheap.  It appeared a bargain and I am a sucker for a bargain.  That's why I just bought ten ladies' shavers from Lidl.  They were half-price and I assume they work on a face like they work on legs.  But in all my time taking cocaine I only had one truly horrific experience, when I snorted about a gram one night in freshers' week and woke up at seven am the following day with numb nostrils and my heart at 200 beats per minute and I sat in the shower crying for an hour wondering whether to call an ambulance and suffer the disownment of my parents or simply give myself over to death and miss out the telling off.

Since then I have had no further brushes with the Reaper because of it, and only a couple with the law that resulted in me being escorted from the premises and ejected onto the street without arrest.  So my decision to stop was not the direct result of bad experience, or tears, nor a sense of moral obligation nor even, alas, the acquisition of a level of maturity that has thus far eluded me.  Once again, it was due to a fear for my health, though not, this time, entirely irrational.

Anxiety gives me frequent bouts of tachycardia and heart palpitations, which is a grossly unpleasant sensation and has more than once sent me weeping to A&E.  So, science.  Cocaine contains a naturally-occurring  psychoactive chemical called benzoylmethylecgonine that produces the high, and while benzoylkdsfoiwenflasdn isn't especially dangerous on its own, the powder you buy on the streets can be mixed with anything from amphetamines to caffeine to baking powder to arsenic.  Without getting too deep in the science, because I've already given up on spelling benzoyelfaksjdfo;n, some of these ingredients can have adverse effects on the heart and on one's mental state.  So you combine all this with an inclination towards anxiety and tachycardia and suddenly you have a heart going Super Saiyan, and I don't know if hearts can literally explode but if anything is going to make it happen, it is that.

There was a time when I believed the drugs might have caused the problem.  I would go to the doctor and inevitably one of their questions would be 'do you take any illegal drugs, particularly cocaine or amphetamines?'  To which I would answer 'no.'  Clearly this was an outrageous lie and one that could possibly have caused serious detriment to my health.  But I was still promised to the army at that stage, and if my medical record had showed 'cocaine user' then I would've been out on my arse before I got the chance to say 'but I don't really want to join the army anyway.'

So I stopped taking it because it coincided with, or possibly contributed to, the mental side of things.  I have since been told that there is no damage to my heart, which is a relief, but serves to reinforce the fact that the symptoms are psychosomatic.  So I'm not physically ill, but nor am I well.  Hip, hip, hooray.

That said, I also get tachycardia from cigarettes, but that has yet to stop me.  Excuse me while I go and light up.

She waits.

The hangover

Well I woke up after last night's five gins feeling like absolute fucking poo.  I haven't felt so atrocious since Halloween, and that was as horrific as the holiday suggests.  The alarm came blaring on at 6am and the first thing I felt was a headache the size of a steak lying flat across my brain.  The second thing was Regret.  The whole room span.

I'm not entirely sure how I made it to work alive, but I did and then forced down half a cup of coffee that did not sit at all well on my sensitive innards.  It almost escaped back out of my mouth during the lesson, but I managed to retain it and then reconsume it, all the while keeping an impressively expressionless face.  By some stroke of incredible luck, that was the only lesson today as for one reason or another the rest didn't require my frankly unnecessary presence.  So I gleefully, albeit slowly and quite hunched, returned to the train station, where I came across the most unfortunate sight.

I think it was chicken.  It could've been that some poor soul had been recently disemboweled, but I think it was chicken.  It was lying on the grass in a pink heap, glistening and raw, flies buzzing about it and an especially swift slug already slithering into the mix.  Thin white strings hung over a few of the chunks, and it was without a doubt one of the most rancid things I have ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on.

In my weakened state I was unable to cope with it, and I gagged three times in quick succession.  Nothing, blessedly, came up, but my stomach was in a sorry state and I forced my gaze away, fixing it on a gentleman walking ahead of me lest it be dragged back to the chunks.  For a few seconds I was successful.  But then suddenly, the image came hurtling back into my mind in high-resolution, pink and wet and devastating and I was unable to contain myself.  I gagged and I could already sense I was doomed this time.  It was on its way.  I gagged again, and the man ahead turned just in time to catch the main event.  With a terrible retching sound, I vomited into my hand and it began seeping through the gaps between my fingers and dripping onto the floor.  I was so mortified that I couldn't stop walking.  He did, and stared at me with a look torn between concern and disgust, but I just carried on, and walked straight past him at speed with a handful of sick as though I was merely taking it home as a souvenir.

I put it on the floor as I rounded a corner and wiped my hand on the wall, which I know is unpleasant but it was either that or my trousers.  I was eager to return home and collapse onto the floor, but then fate conspired against me once again.  Due to some inconsiderate shit wandering across the tracks, I was forced off the train at Wokingham and left stranded.  To make matters worse, a man was then arrested and a woman hit by a lorry, so the police closed the roads and I couldn't find a bus and I didn't even have any fucking change for the bus and it was just the Worst Thing in the World, or at least a close second to that woman under the lorry.  When I did finally return home after the most inordinately expensive bus journey I have ever been on, I was soaked through with rain and sweat and was beginning to become aware of the faintest hint of sick upon my person.

Then I retrieved a bottle of wine and secreted it in a gap between my bookshelf and my bed.  Bearing in mind I am on my own, this seems a disturbing action to take.  I seem to have attempted to hide it from myself.  No doubt in shame.

And of course the skin cancer has also chosen this day to be particularly malicious.  I'm getting the occasional stabbing pain and the nerves there don't seem to be working so well.  I doubt I have more than a week to live.

It looked a bit like this but far less appetising and with more white strings.  And on the floor outside.

Don't let me avoid the doctor

I don't know what the fuck I did to myself over the weekend but I can hardly fucking walk now.  I got out of bed this morning and my calves are just crippled, like the muscles have entirely seized up and think it appropriate to have me totter about like a scarecrow.  It almost had me toppling to my doom down another set of stairs today, but thank Heavens my fall was cushioned by a gigantic man who called me 'an Absolute Fucking Peanut' before kindly dragging me back to my feet.

In other news, I had a whiskey and dry ginger this afternoon and summoned up the courage to call the doctor and book an appointment.  And it isn't for any type of cancer or imminent stroke this time - it's actually to talk about the whole anxiety and depression thing, and about where to go from here.  We were meant to do it a little while ago but somehow I kept finding reasons to avoid it...

But I am going to go this time.  I have inscribed it upon my calendar and therefore I must go because the calendar is law.  Also I've written it in an uncommonly thick black pen that reminds me of a board marker but has a nib so gargantuanly huge it has left absolutely no space for me to write anything else in there.  So I can't change plans now, because it won't go on the calendar and I'll forget.

Don't let me make up a reason not to go.

I was searching for a picture of a giant pen, but this came up so I kept it.

Nosebleed

I sneezed.  Now there is a nosebleed.  Why is there a nosebleed?

I think I'm dying out of my right nostril.

I can't sleep.

I am panicking.

I have work in less than five hours.

Damn my sneeze.

Searched for a nosebleed picture, regretted it, here is the Krampus instead.

Everybody panic

I am as yet unsure on the statistics of panic attacks, and of how many people shall be forced, wailing, to endure them, but I assume it is not as low as I would think.

What I was entirely unaware of was the sheer variety of panic attacks, the multitude of forms that they may take.  It's a bit like wine; one man's Merlot is another man's urine, and one man's ejaculation is another man's Cabernet Sauvignon.  Would that any of them were as tasty as Merlot.

From a short perusal of the NHS website, one would assume that they consist entirely of clutching one's arm, out of breath, and probably lunging over the desk of A&E to check yourself in a little swifter than the staff can manage.  Which, in reality, is probably not very swift at all.  Half your face could've fallen off and they'd still tell you to take a seat and behave.  Now I'm not saying I've never done this, because I have, and there was an ungodly amount of screaming involved, but that was more due to a pathetically palpitating heart than an actual panic attack.  No.  Mine tend to make themselves known at the most inopportune moments, often on trains, and they attack in an altogether different manner of fury.

I sit, still, silent, with an incomprehensible and overwhelming sense of doom oozing out of every pore.  Death is mere moments away.  The Reaper is tapping at my shoulder.  I am seconds away from curling up on the floor and weeping, which is not an altogether infrequent thing for me, but I try to avoid it in public simply because I value my reputation as an Englishman.  So instead I sit still, life flashing before my eyes and regrets boiling out of my ears, occasionally nibbling at my nails when I work up enough courage to move.  Then I convince myself I must've accidentally eaten some drugs and am currently overdosing on an unrecognised narcotic that they won't be able to diagnose at the hospital so I will recede into cramps and general bleeding until I die, twitching, on the floor of Accident and Emergency because I've fallen off one of the seats again.

And then I'll likely be told to sit back down and stop being a ridiculous man.  And I won't be able to stop being ridiculous, because I'll be dead.

That's the sort of panic attack I get.  And I do wonder how many types there are, and I wonder if the next time I see someone staring off into the distance on a train, they are contemplating their entire livelihood and its moment of ending.  If you see me, that's what I'll be doing.

Apologies to the staff of the Royal Free who had to put up with my shenanigans each week.