He speaks

Disclaimer from Anna: The following is written by Marcus. It's his first blog post, something I never thought he would do and I'm proud of him for been able to put it in words. Part of why I was relucantant to blog about this is that it wasn't my story to tell. So the following are his words. He wanted to do it and him writing it has been part of the healing. Part of the fixing.

So there I was, heart pounding, adrenalin flowing through my body, breathing deeply, I hadn’t eaten much in days, any moment I felt like I was going to fall – this was turning out to be my Everest. I told myself I had to carry on, get a hold of yourself and make it home, battle through it, keep moving, stay focused. I could feel the stare of the others around me as they could see this man fading, stress and fear written all over his face. I'm gripping the supports hard - not letting go, keep calm and carry on as they said in London during the war. As great as it might have been to be climbing Mount Everest I wasn't.  No, I was simply trying to make my way to the airport via the Beijing subway while having a severe panic attack.

But let's back the story up a bit. March 15^th 2010, Anna had been training for months to do the Triple Peaks Challenge  - 3 Hawke’s Bay mountains over 47km and today was the day of the challenge. The kids were with my parents so I could support Anna.  As there were hours between each check point I thought it would be a good chance to catch up on some work while I waited. There was a customer that needed some after hours attention and this was a perfect time to do it as their building was right by the finish line. So here I am working away in the server room of one of my clients and every few hours ducking away to support Anna at the next checkpoint. Everything with this particular job was going fairly smoothly then I hit a glitch. No problem I’ll just work through it. Suddenly my heart started to race, beads of sweat formed on my forehead, adrenaline flooded my body as if an army medic had run up and jabbed me with a full vile of the stuff. My knees went weak and I stopped and sat down against the wall. As sudden as the onset of the physical elements set in so did the mental elements. I was gripped by fear and panic. Thoughts of “I’m out of my depth”, “I have no idea what I am doing," “I am hopeless at this,” “300 people and a multi million dollar business is relying on me and I have completely stuffed it," “I am in so much trouble," “Run away, run away and don’t come back – just drive to the airport, buy a ticket to somewhere and hide." I sat in this state for about thirty minutes – it felt like hours. I came out of it and got back to the job at hand. It turned out the problem wasn't even that hard to overcome. I brushed the “incident” off, thought it a little bizarre but put it down to being a little tired and rundown.

Over the next few months what I came to call the 'Panic Monkey' would come back to visit me every so often. He seemed to visit me when work was at it’s busiest, when I was tired, when I knew that I mustn’t drop the balls I had up in the air.

“I really should take a holiday but when? how? We can barely cope with the workload at the moment and taking time off is not fair to the rest of the staff.”

I work long hours, not because I am a workaholic, I don’t enjoy it, it’s just there is too much to do between 8 and 5 so the rest falls to after hours on the couch. Necessity demands it, customer’s expectations need to be met or exceeded.  Once the kids are bathed and in bed it is back onto the computer responding to emails, doing jobs, planning, writing reports, sales proposals and so on. Finally at about 11pm I head to bed. Up at 6am when the kids come into our bedroom and the first thing I do is grab my iphone and check my emails to see what has happened overnight. 15 minutes clearing these emails and it’s in the shower, maybe breakfast and then off to work. Let’s go again.

One winters night in 2010 I was working away on the couch, Survivor was playing on the television and the panic monkey came to visit again. This time is was different. There was not the mental aspect to this attack just physical and it all seemed to be happening to my heart. I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest. Anna wanted to call an ambulance but not wanting to be dramatic I thought I would drive myself to the hospital. Once there the hospital staff seem to take heart stuff pretty seriously and I was rushed through into the emergency department. Nurses were spraying stuff under my tongue and the pain was supposed to go away – it didn’t. I was hooked up to machines and monitors but everything looked normal. This was weird as I didn’t feel normal however after spending a night in the hospital I was assured that everything was okay and there was nothing wrong with my heart. Great, back into it then, it’s just a glitch.

Fast forward to early February this year. The panic monkey visits me most days now, sometimes he does not hang around long and is only loosely hanging onto my back, other times he’s hanging on for dear life and for long periods.  Other times he just watching me from the bushes, ready to pounce on my back at anytime. It’s the weekend before I am due to leave for China to attend a conference and the monkey follows me everywhere I go now. I’m sure if I get on the plane to China he will not make it through customs and by the time I get back he would have lost interest and found someone else to bother.

I get off the plane in Hong Kong, I turn my phone on, it connects to the Internet and downloads my emails – suddenly I feel the panic monkey on my back again. He has stowed away in my hand luggage. I try to shake him, I can’t. Looks like this fella is with me for a few days longer. Hopefully he will get lost in this big foreign country and leave me alone after a few days.

I reach Beijing, it’s the weekend, the conference is over and I think I have managed to ditch that monkey somewhere in central China. I feel good, relaxed, happy, ready to hit this city. I meet up with a friend and we start to look around the city. We go out for lunch and go to the markets, see some sights and finally head back to our hotel. I open the door and sit down on my bed, I open my computer and bang out jumps the panic monkey. He has found me and he’s not happy. He’s on my back and he’s not letting go. I am incapacitated, I can hardly move, let alone breathe. That was the worst night of my life, I slept only brief spells while the panic monkey beat me up all night.

In the morning I was drained. Rich, the friend I was travelling with knew something was wrong within half and hour of us getting up. Still I wasn’t going to let this thing beat me. I will carry on and shake him off sometime during the day. The thing is he had a pretty tight hold and was not going to let go – not at all. He wasn’t going to let me ditch him again. All day I was beat up by this monkey on my back – I was exhausted, frightened and annoyed. This wasn’t me, I’m a strong person, "get a grip" I was telling myself as if having an out of body experience as this monkey continued to attack me. Finally that night I had had enough. I phoned the airline and booked the next flight home. When Rich came back from dinner which I had skipped as I couldn't face it I told him I was off. Naturally he was disappointed but understood. He could see the effects the monkey was having on me so after another bad night Rich and I packed up and headed to the subway which was right opposite the hotel. Rich needed to head south to catch a train to another city but here I was heading north on the subway to catch the train to the Airport and onward home.

We said our goodbyes in a manly way and my trained pulled in. I hopped on and the doors closed. The monkey is pretty much living on my back from now – he is always there, sometimes he’s awake and feisty and other times he’s dozing and quiet, I can always feel him there. As soon as the train pulled away from the station the snoozing monkey was woken by the jolt and the beat up started again. This brings us back to the beginning of this story. I had done this trip to the airport twice already without the monkey on my back and had no problems, it was a breeze. Today the breeze had turned into a hurricane. A 40 minute trip that felt like I was attempting to conquer a giant. However this was not something that would make the cover of any adventure magazine, this is a trip millions of people make every week without any issue. Here I was going mad.

Finally I made it to terminal 3, Beijing Airport. I get off the train and sit down to take a rest. Once I find the departure board I check for my flight – strange I can't seem to see it listed. The monkey is now taunting me, I get out my flight information and check the flight. Oh no! I have booked this leg of the trip Beijing to Hong Kong for tomorrow and the Honk Kong to Auckland Flight leaves tonight. The monkey is in full noise now, swinging from shoulder to shoulder, laughing, and carrying on. Someone notices my anguish. “Can I help you sir?” I turn around and see an airline representative standing before me. I explain my situation and he tells me not to worry, that he will help me sort it out. The monkey on my back starts to quieten down. It turns out the airline representative is from the airline I am flying with – that is fortuitous. He takes me to a desk and in a flash has changed my ticket bypassing what looks to be at least a hour of queuing and checked my bags all the way though to Auckland. I thank him and head off to the gate. I had not walked fifty meters when he catches up with me again and tells me that he has arranged with Thai Airways for them to accommodate me in their corporate lounge, from there they will try and arrange some upgrades to my seat for the trip home. Two thoughts enter my head, “crickey do I look that bad?” And “this is not good fortune, this guy has been sent by God to look after me”.

So I make it home via the upgraded seats but the monkey is still with me everywhere I go. Sometimes he’s asleep, sometimes he’s awake and just letting me know he’s there, sometimes he’s in full voice and having fun beating me up.

Back home a support network rallies around me and I see a doctor. I am prescribed some medicine which helps sedate the monkey but he’s with me all the time still. It doesn’t take much to set this guy off. A phone ringing, a knock at the door, hearing names in conversation, crowds, seeing things that remind me of things that I have left hanging.

So here I am now. Four weeks in to this “experience." I wish it was just a monkey on my back as then I could just shoot it and get on with life but it’s not that easy. It’s not a monkey at all, I am sick, mentally sick, something that is hard for a guy like me to come to terms with. I have been through a range of emotions over the last few weeks from frustration, to being scared to my wits end, to wanting to run away, to crying like a baby in my bed. I never thought that this would happen to me.

I still have a lot of fears and it is early days. I am worried that I am going to be looked at as damaged goods in the business community, I worry what others will think, I have been so strong for so long and now my walls are crumbling.

The road to recovery looks like it is going to be frustratingly long but everyone tells me I am going to get better. We think I have something called Acute Panic Disorder – a mental illness. Am I ready to accept this yet? Not really – hence why I refer to it as a “monkey”, an object that is not part of me. Hopefully soon I will come to terms with it. Mental illness has so many taboos associated with it and I know the stigmas I have placed on people with it in the past. Now these stigmas are going to come my way. I know this experience will shape me to be a better person – as the saying goes what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger but I am not going to lie and say it’s going to be easy as so far it has been any thing but that. From now I need to rely on God’s strength and the strength of those he places around me.

Eventually I will get this panic monkey off my back and locked away in a cage where it can't annoy me anymore or at worst just taunt from a distance.