This is Part Three of a three part true story. Start here, it will make more sense…
January 2022. I had landed on some kind of magis terra firma, having moved back to the London Borough of my birth.
I started to sort things out, began by filling the huge summerhouse with as many of my belongings as would fit. The bike went in the back garden, wrapped in a waterproof cover, as did a small chest of drawers and the bookcase rescued from Mum’s house, now wrapped in bin-liner plastic to keep the snow and rain off until I could retrieve the bookshelves that Mr Driver had nicked.
Based on the preceding months I assumed recovery might be a long process, but it turned out not to be as time consuming as I expected. Difficult, however, yes. My ability to make quick, confident decisions definitely needed some work, but once I had that again, surely I would be up and running, I fondly imagined. I was aware that I had only just about held everything together to the point I’d moved house, but now I had got away from what had become repeated scenes of failure, and was in a less stressful, more dynamic environment, the internal noise at least was less deafening. Attempting to be a credible version of my ‘normal self' soon showed me how far I had yet to go.
Meanwhile, in the new place, I kept waking up in the middle of the night, my heart racing. Despite this rather scary physical malfunction, when it came to seeking medical attention I had become an introverted, solitary pensioner who didn’t want any fuss, though it might be fatal to ignore the symptoms.
This was totally unlike my health conscious old self… I just wanted to lie low, take stock, let the noises die down, and observe Popstar exploring the neighborhood. I found my blood pressure machine in one of the boxes, and it showed me my BP was higher than the standard balanced norm I was used to. I started improvements by walking up the hill. I found some woods, a Bronze age settlement, and a view of the town centre and beyond. A month later I could run up the hill, through the woods and back down again. My heart rate recovered quickly, BP was more or less back to normal.
I got along fine with my house mate, who was a tad reclusive - something which I was particularly relieved to find - but along with it, conscientious, pleasant and kind. Slowly, I made friends with the neighbours either side, conversations based on our mutual love of cats.
But matters foreign were pressing. I had to launch a rescue mission to Norway, the land of my childhood dreams, and latterly ten years of official habitation. The great majority of my belongings there had been safe throughout pandemic lockdowns, but I’d had to move them several times already. This time it meant extricating it from a Danish-owned lockup, the expense of which had mounted up considerable debt.
How could this possibly have happened? Simple: in my daring future plans, which included starting a music distribution business affiliated with a Finnish company, I had failed to factor in the unknown. Note to self: always allow for random catastrophies and remain aware of the inevitability of unexpected chaotic events. Despite writing detailed business plans, recruiting artists, building a small team, having good ideas, it hurt like a vicious blow to the guts as it fell to pieces.
Norway was calling, and I didn’t want to go I didn’t want to go I didn’t want to go I didn’t want to go I didn’t want to go I didn’t want to go. But my Good Old Chum and landlord would help, he said. ‘You’re always welcome,” he said. “I can help you.” He often said that.
From Blighty I had already looked everywhere for somewhere else to move my household belongings in Norway - a flat, a room, a garage, a cave - but I could find nothing anywhere, so before I even got there I was running out of options. At Good Old Chum’s last minute suggestion we moved most of my things out of storage into his recording room, his living room and his art outhouse, and put more things into his girlfriend’s large house, and her ‘safe, dry’ basement. The rest was given away, abandoned, a few items sold for a pittance.
Throughout this sorry period I really struggled. My body was becoming more painful, my brain only superficially recovered, and my morale was as low as a mole. As a result of the crash I had lost acres of stamina - I could no longer lift heavy things which two years earlier I had managed to move entirely on my own. This wasn’t simple lack of fitness - before the crash, I was fit, I ran regularly, cycled everywhere, did yoga, had proper muscular strength! Regardless of their liberal, intelligent views, in this iteration of Norse culture it was increasingly humiliating to have to remind people of my physical limitations. I felt they were pretending to forget what I had told them, or possibly just they didn’t believe me and thought I was taking the piss. I wished I had been.
My brain was ploughing on, however, though mostly numbed and freqently wondering if it wouldn’t be easier if I just left on the next flight. Somehow I was hiding the worst of my experiences and keeping focus as best I could. My birthday came and went. Smiles all around were tired, the bonhomie strained. Help generously offered was given with visible, audible growing impatience. These fair and friendly people had become cynical, sceptical, bored. “Of course we'll help you!” in translation became “We’ll only help you for so long, then we’re fucking off - many more important things for us to do, so don’t go wasting our precious Norsk time, you fuckwit English twat!” or words to that effect. I’ve watered it down a bit.
I was no longer a friend, I was now a time-draining inconvenience.
This rescue trip was a degrading, exhausting fire after the Shit-Truck frying pan five months earlier. All I had managed to do was kick the can down the road, and my mood on return was bleaker than when I left. Even worse, I was running out of metaphors.
Back in London, my thoroughly depressed mind was now just a shadow of a shadow of something I couldn’t quite remember and which anyway I could only see clearly in sunlight which didn’t exist, and indeed, there wasn’t much sunlight outside or in, this being winter. I had to get help. I had to tell myself to help myself to get help. I even wrote to myself, but stopped short at phoning myself for fear of being taken away somewhere worse, which would be a place where all I did was think about myself, a preoccupation which I found deathly boring.
Since I might not get decent work that quickly, I thought it practical and proper that as well as applying for jobs I should promptly start the application for whatever government benefits were due to me in my situation, something I hadn’t done for 40 years or so. I knew I needed to register with a doctor even more urgently, because I was still suffering all the things, plus new things I couldn’t adequately label.
So this is what I did two and a bit months after arriving back in London.
3rd March: I reported to the doctor with two lists:
Body’s malfunctional state - racing heart, pain in neck, neuropathy, constant fatigue, blood pressure too high;
Psychological state complicated. Depressed.
The next day I added a third list, not for the doctor:Bristol education agency to refer me to London branch.
OK, it was on the wrong list, but I wrote it down and I did send the email.
At the surgery, Doctor #1 was sympathetic. She referred me to the local NHS talking therapy institution, which had a fairly good reputation. She said (I summarise) :
“We can’t help you in ways that therapists can. We will refer you to them, or you can self-refer. They will assess you over the phone, then you will be on a waiting list. Meanwhile, do you want some pills to help you cope?”
So, there and then, no futher questions, I was offered ‘chemical solutions’ which in my case was Citalopram, an SSRI drug for the mental health issues, and NSAID medications for the physical issues - Ibuprofen for inflammation and CoCodamol for pain.
NB: NSAIDs (Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and my medical usage of them inspired me to write about the incident which happened three years ago in 2021.
The fact is that the Citalopram suggestion horrified me, though I knew it was a normal thing to be offered this support. I will explain why I was horrified, and why it became important.
Now please bear with me, dear reader, for I must go back in time 50 plus years, simultaneously channeling Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; for it is only with the assistance of these far-sighted, truly inspired writers that I can continue into the future.
I was three years of age, it was just before my fourth birthday, and my mother was concerned that I wasn’t sleeping at all well. Plus, I was resisting going to bed. She was referred to the hospital for a diagnosis and an answer to this dreadful condition, which, the parents somehow missed, might just have been caused by their rocky relationship.
The reason I didn’t want to go to up to bed was almost certainly because I was being tormented by my siblings, possibly just one of my two older brothers, these being five and seven years my senior. To them I would have been an interloper*, plus I’m sure I got an extra dose of love early on, so perhaps that is one reason I was being victimised. I’d had what they had lost - attention, affection, really being appreciated, and there were reasons for this, far sadder than simply my new existence.
Of course, all of us were equally loved, as Mum always insisted, and I believe she was honest in this; by contrast, as a new born I was celebrated, adored, made a fuss of, and became “mummy’s darling”, a sickly phrase I apparently used to use to charm myself out of trouble, so went the cringeworthy family story. Then, when I was two, it was my sister’s turn to get the special treatment, and I was left with the boys.
It wasn’t until I was 21 that I learnt the full story about our parentage and the tragedy of my older brothers’ father, Mum’s first husband, who was struck down with polio. Mum spent five years looking after her heavily disabled husband and their two children, eventually taking his compassionate advice and finding herself someone to fulfil the roles of partner which he could no longer provide. I appeared after a five year gap, temporarily the great new hope.
When I was 40 years old, as a result of good psychotherapy, I recovered many memories from that time in my early childhood, so when it comes to recovering lost memories I have ‘previous’ as criminals like to say, referring to past spells they have spent incarcerated. It has taken me over two years to put my loss of memory from the recent traffic incident in the same place as lost memories in my early childhood, and my recovery of these memories in my 40s, and consider the three together. I wouldn’t use the word seminal, but they did all impact greatly on the passages of my life which followed.
In her prime Mum was highly intelligent, but being of the generation which venerated medics and respected those in authority she was full of trust when I was prescribed phenobarbital, a barbiturate, not the kind of drug that would be given to a young child these days. However she could also be short-tempered (this no doubt worsened by circumstances, including having four children to care for a the time) and when she went back to the hospital after two weeks to check in with the hospital doctor only to be stood up, she exited extremely cross (she told me years later) and went to Dr. Casey, the family General Practitioner.
Dr. Casey was not what we would call a standard GP. He had joined the army halfway through World War 2, and returned to civilian life without completing normal medical training. Nice enough man, didn’t have all the knowledge, made guesses. The hospital prescription designed to be brief became long and repeated at Dr. Casey’s hand.
I have vivid memories of childhood including pills being crushed up with jam as they tried to make me take my medicine, the effect of which was to knock me out, lock me into my nightmares, and render me helpless to escape. I couldn’t wake up and get away from nightmares.
I found all this out 37 years later when I first read Page 2 of my NHS medical notes. I had waited 18 months to consult a psychiatrist because of depression, and here I was in the esteemed Professor Shrink’s office in a major London hospital. As the appointment was getting underway, he had popped out to take a call, leaving my medical notes on his desk, and when he returned ten minutes later, I was reading them.
“Is this normal?” I asked, indicating my find on page two of my medical notes, phenobarbital prescribed for a three year old. The Professor was a gentle man, and I recall his kindness as he explained that yes, this was obviously an error of judgement, but it didn’t seem to have had any direct effects on my mental capacity. After all, look at my achievements. As I was coming out of a deep depression, this didn’t impress me much, but he was trying, I gave him that.
Without being cynical, I listed the issues I had gone through in childhood, including being prescribed Valium for migraine as a young teenager. This was when I learnt how to lie to adults about drugs I was supposed to take - a “Yes, I’ve taken it” confirmation, backed up with my new conjurors’ technique of palming (hiding) objects while distracting the eyes of the viewer.
I am certain that one of the lasting effects of being drugged as a three year old for weeks on end was the drive to find out about mood-altering and transforming / transcending elixirs which I might try in later life. I read voraciously, particularly books way above my peers’ reading capabilities. I found the door to the adult library when I was seven, and started reading anthropology books, fascinated by details of non-Christan societies, mores, rituals and beliefs.
As I devoured all the material I could find I composed a mental list - what to think about trying, what to do first, what to avoid. Nobody worried, I was a well-behaved boy back then in the 1960s, and I always put the books back on the right shelf.
I explained to Prof. Shrink that escaping my family, learning self-expression and self-acceptance, and going to art school had provided me with the means by which I had been able to acknowledge and ultimately escape from a childhood suppressed by drugs and other means, and that treading this path gave me the fuel to make my living.
The knowledge of what had happened in my early childhood triggered a long, steady process of putting two and two together and getting what seemed like millions of answers to questions I didn’t know I should ask.
Over many months that followed this insight, pennies dropped like rain, sometimes stopping me in my tracks, sometimes dozens in a single day, insights both useful and surprising, sometimes dark, other times revelatory. What must have happened. Oh My God moments. As for the phenobarbital, they had no idea, and I had no memory of it until this moment in Prof. Shrink’s office, when it slowly triggered a long, unpredictable avalanche where one recovered memory released another memory, and yet more related memories.
It was very interesting, this opening of my pesonal Pandora’s box.
Later, talking to siblings helped, though sometimes more me than them. Thankfully Mum was still alive and ‘with it’, and I was able to ask her questions, based on what I was recalling. She was very generous with her replies, unafraid to think back to times when she was challenged, up against it, and I was sometimes astonished by her openness. It helped that her relationship with Brian was solid and supportive - he was the love of her life, a kind, patient and a dedicated husband, and he gave her a lot of confidence.
Over two years, without psychiatric help but with the help of meditation and similar disciplines I worked on discovering myself. In doing so I became who I am now.
This version of me arrived when I was 40. You can clearly see how the discoveries from recovered memories were absorbing me greatly at the time…
So when as a recovering road traffic accident person (RRTAP) the nice doctor in modern day London offered these SSRI drugs to me, to my surprise, I said yes to the pills, collected them, but didn’t swallow them. I picked up the prescriptions, every one, took them home, kept them safe. I thought about cracking open a pack on and off, but no. Didn’t want to, didn’t need to. Read up about them, double checked, still no. Asked friends who had been on Citalopram - one told how it had really helped him through a down period, the other told how it had made him suicidal. Still wasn’t interested. So why did I accept the prescriptions?
It’s a tad bizarre, and a bit like the bus-noise-bale-outs (BNBOs) it was spontaneous. Why do this? Wasn’t this wasting precious NHS money? What about other people, etc.? But this kind of talk is plain old fashioned bollocks, so much that I could hear them swinging in the wind. The NHS had kind of wasted me, so I had zero guilt. Preposterous illogic, yes, but just what the doctor didn’t order, which is part of what I needed. Taking control of what I did and did not want was a strange but real part of my recovery, as I was quietly going against professional advice, and harming nobody.
After a couple of months I had proved to myself that however messed up I might be, I could and would get well using various means, just not this one. I didn’t need these SSRIs, but having them and not taking them had effectively laid a ghost of my childhood. So job done, I took them back. Thanks for the opportunity, oh wise ones.
It took me three months to get a job, four months to get financial help from the Dept. of Work and Pensions, three weeks to get on the psychotherapy waiting list, and two months before I started it. It began with telephone triage.
I received a letter of diagnosis on 16th March 2022, and emailed my family:
My diagnosis letter arrived after last week's mental health triage. I've got three kinds of mental health issues to deal with, it says here - moderately severe depression, severe anxiety, and clinically significant PTSD. They note that I'm not suicidal.
I have to wait two months for six weeks of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) with one of the local health teams "high intensity" therapists. They are based at the M., which is quite highly rated at least.
Meanwhile they've given me some leaflets to fan myself with and various other options (Samaritans, A&E) in case I do suddenly become suicidal ( I don't think I'll become suicidal) and they want me to start on 20 mg of citalopram for a month after which they will review the effects of said pills, which could cause impotence, flatulence, or heart failure. Only one of these possible outcomes concerns me.
Work is dribs and drabs. I'm making a pittance doing online teaching but it's good for me because it keeps me working. When I say a pittance, I've taught online since early Feb using Preply.com, completing six whole hours now, and I've made US$30, after tax. Another good news item in this bulletin is that my airbag deafness seems to be receding steadily, albeit at a glacial speed, which means that I'm able to return to audio work. So I'm pitching for that, and friends are sending me things to do.
I've been offered some writing work for a friend's travel project. It's a nice offer, but I had to reply and ask him what the deadline was before I said yes. He said, end of the month would be good, so I came clean about my situation and said I can't promise that, I can only say I'll do it as soon as I can.
If I was up to full speed I would be fine, but I'm not. I'm wading through mud psychologically, it takes me ages to complete things.
What I want therapy to do is to provide some relatively speedy cure that will render me fit to go back into schools, because that's where the money is, it's why I came up to London, but all that's done is shrink my living space to that of a postage stamp, freaked the poor cat out because of the number of cat bullies around here, and put my rent up by 25 quid. But at least I am nearer work that I can't do right now.
Even if I teach online 60 hours a week, I still wouldn't be able to pay rent and bills. (That last sentence is how I think most of the time.) So I really don't know how I'm going to be able to stay here this place for very much longer. I'll just keep selling what possessions I have here that people will buy, I guess.
Being officially depressed may partially qualify me to get some state assistance, so started to apply for PIP. D.R., who many years ago was in the most appalling car accident, found a PTSD 'cure' called Rewind Therapy which might speed up the process of recovery. It's a form of hypnosis. There are two practitioners in London. I probably can't afford them.
But the good news is that the symptoms which took me to the hospital and to the GP in the first place, my strangely beating heart, are almost certainly caused by post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety, rather than something that is potentially lethal in itself.
So my diagnosis was: significant PTSD, standard-issue depression, and off-the-scale anxiety.
In the following months I worked through it all thanks to patient therapists (in the sense they suffered my regular criticisms of their system in good grace) and live Zoom video sessions. It’s all very predictable, CBT, the cheapest quickest talking therapy in the book, hence its prevalence in deliberately deprived Britain.
Aside from keeping going with online teaching, I didn’t work until the summer when I got a job in a nearby school which happens to be excellent. It was a ten minute walk from where I lived, and I needed not bike nor carriage. I loved the work, the people, the incredible place, the peacocks, the games, the many nationalities. I ran a drumming circle in the founder’s garden, and I taught a class how to meditate. I was happy, functional, still with some work on myself to do but very happy doing it, and never any doubt I was where I should be.
It was around this time that I knew I had to write songs, blues songs, three albums, one each for the three mental health conditions I suffered and dealt with. When I release it, if you subscribe, you will be the first to know. Or maybe the second.
There is one last sting in this tale - how the crash affected me physically. Neuropathy affected my neck and arm. I got pins and needles in my hand if I looked right when holding something, anything. I had x-rays and an MRI scan which revealed narrowing of the small tunnels in the vertebrae which house your nerves and run from your brain to the rest of the body. This narrowing is often caused by trauma, the body reacting to damage.
I was prescribed anti-inflammatory medication, Ibuprofen, an NSAID which helped quite a bit. Pain was reduced to mild discomfort, and I slept well again. Unfortunately, keeping on using these NSAID drugs plays havoc with your immune system, 70% of which is housed in your gut. I took NSAID drugs for 18 months, before realising what effects that they’d had on my immune system, at which point I asked the doctors in the surgery why they had not cautioned me that these drugs are not safe for long-term usage. I wasn’t advised by the doctors not to use it permanently, in fact, the reverse, and I was very disgruntled they didn’t tell me that.
These links FYI explain what the NSAID drug group is and what it does, and why you should know about it and be careful if you take them - see this, this, this and this.
October 2023, I was on a train going home from work. In a crowded carriage, a woman sneezed and from 3 metres away I felt her expelled saliva hit my left eye. I had been wearing a face mask, Covid was making a comeback, but I wasn’t wearing glasses. It was slightly revolting, my heart sank, and I hoped it would be nothing. It was not to be.
Within 8 hours I had a raging high temperature, and the following day I developed a fever which knocked me out. After being out for the count for 24+ hours, I came to in a sweat-soaked bed feeling very pale and without a voice. I called the doctor and whispered my situation, and was diagnosed with a bacterial infection, following a viral infection. I was prescribed a week of anti-biotics. This totally cleared the symptoms and restored my speaking voice, but six weeks later, the sore throat returned.
I had been trying to restore my singing voice, and I just couldn’t do it, my bright red raw throat hurt like needles were digging in to it. I researched and found out that NSAIDs significantly deplete the immune system, as do antibiotics, the latter being already known to me. The combination of a reduced immune system and a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics is not good at all - my healthy gut biomes were now totally compromised, and my body was under attack. The doctor saw me as soon as could get there, I was immediately referred to the hospital, fast track.
Post chest X-Rays, blood tests, and now waiting for an endoscopy, early results came in two days before Christmas, and I had a phone call with the hospital consultant. First, I have 1% chance of cancer. Huzzah!
Consultant Doctor agreed that there is a strong probability that my gut health was damaged by Ibuprofen and Cocodamol over 18 months, and was genuinely surprised the GP’s surgery had not prevented this NSAID prescription from running on and on. He agreed that their error had probably led to a brief collapse of my previous resilience (I liked the word ‘brief’) because I don’t have a history of this kind of thing - he was right, I don’t. He suspected that my recurring sore throat was caused by ‘silent reflux’ which means my throat and voice being negatively affected from crepuscular emanations (gas) from my depleted gut lower down.
I met this news with several levels of relief, and saw it as presenting me with a great challenge. I want a fit and functioning immune system, so now I’m eating my way to health, using food as medicine.
Last September, before having any understanding of the connection between NSAIDs and gut health, I was already thinking I should take less Ibuprofen, it just didn’t feel right. I started to slowly reduce the Ibuprofen, going from 1200mg per day to 400mg, and replaced it with Turmuric - yes that bright orange stuff you find in Indian food - which works with catalysts such as ginger and black pepper to release curcumin, an effective active anti-inflammatory agent. Just two tiny pills per day, and I am better for it. I completely removed the Ibuprofen two months ago.
My neck which suffers the most is OK, I experience only occasional neuropathy (it moves around) but I could now feel minor knocks and bruises which I had been carrying but not feeling for months! These minor bumps are lessening now, I’ve got used to them again, they don’t intrude. Less cocooned but I’m suffering a lot less from inflammation without negative effects.
Ah, my feet, my knee, my knuckle… there’s three more blues songs.
Overall the pain is now at worst an occasional discomfort, a fraction of what it used to be if I ran out of Ibuprofen.
After the prequel, the main story and the sequel, here’s my take-away.
How to love yourself until your gut loves you
This is how I am rebuilding my biome.
To give my damaged gut a chance to recover, I immediately stopped drinking alcohol.
I cut out my very occasional red meat. I’m going to stick to a pescatarian diet for now. I aleady get lots of protein from non-meat and non-fish sources from pulses, beans, nuts, tofu, soya, micoprotein (e.g. Quorn) and more, so no problem there.
I eat as much organic wholefood as I can find which won’t break the bank.
I include lots of pickles, olives, sauerkraut, kimchi in my diet, all great for you, and your innards love them. I love these flavours, I always had a taste for savoury food.
Eat fibre - I eat organic oats, so plenty there. Don’t eat coloured or ‘flavour-enhanced’ oats. I also eat lots of Brown Food - wholemeal brown rice, brown couscous, brown pasta, brown bread, some taste better than others, but worth finding them. Cheap and cheerful tip: brown organic pitta bread.
Drinks and yoghurts - this week I am drinking Biomel coconut cultured milk, and Kefir. Coconut can make a great butter replacement, believe it or not. Costs the same amount as dairy butter, doesn’t taste of coconut, I get it from Insanesbury’s.
Pomegranate pills thicken the mucus in the gut, this protects me from nasty invaders. One per meal.
Pro Biotic cultures are essential for repopulating and maintaining happy gut bacteria. Two per day. Shop around.
Omega 3 Fish Oil is an all-round positive supplement and supposedly just having this as a regular part of your diet can add as much as 4 years to your lifespan. One - three per day.
Add fruit, vegetables (all the vitamins), garlic (blood), ginger, (gut), strawberries (amazing powers of renewal) nuts (aren’t we all?).
I now drink my tea without dairy milk (nut milk keeps the polyphenols digestible) and organic ground coffee (organic is a different drink - all the good stuff is in it!) and because I love my throat I no longer drink anything scalding hot.
Vitamins I neck daily: A and D (essential, especially if you don’t get much sun where you live, or live in a subway) E (skin, hair, nails) B12 (mental health) and of course Vitamin C (avoid scurvy, me hearties!)
Tired? Try Magnesium Oxide for muscle function, nervous system, fatigue reduction.
All the supplements I have mentioned are really beneficial and work well together, but stagger them over the day, drink fresh water with them, and / or take them with food in your stomach.
Last but not least: always stay clear of over-processed food; go organic as much as you can; cut out glucose, particularly refined white sugar; avoid red meat or at the least, make it special occasions only.
Eat insects instead, but not the endangered ones.
OK that’s a joke, right? But in the fullness of time, who knows?
PS: my throat is still getting better. I may yet live.
Fingers crossed, eyes crossed, legs crossed, one for each set of blues songs.
See? I haven't forgotten how to end on an up note ♪
I dedicate this three-part story to Popstar, my treasured most affectionate friend in the worst of times, and you, of course. You know who you are.