Previous Post:  Fill it…please !!

After moving out of home I spent a couple of nights in a motel trying to get my head around what I was doing.  I switched into Michael mode and spent many hours deliberating about what I was going to do with my life.  I had no idea where I was going to stay, what I was going to tell my family and certainly had no idea about what my life now had in store for me.   When you make a decision to leave your family your head goes into a spin and you choke on the continual bits of useless information that inundate your brain as you try to make sense of what you had done.  You dont ever really get on top of it and I was fortunate that I had some close family who I could see and talk to.    Talking to someone is something that seems ironic becuase it never crossed my mind when I took those pills in May.   I had family, friends and Katrina who I should have spoken to but I didn’t take my own advice and kept it bottled up and festered away on red wine.

Anyway…I went over to stay with my sister and her family where I knew I could talk and not be judged.  Its a rare commodity in a family member because alot of family and friends can have opinions and as we know opinions are like arseholes…everyone has one.  When something like this happens you can take it for granted most will let you know what they think and its the reason psychologists and pyschiatrists make a mint because they fill that void where people want to talk but dont want to be judged by the people who mean the most to them.  I’m really lucky as my brothers and sisters are people I can talk to, it’s just me who fails to make the most of those opportunities to share my frustrations.

I managed to get myself sorted after a couple of weeks and got some house sitting which allowed me to have time to myself and slowly establish a bit of order in my life.  I was continually stressed as my mind worked overtime and that stress drove me to have a couple of hiccups on the way.  One morning I woke  at 2am with some tingling in my fingers, I was alone and I initially thought I may have been sleeping funny on my arm.   It didn’t go away and I started to get some pains in my chest.  I did the man thing and ignored all the warning signs thinking to myself…it will go away.  I was wrong and the pain never went away, it just bubbled away in sync with my mind as the stress played havoc with my brain as I lay there thinking the worst.  The worst was what I got,  my mind shifted into overtime and at 3am my chest caved in and I was paralysed by an acute pain …I honestly thought I was going to die and its the closest I have come to wishing there were some “pearly gates”.

As I lay there taking a grip of the only hair on my chest I remember crying and saying to myself “I don’t want to die on my own”.  I didn’t really want to die at all and I was lucky because the pain slowly subsided after a few minutes to the point where I thought I was alright.  After awhile I still had tingling in my fingers and I began to worry and thought I better get myself to hospital just in case I was delivered another warning about my diet.   I dragged myself out of bed and to my trusty green Toyota Caldina.  I didn’t really think about not driving and calling an ambulance, I knew best.  I was wrong again because as I drifted down Blockhouse Bay road my blood pressure rose and I could feel a wave of pain flow through my chest like a torrent of water.  Lucky for me there was no-one else on the road because I veered across the road and struggled to control the steering wheel.  I managed to pull it back and get the car and myself under some sort of control and made the obvious decision to pull-over and stop on the side of the road.  I started crying and felt so isolated,  I was about to drive off again when the pain returned to send me scrambling for my phone and a call to someone to come and help me.  I couldn’t call Katrina,  she wasn’t suppose to be part of my life then, so I called my sister.

My brother-in law Graeme answered the phone…two minutes later he’s knocking on my window….Graeme’s like that, he’d break every road rule in the book if he thought you needed a meat pie.  A meat pie wasn’t what I needed but Graeme then proceeded to run every red light between Blockhouse Bay and Auckland Hospital.  I got there without having another attack but Graeme’s driving hadn’t done much for my stress levels.

I was rushed through to emergency and plastered with wires and stethoscopes to work out what was going on.  They did the normal blood tests and kept me in for 24 hours until they were sure I hadn’t had a heart attack.  I hadn’t and although I had some unusual heart patterns they put it down to stress.   I was discharged and returned to my house-sitting job in Blockhouse Bay.  It was around this time that I became aware of what sort of person I was and self-reflection was a big part of my landscape.  My bout of depression back in 1999 was one incident and I treated it as such but my separation from Denise and my girls was to make me realise that I wasn’t the tough policeman that I thought I was and had me looking at myself in a bit more in depth.

Thinking in a bit more depth ???  There it was, there was my problem, “I get in my own way” and spend way too much time thinking about things and not just doing. I get so worried about making mistakes and looking stupid that I forgot that even when you fall flat on your face you are at least moving forward and not stagnating in your own thoughts.  Thats exactly what I do, I stagnate and am never moving forward and its so much so that I become bitter and twisted and became feral in my thoughts to the point where I see the positive’s in nothing.

Its a very tough cycle to get out of and for the next few years I did to a point.  I met Katrina and fell in love and for 3 years we had a fantastic life, for 10 years I have had a fantastic life, but this is a blog and I have to break it down.   Over those three years I turned 50, got myself into a loving relationship, had a great job and then….messed it up.