I’ll tell you something else about swimming all year round @Cheasty at blackrock, there’s a very nice and friendly group do it. You’ll meet a lot of people. Everyone chats away. It would really help just that.
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I honestly think you should write a book cheasty. You’re a very good writer, you’ve shit loads of info and ideas bouncing around in your brain and you’ve the time. A memoir of an average Joe/slight outsider growing up in 80s 90s 00s suburban Dublin linked with the sporting cultural news issues of the day. You’d need a good editor but honestly id read it.
On an unrelated note you should get yourself assessed by a psychologist/psychiatrist for some form of neurodivergence. I’ve read a huge amount about it in recent years and the peace it’s given to adults getting a diagnosis of asd, ADHD or whatever seems to be unquantifiable. Explains a lot of their difficulties and struggles through life and allows them understand themselves more. Things seem to make sense. Now you may not meet the criteria but it’s something to look into at least.
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Look into going to John of Gods as a day patient. It’s private, you’ll get better care. It’s not right, but it is what it is.
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I’m not qualified to give advice here but fwiw this is my advice. You need to do one of two options.
- Back to the idea of small wins, start doing some small jobs for your mother around the house. The most basic of tasks but if you can start off small you will hopefully get more and more done each day. In this way you earn your warm chair, Tayto, hot water bottle and World Cup game and they will all seem more worthwhile.
- Go into hospital. It won’t be easy but anything worthwhile is never easy. You seem like a very intelligent person but you have to accept that at the moment you are not the best judge of what is best for you.
Good luck with it whatever you do.
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Ride out the storm as best you can @Cheasty, it will be your greatest achievement and you will be glad you mastered it and controlled it.
From a selfish pov I need someone on here to drag me back from my increasingly right wing tendencies/concerns.
This sounds very simplistic and may be naive, but if you can at all, try and take a sec and assess and accept the rational, rather than the emotional response when something upsets you.
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Sometimes the best thing to do is just give in. Stop fighting it. Your eye may or not recover, if it doesn’t is it the end of the world? Most people would say no but the problem is you think it is. Anyone that committed suicide felt that whatever problem they had could not be overcome. Those left behind would disagree.
If you want help, which I believe you do, then there is help out there. Once a week counselling isn’t enough right now. Neither are GP prescribed drugs. You need a bit of in house treatment where they can diagnose and treat you properly.
My heart breaks when I read about your poor mother. I did the same to mine. I eventually gave in and spent 8 weeks in a treatment centre when I was 19. I was afraid what people would think if they found out. They did find out and they all said the same thing ‘it worked’. I haven’t needed to be in one since.
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I do feel it’s effectively the end of my world if I won’t be able to see properly with two eyes, with full binocular vision and depth perception, detail and especially if I’m not free of the wavy lines. Genuinely I’ve always had a fear of sight impairment. Like even the evening before I went blind in the eye I was walking through a supermarket car park and taking extreme care that I didn’t poke my eye on a car aerial. I’ve had a mortal fear of those yokes for many years.
I was at the GP there an hour ago and he said to me that if I went in for an assessment he didn’t think I’d be kept in. It was only a 15 minute visit because they’re out the door busy with kids getting sick but he explained to me a little about the sort of drugs I’d likely be prescribed, I can’t for the life of me remember the names of them but they can be used in conjunction with the anti-depressants I’m taking.
I said to him I’d go to A and E in the morning, so I guess I’m going to have to do that.
One thing that my mind was put at rest about is that I’m not a diabetic, I had a bit of fear that I might be one without knowing but I had a blood test taken and my blood sugar levels are perfectly normal.
GP’s mean well but to be honest they are jack of all trades and really shouldn’t have the responsibility to be dealing with people who are feeling like you are. Not sure if you hsve health insurance but get yourself checked in. I had great craic where I was. Smoking, playing cards, pool, chess. They had to kick me out.
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Ian McKinley was able to play international rugby and he blind in one eye. I don’t think it’s the eye pal in fairness to you, the eye is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Yeah but he played for Italy mate.
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I always felt that there was a market for a sort of Wonder Years style comedy drama series about growing up in Dublin or Ireland circa 1987 to 1992.
But maybe Roddy Doyle had that market cornered and Roy Curtis seems to have it cornered at the moment.
I watched The Commitments through double vision about six or seven weeks ago when it was on RTE2 on a Saturday night. I think I’d only watched it through once before. It was a lot funnier than I remembered but watching it made me unbearably sad about a sort of lost world of ye olde Dublin of 1990 or so which served as a metaphor for my lost world or seeing the world as it is and I think I started getting terrible anxiety attacks a day or two later, it was the following Monday evening I think I had to be carted down to a doctor to get valium.
I would suggest I meet the criteria for something or other, some form of autism or OCD or whatever. I’m ignorant about this stuff but there is something off and I think always has been. I’m not sure if I posted this on the main board or to somebody in a PM but the first time I was out of Ireland was when I had just turned seven, I went to London with my granny. I became fascinated with the London Underground and its electric rail and the concept of people throwing themselves under tube trains. I’d make mock runs out to the edge of the platform as if I was about to throw myself onto the electric rail. I’d stand out on the very edge of the platform with the front of my feet hanging over the edge before I’d be pulled back in. I don’t think many seven year olds were doing that. There was no bathroom in the hotel room. My granny had to leave the room in the middle of the night one night to go to the loo. When she tried to get back in, I wouldn’t let her back in, I was in floods of tears. This went for what must have been half an hour and staff had to be called.
Certain other things stick out in my youth. I got measles and my Mam always said that changed me as a child from a happy, bonny four year old into a much more sullen one. I had to have my tonsils out at the age of four as well and I recall the nurse asking me “would you like to see the theatre?” I thought they were taking me to see puppets playing like in a Punch and Judy show, I didn’t understand what was happening. I don’t know did this instill a sort of bitterness and fear early in my life. When I was a child I had an irrational fear of the house burning down, even though nobody in the house smoked. We did have a SuperSer, mind.
If I’d done all this this psychiatric or even counselling stuff before my eye went I think it might have benefitted me greatly.
Right now I feel I’m in a place where nothing will work other than full physical recovery and that is very much doubtful at best.
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I’ll just add one thing.
Your mother. Dear Jesus Christ almighty, what that woman must be going through. If you don’t mind me saying, I think that you have gone out of your way at times to frighten her and make her feel as uncomfortable as possible. The day she went out and came back 2 or 3 hours later and you said to her that she must be confident enough that you wouldn’t do something. Telling her that she should saw the beam down. That the time to really worry about you would be when you appeared OK…this is a form of tormentation.
I know that you are not anywhere near the right frame of mind and to be honest about it I think that you should get proper full time help, but please do try to keep your Mam in mind. She worships the ground you walk on and just wants to see her child well again
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It is the eye. There is other stuff there that the eye has exposed, but the eye is the problem.
I heard that interview with McKinley, it came on the radio just as I was finishing my first long post about how I was feeling. I’m sorry I ever heard the interview. I didn’t find it encouraging, it made me more fearful that that was how I might end up and I don’t mean the playing sport bit. He went blind waiting at a traffic light in Galway and all.
look at @Fitzy - i think he is one of the top posters here, lives in paradise & is still playing footy, he has an Eye issue too, have you reached out to him, he might have some advice
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Great post
Sound advice boy
Let a professional be the judge of that bro.
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November 30th-December 6th
My uncle arrived last Wednesday to get rid of a load of junk from the attic and put up insulation in the attic. We’ve largely stayed out of each other’s way since.
On Thursday I went to the GP. It was only a 15 minute visit. He did a blood test and analysed it with some machine he has in his office. He was able to tell me I’m not a diabetic and that my blood sugar levels are normal. I got a new prescription for sleeping tablets.
We discussed going to the hospital and me getting a psychiatric assessment. He said based on his knowledge I would likely not be admitted. I said I would go on Friday morning. I did not go on Friday morning. I then said I would go on Monday. I did not. I have not gone today either. I am thinking of going tomorrow.
A friend of mine who years ago did time in psychiatric wards is involved in a peer support group. I told her I would attend that. I did not.
Due to the presence of my uncle, who I have always been a bit afraid of due to him smacking me across the face when I was about six years old, I managed to keep my despair under wraps until Sunday evening. I went for a half an hour walk on Saturday afternoon before the Holland-USA game and then an hour walk into town and back on Sunday lunchtime. About 6:00 on Sunday evening I started falling into despair again after reading a thread on the Facebook Retinal Detachment group which asked people how long it took them to feel normal after surgery and a load of people said they never felt normal again. I only paid cursory attention to the England-Senegal game, mainly verbalising how I was gong to kill myself to anybody who was listening. I didn’t have any substantial food from about 3pm Sunday until about 5pm the next day, only a packet of Tayto and a mug of cocoa and nicotine gum.
On Monday, my uncle and my mother left the house for about three or four hours, firstly to go the dump and then to get stuff for insulation for the attic, and other shopping bits and bobs. This was from about 10:30 am until after 2pm. During this time I let off about five or screams at the top of my voice even though there was nobody else in the house. I visualised hanging myself with a bedsheet or a scarf at the GAA post beside the trees near the river at Dangan, opposite Menlo Castle.
In that time I watched roughly 100 videos of people committing suicide, mostly by hanging. In our brave new modern world, people use technology to broadcast their own suicides and become internet memes. I used to watch various execution videos once and once only as a reminder to myself of the depravity that humanity is capable of. Now I’m repeatedly watching hanging videos as instruction manuals. By the time I got out of bed around 2:30pm, I was already in a very bad way. Over the next hour and a half or so I had an appalling episode, perhaps my worst yet, which involved constant crying and at least 50 to 60 screams and shrieks at the top of my voice, banging the back door which was locked, shouting “help”, then staggering out into the front garden and curling up in a ball in front of the garage doors shrieking and crying. I then went back in before going out the front again and lying face down on the grass crying and shrieking. No passers by said anything. I ran out of steam for this episode around half past four. All the while my uncle stayed up in the attic looking at how he would approach doing the insulation.
My mother thought of ringing an ambulance but didn’t. I said I’d go to the hospital today but have not. My mother confiscated my computer after me telling her what I had been watching. I didn’t get it back until after 11pm that night.
I rang my aunt in Dublin and told her I was in a terrible state. I told her my mother was away with the fairies and that she didn’t fully understand I was a suicide risk. She told my mother to ring the Dean Clinic in Galway. My mother did ring the Dean clinic but they have a waiting list until March and it’s bloody expensive anyway.
I have not received my usual notifications from Pieta House that I have counselling tomorrow Wednesday. They send notification texts on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I have received none this week, so this means no counselling tomorrow. Pieta had promised they would be in touch to give my mother something called “key support” but this has not happened.
I woke up early this morning and then fell back asleep about 9am. I drifted in and out of sleep until 2:30pm, mainly in. Today I cannot shake the sense of disorientation I see in my vision. I can’t shake the fact that I’m three feet away from a telly, the pair of glasses I have with one lens occluded are upstairs, I can’t shake myself to go upstairs and get them, and in my bad eye each player in the Morocco v Spain game seems about a third smaller and bent over, it’s like looking through cellophane, and when I open my two eyes I have double vision, which is why I’m paying very little attention to it. I haven’t passed a motion for four days, haven’t shaved for 12 days (and that was only with a barber’s razor), and haven’t had a shower for 11 days. I haven’t brushed my teeth today, and haven’t blown my nose or taken the sleep out of my eyes. The only thing I can bring myself to do is type and get all the bile that’s in my brain onto a screen and recorded for posterity.
For about a week when there were early games in the World Cup I was crawling out of bad around 10 am or 10:30am. Since these early games ended it has been rare that I’m out of bed before 2pm. It is another seven days before I see my surgeon again for the first time since November 1st. There are no World Cup games tomorrow or Thursday and there won’t be many games after that and these are the only things that are giving me any will to live at the moment. It’s 69 days since my surgery and I don’t much want to make the 100, never mind the 1,000 it might take for my eye to come right, and I don’t think it ever will, as it nearly seems to have got worse over the last couple of weeks. I can’t read with it and the wavy lines show no signs at all of resolving. I cannot a imagine a future in which I have to live with these wavy lines. And I still obsess with regret about not going to an optician or opthalmologist before all this happened when I had warning signs. I read about Anthea Turner having a near miss with total retinal detachment but being caught in the nick of time, and some chef called Michel Roux having two retinas detach but now he’s fine, and some Canadian ice hockey player called Matthieu Perrault having lattice degeneration and a retinal detachment but missing only 2-3 weeks (!) and a US TV newsreader called Savannah Guthrie having a retinal detachment, but she’s now fine. And they’re all fine, none of them seem nearly as serious as what I suffered. I got a letter yesterday to say that on initial examination at the Regional on September 27th, my visual acuity was “hand motion”. This is code for “blind”. I have a posterior vitreous detachment, which can cause a retinal detachment, building in my good eye. There’s around a 15-20% chance that people who suffer a retinal detachment in one eye will get it in the other eye. What is my life worth already? Little. And if it happens in the other eye, what it will be worth? Nothing.
My Mam asks me “what are you writing” about. I said “me”. She says that’s boring and that nobody wants to read about me. And she’s probably right.
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Glad to see you’re still here anyway pal. Showing a few of these posts at your next or some future counselling session or to the GP might help. Or at A&E. Would you not try go tomorrow? It couldn’t hurt. You misspelled "bed’ there at one point so clearly you’re not yourself.
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