Ten years ago, on a bank holiday weekend much like this one, I came downstairs to find a message from London sister on the answerphone, left in the early hours of the morning: my brother-in-law had had a massive heart attack and they didn’t know if he was going to make it. I wandered back upstairs and told my beloved, who said – like we all did – ‘are you sure? what? that can’t be right’, or words to that effect. But he’s really fit and healthy, he’s only 36. That sort of thing. He had an undetected heart condition, apparently: scanning young adults is not routine, so it was never picked up. It’s the same thing that caused footballers like Fabrice Muamba and Christian Eriksen to collapse on field.
They had been out running and out of the blue he had dropped. She did CPR and with the help of a passer by – as she didn’t have her phone on her – had called the ambulance and he’d been raced off to hospital where they operated. He’d been half an hour without a heartbeat and was given a 10% chance of making it through the next 24 hours. I still go cold thinking about it now.
London sister and her husband met at school when they were 11, and did the whole playground ‘going out’ thing, so he’d been in our lives for 25 years at that point. They broke up, as you do when you’re 11, and got back together on my 20th birthday (which made remembering stuff a lot easier). He was a hugely talented guitarist, a sound engineer who had worked on some great albums with some very big names, a guitar teacher, a rock to the whole family when our Grandad Bill passed away. He and I hadn’t always got on, but I love him dearly.
They married in 2005, in a joyful ceremony (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another bride turn round and give the entire congregation a thumbs up and a massive grin when the vows were said) with a reception where their first dance was to ‘If I had a million dollars’ by the Bare-Naked Ladies.
High Beech, 2011 – pre-cardiac arrest. Thing 1 nicking her aunty’s water
Things 1 and 2 adore their uncle (and aunty, of course), and Thing 1 treated him as a giant climbing frame. Thing 2 didn’t like a lot of people but he was one of them. I don’t think that that she talked to him much, but she did at least acknowledge his existence which was rare. At five and rising three they didn’t understand what was happening, and Thing 3 was only seven months old at the time. I was due to go back to work a few days later, at the end of my maternity leave. I am not sure how much use I was back at work, but there we are.
Both London sister and my brother-in-law are, fortunately, stubborn types. He pulled through, and after several months in hospitals he came home. He had to learn to walk, talk and eat again, and both their lives have changed irrevocably. The long – and ongoing – journey they have been on since then is not my story to tell. Thing 3 never knew Uncle Mk1 as he was too young, but he adores Uncle Mk2 and treated him as a climbing frame in much the same way as his big sister did. He was a sturdy child, to say the least, and had to be reminded to be gentle at times.
Thing 3 and his beloved uncle and aunty
The swift work of my sister and the NHS meant that we still have my giant, grumpy, funny, beloved brother-in-law in our lives, and my sister still has her soulmate. They have raised thousands for C-R-Y (Cardiac Research in the Young) and Headway since then, and I am proud to have been a small part of that when we did a half marathon together. Well, together at least part of the way – she finished before I did!
Twelve people each week under the age of 35 die due to sudden cardiac arrest. If more of us knew how to do CPR – I have the vaguest idea, having last done first aid training when I was a student teacher in the mid-90s – then that number could probably be reduced. There are defibrillators all over the country now, but I am not sure I would know how to use one.
When I went back to work I asked our HR team about first aid training: no, I was told, it’s only for front of house staff. While I wasn’t working on the floors, I was delivering sessions in basement classrooms without a radio or a telephone, or on gallery, so I was working with the public. Still not good enough, I was told. This seemed shortsighted, but they wouldn’t budge.
If they can find the space in the school curriculum to teach financial literacy and ‘British values’ they can find a space to teach CPR: a half day out of the school year isn’t that much and it could – quite literally – save a life.
Normal service returns next week, honest.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Mort / Interesting Times/Reaper Man – Terry Pratchett
When I was 29 I thought I had my life in order: I was a home owner, I had a settled relationship and I had a job I loved.
Also when I was 29, I found myself single and looking for somewhere to live. It was after viewing yet another dingy bedsit (sorry, ‘studio flat’) in East London that I found myself on Mile End station, standing at the end of the platform where the wall went all the way to the edge and the driver wouldn’t have time to see me. I stood there for a long, long time, staring at the track, and eventually a kind person came and talked to me and put me on a train instead of under one. Without the kindness of that stranger I would, in all probability, not be here.
That moment should have been the one where I recognised I needed some help, but as I had always seen myself as a bit of a Tigger – when I hit the ground I bounced. I put it down to viewing dingy bedsits, decided to stay in Epping, and carried on. I found a flat and moved in. The day after I moved in, someone phoned to check in on me. I opened my mouth and started to cry, and couldn’t stop. Even then, I didn’t go and get help.
I decided I would be brave and grown up and do Christmas on my own, as it felt like an admission of failure to go home. It wasn’t until I met my best friend for lunch in London and she went straight home and phoned my mother that things started to move: my dad came and got me and took me home for Christmas. My mum found me sobbing over the sellotape, phoned the doctor I’d known for many years and marched me off to see her. I was diagnosed with depression. 2003 is known to me and my friends as ‘Kirsty’s lost year’: I made very questionable decisions, I cooked a lot but ate nothing, I drank far too much (not a good idea with anti-depressants), I slept little. My beloved Grandad Bill died that year, which is one of the few things I remember. I made some new friends, who took me under their collective wing and put up with the fact that I was so far away with the fairies that Tinkerbell was my next door neighbour. My best friend had a baby and made me godmother, despite me being so patently unsuitable for the job at the time. It was a year of feeling like a ghost in my own life
In late 2003 I started to pull myself back together: I got a second job, in a pub, which meant I wasn’t drinking or staying home alone. I moved to another flat and met the man who would become my beloved, and slowly I started to feel ‘normal’ again. I came off the antidepressants after a couple of false starts, and a couple of years later Thing One arrived. I was terrified: labour had been frightening, long and painful as she was lying on my sciatic nerve. An aggressive healthcare assistant kept telling me I was breastfeeding wrong: I was failing at parenting after less than a day! They took my baby away as she kept breathing too fast and brought her back several hours later without a lot of explanation. The expectation is that your baby will arrive, you will fall instantly in love and motherhood will kick in instinctively – but it doesn’t. It wasn’t too long before that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself, and now there was a baby?
I went back to work when she was five and a half months old, to find I had a new line manager who I barely knew (he was lovely, but that shouldn’t have happened while I was on mat leave: this was before ‘keeping in touch’ days). I worked full time and I was exhausted. I felt guilty for going back to work but we had to eat and pay rent, didn’t we? She had terrible colic, so evenings were horrendous and for six nights out of seven I was on my own with her till 8pm as my beloved was either working or with the older children at his mother’s. At a couple of months old she stopped putting on weight, which was another worry.
I was desperately afraid I’d hurt her, but I had no one to talk to about whether this feeling was normal or not (it wasn’t). I loved my baby so much that sometimes just looking at her made me cry, but I was terrified of what I might do because I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t tell anyone though, in case they thought there was something wrong with me and took her away.
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: It is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’
There was a baby boom that year, so her nine month check was delayed. When it eventually came round the health visitor took one look at me, said we’d deal with the baby next time, and made a doctor’s appointment for me on the spot. I was diagnosed with post-natal depression, signed off work, and put back on the tablets – this time with some counselling support, which took the form of cognitive behaviour therapy and which helped me see that I wasn’t a total failure. My London sister became my lifeline, as she was close enough to help – my parents were settled in France by then. Luckily her work brought her to the east side of London regularly. I don’t know what I would have done without her appearing and doing the aunty thing.
When the PND kicked in with Thing 2 I recognised what was happening and marched myself off to the doctor as soon as I started feeling odd. With Thing 3, I took up exercise and tried to prevent the slide, which mostly worked as long as I kept running.
This time round, I have been on the anti-depressants since 2014: a friend was killed in an accident, and I was heartbroken. Grieving so far away from their family and our mutual friends was hard. I went to Cornwall to scatter their ashes, foolishly thinking that that would give me ‘closure’ and I’d be fine afterwards, and…I wasn’t.
I don’t see the tablets as a cure, but they give me the time and the headspace to be able to see a way through each day. There are bad days still, when I feel as if I am wading through treacle and the world is a long way away. They are becoming further and further apart, which is a blessing, and I have to say that having six months on furlough last year made a huge difference to my mental state. I keep walking, and I keep making things, and I have friends who also have varying forms of depression and anxiety. We support each other and stage the odd intervention when we see things aren’t right.
On Thursday I took Thing One to the Emotional Health and Wellbeing Service for an assessment. We have been there before, when her anxiety first started in primary school after being bullied. We self-referred last September and pressure on the service is so high that it took this long to be seen, but the keyworker she’s been assigned was wonderful, and will be putting a care plan in place for her. She told me before half term that she just wants to go back to school: the routine, her friends, clear expectations. It’s hard enough being a 14 year old girl without a global pandemic preventing you from seeing your friends.
It’s a shame that this service stops when they are in their early twenties. Getting help after that becomes much more difficult, only really kicking in after a crisis and then anti-psychotics seem to be the default setting rather than care. This service is so underfunded, and a lot of responsibility is devolved to the schools who are also not equipped to cope with the levels of mental health issues being seen in pre-teens and teenagers at the moment. I’m pleased that Thing One feels she can tell me anything, and I hope that all my children (both natural and the timeshare teenagers) feel the same. I hope that my adult friends can too.
I’m going to break out into cliche here: if your leg was broken no one would tell you to pull yourself together, and it’s past time we had the same attitude to your heart and your mind. I was lucky to have friends who saw through the fragile bravado and the manic socialising, but not everyone – especially in this time of isolation – has support like that.
Postscript…
I started writing this on Friday, while I was reflecting on Thing One’s visit to EHWS, and over the past couple of days I’ve thought several times about deleting it. Is it too much? Have I been too honest? Do my friends, family and colleagues need to know this about me? There are things here that I have never spoken aloud, for example. Then I re-read the last paragraph above and realised that to delete it would be to become guilty of hiding my own mental health issues, when the point of the post was to talk about depression and anxiety openly.
So, the post will stand and I will stand by it. This is me: not brave, because it should not take courage to speak when you’re ill, it should be normal.
The fun stuff
I finished my sock at last! Now to do the other one. I do love crocheting socks, and as I’ll be back in the office and on trains twice a week for a while these are a great portable project. In one of my magazines there was a supplement about Tunisian crochet and it had a sock pattern, so I’ll give that a go soon too.
One sock!
There’s been a lot of cross stitch: here’s the temperature tree update, and I have been working on a Happy Sloth design of a galaxy in a bottle. I’ve also been frankenpatterning (combining two patterns to make a new one) as I wanted something particular but couldn’t find it. More on that later!
Spot the really cold week…
On Friday we had a family Zoom call: my lovely dad was 80 and we couldn’t be with him. Obviously as a teenager I was convinced both my parents were trying to ruin my life, but they were pretty cool really. Without my dad I wouldn’t still be able to say the formula for solving quadratic equations on demand or my times tables. I would have no clue about the need for balance and options in my life. I wouldn’t know how to annoy my kids by standing in front of the TV, and as I get older I appreciate his afternoon nap habit more and more – even at 47 he’s a role model! I blame my parents for my love of books, and Dad specifically for the science fiction and fantasy habit. Happy birthday Dad – I love you!
Mum and Dad, 1969.
So that’s been my week! Normal service (well, as far as that goes) will resume next week.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Inspector Hobbes and the Blood/Inspector Hobbes and the Curse – Wilkie Martin
A Capitol Death (Flavia Albia) – Lindsey Davis (Audible)
And a slightly belated Merry Christmas to you all! Our lockdown Christmas was good, despite not being able to see family. As a child this was how our Christmas always was: we would do a round of the Cardiff family on the 23rd (my late grandma’s birthday) and then we’d know Christmas could start properly. On Christmas Eve, as we got older, we’d usually go out for a meal in the evening and to midnight mass at the local church. In the morning my Grandad Bill would arrive at a ridiculously early hour – before he went back to Cardiff for Mass – then we’d have stocking presents. Later, when everyone was dressed, we’d have family presents followed by Christmas dinner in the early afternoon, and turkey sandwiches in the evening.
Since meeting my beloved my Christmas has been a bit different – we would have his older girls for a few days every other year (alternating New Year in the other years), and we’d spend Christmas Day with his mother until she passed away in late 2012. One of the older girls now has her own son, and we had planned – until Tier 4 – to spend Boxing Day with them. We’d hoped to see the other one on Christmas Day, but she was isolating as her boyfriend’s mum had tested positive for Covid a few days earlier.
Usually we’d see my London sister and her husband between Christmas and New Year as well, but we had a family Zoom on Christmas Day instead – our parents, the Irish contingent, London sister and her husband, and us. It was lovely to see them, but it’s not the same as being together.
Back to Christmas Day! Thing 2 has always been a child who likes to know what’s happening: she finds it hard to jump into new things, and prefers to sit back and watch for a while before joining in. She likes to plan how things will work on Christmas Day, as she knows there’s elements of chaos, so we were woken up on schedule at 6am to watch them open their stockings. Wisely, they also brought coffee up with them!
I love watching the children open their presents. This year we bought Thing 3 a Nintendo Switch, which he hoped for and didn’t expect. Shortly after he opened it we had a brief snow flurry, and he was so completely overwhelmed he didn’t know what to do with himself. Thing 1 had shoes that she’d wanted to spend any Christmas money on, so she wasn’t expecting to have them on Christmas Day. I like to go off-list where I can, to surprise them a bit. Life’s no fun if you know what’s in all your parcels!
Christmas cake
You can definitely taste the rum
So we whiled away the day quietly: everyone ate Christmas dinner and far too many Quality Street, and in the evening I broke into the Christmas cake. I have been feeding it with rum and it’s quite delicious.
On Boxing Day I went for a very chilly socially distanced swim – 5.6 degrees. If someone had said to me last year that I’d be looking forward to jumping into a freezing lake I’d have laughed at them, but my swimming gang and I have had so much joy from this newfound passion this year. Some of my Christmas Amazon voucher has been spent on a wetsuit changing bag and a new tow float, in fact.
I have also had a few good muddy walks with various friends and their dogs this week, and some outdoor coffees on the way home which have provided some much needed adult conversations!. I was supposed to meet my permitted friend this morning for a wander, but there appears to be a typhoon – or Storm Bella – in progress outside so we have decided to regroup tomorrow instead.
Geek crafting
Over the past year I have made a series of dolls for a DM friend, one for each of his campaign characters. The last one was finished this week, as his wife’s Christmas gift, so I haven’t been able to share progress on it. This one had to have armour and wings: while I could find lots of wing patterns on Ravelry I had to go off-piste with the armour and make it up as I went along.
I have also started work on this sampler from FiddlesticksAU on Etsy: Tolkien fans will recognise the list of Hobbit mealtimes! I love the colours against the black aida fabric.
Less geeky but quite delicious was the stollen I mentioned last week – I have made two loaves so far as they disappear quite quickly!
And that’s been my week. It’s been a quiet one but I am happy to be safe and well with my little family.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Without the Moon – Cathi Unsworth
That Old Black Magic – Cathi Unsworth
Zero Waste Sewing – Elizabeth Haywood
The New Anchor Book of Blackwork Embroidery Stitches
What Kirsty did next 