This is a deeply selfish post given that two good men on here died this year and never felt sorry for themselves during their illnesses and there are others with worse problems of the same variety as myself on here who arenāt drama queens feeling sorry for themselves, but here goes.
I am in a very bad place at the moment. On September 27th I lost the sight in my left eye. I got a detached retina, a bad one, one that fucks up your macula. I was operated on the following day, but I know my sight will likely never come back like it was, it will likely be distorted for life. From my affected eye I now see horrible squiggly lines not straight ones, I see double, my depth perception is gone, things look further away, my vision in my affected eye taunts me every time I open my eyes. The vision in my left eye is wizened, like a stooped over old man. Iām trapped in a head I canāt escape from. I canāt concentrate, I canāt read anything substantial because my ability to concentrate is gone. Canāt imagine ever attending a match in Croke Park, or anywhere, ever again. Canāt imagine working. Canāt imagine going to the pub, or on holiday, or being attractive to anybody, or finding anybody attractive, or being anything other than an ordeal to encounter at home. Canāt imagine being genuinely interested in anything any more. Canāt imagine surviving. I am not resilient. I am delicate and I am that term of derision, a snowflake, at least I currently am.
I was a reasonably happy person. I have never been a person of any great need nor ambition, I liked simple things - going to matches, watching matches, walks, cycling, reading, a few drinks. I was a comfortable in my own company. Now the fear is overpowering, the regret is overpowering and the self hatred is overpowering.
My sense of self has been destroyed. I now feel like two separate people, that my bad self ā the nihilistic self - has done my good self ā the one filled with human ability and potential - a grievous injustice, that my bad self could have saved my good self, but chose not to, chose to allow it die. My bad self could have tried to save my good self by going to a doctor or even an optician in the seven weeks between August 7th and September 25th when there were warning signs but I still had good vision. Instead it laughed at it. I replay over and over in my mind what the outcome would have been had I gone to the hospital as soon as my symptoms started progressing. Every hour feels like a day, every day feels like an hour, every week feels like a year. Just fucking terror mixed with emptiness and a wish to escape. I try to remain vaguely interested in things happening in the world but me trying to be interested is a front - and what is happening with the war, the fucking cruelty and evil of those who inflicted it and the pathetic apologism for them, and all the shit and the widespread embracing of hate and stupidity going on around the world, only depresses me further.
I spent from around last Friday to Monday evening mostly crying and in a state of constant anxiety with a very high heartbeat and yet simultaneously a feeling that my heart had been ripped out. I constantly wanted to scream but couldnāt. On Monday this erupted in a mini-breakdown where I was shrieking and hyperventilating and not being able to stand up for an hour and a half. I ended up prostrate on the front porch, in full view of passers by. Then I had to be carted off to the doctor to be prescribed valium. I slept for about three hours that night and woke up at half three and stared in the dark silently for the rest of the night thinking about where the best place to throw myself under a train would be. Overlooking Galway Bay on the coast road out to Oranmore? Or beside the water tower on the old Dublin road where the train picks up speed? Or in Dublin? A Dart station, under the Belfast train? Over in a flash. Thatās the only way I could do it - minimal effort. My father, who was the greatest friend I will ever have - we finished each otherās sentences - died in a hospital where he lay for 23 days alone. There were four people at his funeral. I am still not over this, but I feel ten times worse now. At least when he died I still had my health.
There have been posters here who have engaged privately with me, fucking great men, generous men, much better men than me, and they have made me feel some sense of worth, and for the last three days until last night I felt mildly better in myself, but they cannot provide the answers I need to hear and this is no fault of them at all. Last night I fell back into the pit of darkness and Iām finding it harder and harder to see a way out. I feel no physical pain but I would take two broken legs over what I have because there would be hope and knowledge they would get better.
I do not really think I am being gaslighted by medical staff where I was operated on but I feel like I am being gaslighted because nobody seems to recover from what I have which is called metamorphopsia. Nobody.
I do not think I am about to end things right now and I donāt want to because of what it would do to my loved ones and because I want to get better and want to have hope that it will ā and I think this is why I have written this ā because I want to be here in six monthsā time and read this and feel stupid and mortified for having written it - but I donāt know how this gets better because every time I open my eyes Iām confronted with it. I feel like Nuala OāFaoilain in that interview with Marian Finucane where she said that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and all the joy had gone out of living. Except that she knew it was about to end. Mine has to somehow keep going.
