Tell Me What Happened To You

What I’m about to say here may upset a few people. In fact, I know it will. Some of you may say I’m a selfish so-and-so for posting this here, and a few people on my social media friends list may unfriend me.

You see, what I’m about to say here is aimed at you, the person reading this. You may be related to me in some way, you may consider yourself a friend, or you may be someone I’ve crossed paths with sometime over the years that’s reconnected with me via social media.

I feel let down, in a big way. Why?

It’s roughly three years to the day where I almost lost my life. I still have some quite vivid memories of that certain night in Hethel Ward in the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital, when things almost came to an end through a combination of pneumonia and a heart condition.

I remember the group of people around me, working on me, injecting me with drugs and hooking me up to machines. I remember the Chinese nurse who stood at my side, a woman whose name I never knew, holding my right hand as she tried to comfort me. I remember hearing the words “heart failure” over and over again.

I remember planning my own funeral, who I wanted there, what music I wanted played. I remember wondering how those friends I’d fallen out with years before would find out, because I didn’t want them to know that something had happened by reading it on their FYP on social media.

I have no idea how long that lasted. It may have been a few minutes, it may have been a few hours, but the fact that those events did happen have remained with me since that day three years ago. Those memories are just as vivid now as they were then.

I recovered, well, sort of. Two chest drains during the first stay in hospital, thoracic surgery during the second stay, and three years of flashbacks and bad dreams that go back to that awful night on a regular basis, flashbacks and bad dreams which have made me, at times, wonder if I should actually go on with things.

Those four weeks in 2023 left me with physical scars and a recurrence of my cardiovascular disease which have required further treatment. Indeed, I’m now on the waiting list for a third round of cardioversion, which may be followed some months later by further surgery.

But it’s not the physical scars that’s led me here to write this particular piece. It’s the mental ones.

Now this is the bit that will probably annoy some of you. Why? Because it feels like you, the person reading that that is somehow connected to me through either blood, friendship or coincidence, you are the person that’s let me down.

I’ve told my story to countless people over the past three years. To healthcare professionals, to doctors and nurses, to my local mental health team, to a mental health counsellor, to my advisor at the DWP, to my former personnel and department managers at work, and I’ve told it to the brothers I live with.

But I’ve never told this story to you, the person reading this, in person. You may have read it on my social media feeds, you may have read it on my blog, but you’ve never actually heard it from me, have you?

What am I getting at here? It’s quite simple really. You see, nobody, none of my friends, or anyone for that matter, outside of a professional setting, outside of a treatment room, none of you, have actually said to me this: “tell me what happened to you.”

Nobody, none of my extended family, none of the people who consider me a friend, none of the people I’ve encountered on a personal level over the past few decades have ever contacted me and offering me the proverbial shoulder to cry on. None of you have sat in front of me, looked me in the eye, or called me on the phone and said “tell me what happened to you.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so damn lonely over the past few years, and why I felt so damn lonely during my recent hospital visit.

Is this a cry for help? I’ll let you be the judge of that. But if you think that this isn’t aimed at you, then you’re probably wrong.