‘I’m feeling much better, I think I’ll go for a walk now’
Since mid 2023 I’ve been away from all of the styrene and resin hobby stuff and most of what is laughingly referred to as ‘normal’ life too, when I say ‘away’ I mean both mentally and physically.
Mental health
Since my early teens I’ve struggled with, and eventually adapted to a variable mental state of health. On reaching the age of 60 I discovered that this doesn’t really get any easier.
In hindsight its relatively straightforward now to suggest this is a set of conditions that belong in the autism and bi-polar disorder spectrum. But back in the mid-70s North British Secondary Modern combat zone, you just hid any perceived ‘weakness’ for fear of being picked on and just got on with it. My parents never talked but they never talked about cancer, heart disease and the schisophrenic aunt either.
No one talked about shit.
Physical health
Also, I had undetected heart condition which after years of monitoring and medication for a leaky mitral valve, hypertension and angina (with regular MRIs, ultrasounds and ECGs), eventually turned out not only to be a leaky valve, but an aortic aneurism, which in turn triggered an aeortic section (or small tear in the aortal wall) plus three partially blocked arteries for good measure, all stirred up by a familial predisposition. Like I said, no one talked about this shit.
How I walked away from that pile on is anyones guess.
The high blood pressure, the mitral valve spitback and angina was supposedly under control with a cocktail of meds and a healthy-ish lifestyle, unlike the tricksy mental health sneaking up on the outside.
Speaking of which:
Be aware that the following text may be triggering and deals with the subjects of depression and suicidal ideation.
Acute depression: some depressive episodes rolled in like a cold front on a winters day to blanket the head with melancholy and greyness, you sort of see them coming but then they eventually drift away to leave a changeable sky. I’d become used to these and actually quite liked them in an odd introverted extrovert way. They also often lasted for days, and on occasion, weeks.
Other deeper trough episodes sneak up on you and make collaborations with the other antagonists to get inside you and set up camp – reaching the summit quickly, they work away at the descent like some foolhardy rock climber armed with a fraying rope and a blunt ice axe. The rope was never going to be long enough.
Add in post-covid modern (ha) life, which fucked us all over good and proper, duplicitous gits at work, family members half a world away in sunny Britland, (or gaslit swamplands) my loved ones struggles with just trying to be themselves in this rapidly fragmenting insta ‘looka me-me’ world, and even the stoutest of constitutions takes a battering.
And mine was never that stout even at the best of times, more lemonade shandy.
So a particularly grim episode in mid 2023 culminated in my leaving the family home one wet night with the intent of just disappearing – off the back of a Wellington harbour ferry – only the ferries had stopped running for the night.
Which just added to the despair and total breakdown.
What’s important here is a positive outcome – still being here today on a sunny Friday in February 2025. This is not by way of any rational thought on my part, just a couple of events that happened (the no-show ferry and the old homeless dude at the bus stop who said “don’t get the bus lad go home”.
Then the deluge: retreating inwards, eventually seeking help, councelling and medication (talk therapies, SSRIs etc) . Of course beating the 70s baked-in stigmas of masculine failure and the perceived shame of anti-depressant dependency etc. was a climb.
Men eh?
If you have had, or are experiencing anything remotely like this now, today, do not wait for it to resolve into something else.
Ask for help
Heart surgery: And then February 2024 rolled into town.
Several days of increasingly severe ‘odd’ pains, arm aches, (not the classic telly drama heart attack signs) signs which turned into a saturday on the sofa and two heart attacks, followed quickly by ER, and then into surgery – triple coronary artery bypass (or a CABG ‘cabbage’) and aortic valve and root replacement – otherwise known as ‘Bentalls procedure’. A type of cardiac surgery involving composite graft replacement of the aortic valve, aortic root, and ascending aorta, with re-implantation of the grafted coronary arteries taken from the forearm and thigh and chest wall into the graft.
8 hours in surgery, a full blood-transfusion three days in ICU and some serious post operative medicines and hallucinations. . . white dogs, men in black and spiders, big fuck off spiders.
The dedicated people of the Cardio unit are utterly wonderful. Care and skill beyond words and my gratitude which can never be expressed adequately.
Ohh and also a post-op collapsed lung and a seroma in the left arm arterial graft site. . . I must have been a right bastard in that recently-passed past-life.
Causes? What do you mean it’s ‘just one of those things’?
I’ve never ever smoked, or drank much (not at all for the last 2 years in support of my youngest daughter’s sobriety and recovery) and dislike beige food from the red and yellow peddlers of LDL cholesterol, so the usual suspects weren’t around to blame or modify afterwards.
Discovering that I had three partially blocked arteries courtesy of familial/genetics and an enlarged aortal root to add to the known leaky valve was a bit of a puzzle/shock – as the droll Registrar said, “just one of those things, dashed bad luck old chap”.
Still, New Zealand’s finest cardio-thoracic team went to work, installed new pipes and a nifty composite aortal valve graft which clicks away to remind me just what happened – as if I need reminding.
It’s taken a year to get here, I’m around 85-90% fit but still experiencing what is known as Post-Operative Cognitive Dysfunction, and the occasional mental ‘spider’ still scurries across my peripheral vision:
I’m sure you must be weary, with soaring up so high,
Will you rest upon my little bed?said the spider to the fly.
There are pretty curtains drawn around, the sheets are fine and thin;
And if you like to rest awhile, I’ll snugly tuck you in.
Oh no, no! said the little fly, for I’ve often heard it said,
They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed!Mary Howitt 1828
Please don’t ignore your body and its messages, get anything untoward checked out no matter how trivial it might seem.
Scale in Focus 