Fettered for Life

 Imagine having a heavy ball and chain fettered to your ankle shortly after you reach your 24^th birthday and then slowly realising that nothing you do, or indeed nothing that anyone else does, will free you from that ball and chain. With this realisation, a sense of doom and absolute despair weighs on you every waking hour and it gets worse with each new defeat in your attempts to break free. Such is the nature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It can be a living hell, as I can personally attest to.

It all started in Bournemouth after I had an accident on my bike that knocked me unconscious. Back then I thought I had made a full recovery after the stitches were removed from my chin and the bruises faded. Years later, I learned from one of the top trauma experts in the world that such an accident can open the gate behind which trauma lies dormant. But I wasn’t aware of that when I walked out of the casualty department of my local hospital. I felt a bit shaken but otherwise fine, even though I’d lost my memory, which I found mildly liberating. I knew that I’d started a job on the day of the accident but couldn’t recall where. I also knew that I had graduated, but I couldn’t remember my final result.

My memory returned two days after the accident, but in subsequent weeks I began to suffer from insomnia, one of the key symptoms of traumatic shock. The following month, I travelled to Spain to begin teaching in a language school in Tarragona, Spain. That was when the trauma really became manifest through chronic insomnia. Wakefulness night after night blighted my life to the extent that I was constantly exhausted and zoned out while I became obsessed with the matter of what I could do to get some sleep at night.                                

One option was alcohol, and I chose it. At first it started with a few glasses of wine in one of the many bars throughout the city. When I got home, I would take a “tipple” of brandy to enhance the effects of the wine. Some nights I heated milk in a saucepan and added brandy and honey to it. The night that the saucepan caught fire, I knew that I’d overdone the brandy. What was happening was that I needed ever greater quantities of brandy to achieve the same drowsy effect that I hoped would help me sleep. At the same time, I began to drink beer, but always the strongest beer in the bar/tavern.

Prior to arriving in Tarragona, I very rarely drank alcohol and often gave my Sunday evening glass of wine in the family home to my sister because alcohol didn’t appeal to me. This changed once the trauma made its presence felt in my body. Alcohol became my best friend and was seemingly the only way I could get to sleep. With time I grew to loathe it. Those late-night sips of brandy became my “dirty little secret”, which I desperately needed to get me through the night. In later years, I would keep a supply of alcohol in the house to help me cope with the despair of being unable to sleep. Even worse were the pre-dawn awakenings that left me breathless and on full red alert. That was anxiety. And it became insomnia’s inseparable friend.

Anxiety ramped up the suffering even further. On many nights anxiety woke me with the force of an “electric shock” that raced through my body, giving me a dry mouth, tingling in my hands and feet, exhausted eyes staring without seeing, and the sense of being depleted in mind and body unable to keep going. If insomnia made my nights endless misery, then anxiety intensified the effect. It went on and on, for ten to fifteen hours, shredding my days to pieces. One day, a friend, a very fortunate woman who had never experienced anxiety, asked me what it was like. After congratulating her on her good fortune, I asked her to imagine that she had walked to the middle of a road, completely engaged in conversation with a good friend. Then suddenly she realises that a juggernaut is barrelling down the road toward her. Only a few metres separate her from death. How would she feel at that very moment? What is happening in her body? My friend looked at me incredulous. “That is the anxiety which I suffer daily”.

 Of course, there were some days when I was free from the torment of traumatic stress when I had slept better than usual and anxiety was not on the horizon. Such days were precious to me in the early years because they reminded me of what my life had been like before it became fettered to trauma… and what it might be like without the effects of trauma. It was paradise, a joy to live like this. In later years, however, I began to hate these days with a fury for they taunted me with what I had lost: a “normal” life, free of insomnia, anxiety and depression.

 If anxiety and insomnia dragged me down daily, then depression was the big guns brought in to sink me. And depression most certainly did sink me. This is the best description of the impact of depression on my life for it is tactile: heavy, heavier and heaviness. Mostly, it descended on me during the night, making it almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning. But staying in bed was more of a challenge than getting up because there would be only me and my depression alone in the bed, with no escape and no distractions. Somehow or other I had to make my day “happen” by getting dressed and going to work. It was better than lying in bed lamenting the fact that I did not have the courage to kill myself, as my mother had done. Instead, I prayed that I would develop cancer to put an end to my misery.

 The worst day of my worst depression so far took place one February in the early nineties, a dark and cold time of the year in Ireland, when clouds hang so thick and low that you can almost touch them. On that February morning I was suffocating with exhaustion and hopelessness. I couldn’t find the energy I needed to pretend that all was well when it certainly was not. In a break between classes, I put on my coat and walked calmly out of the building. There was no plan. I bought a bottle of gin from a shop just around the corner from my house and poured myself a generous amount. A few minutes after drinking what must have been half the bottle, I got into bed. It was not even midday, but I drew the curtains all the same and buried myself under the duvet.

Sleep came rapidly with so much alcohol in my body. Not until 5.30 pm did I open my eyes, but after feeling grateful that I’d slept for a full five hours, I groaned with despair. No way would I get any sleep tonight because I’d already slept for most of the day. I looked at the bottle of gin again and saw it as my only hope of getting through the night. Thus, I finished the remainder and went back to bed. Even so, my mind fought to remain awake. I felt ravaged and just gave myself over to what was going to happen next, whatever that was.

In spite of my dependence on gin or wine, etc., I knew I was not an alcoholic. Of course, I knew that I was having to drink more and more to achieve that “knockout effect.” The booze was failing to do what I needed it to do and I knew deep down that one day alcohol would not be enough. Already, I was arriving in work, not having slept very little, if at all, looking like death, and probably with the smell of booze on my breath. It had to stop.

 My therapist was alarmed by my deterioration and growing inability to function in everyday life, so she organised an appointment for me with the consultant. That woman saved my life. She gave me a message to hand to my doctor asking him to prescribe the medication she thought I needed to abandon the booze and still get a good night’s sleep. That very day, I went to see my GP, a man about my own age, and gave him the consultant’s note listing sedatives, sleeping tablets and antidepressants. After staring at the note for several seconds, he looked at me and stated that he only prescribed this combination of medication for “hardened alcoholics”. He turned to me and demanded to know if I were a “hardened alcoholic?” I was too stunned to answer.

For my next appointment I requested a different doctor as I could not face that man again. This time it was a woman who attended me. She looked at my file and must have been reading notes about my prescription because she looked up at me and asked if I expected her to be my “drug pimp”. I rushed from her office in tears. These days I wouldn’t hesitate to warn a doctor that I would make a formal complaint to the authorities about their treatment of me. Back then, I was too broken by the symptoms of trauma to defend myself.

By the end of the year, I was managing to function on just one of the items on the prescription, not three. I didn’t know it at that time, but it was the beginning of a lifetime dependence on antidepressants, which was rarely straight forward or free from suffering, but it kept me alive, and that alone was quite an achievement.