Hi everyone, I hope you’re having a wonderful day! This is my life for the past four years.
Four years ago my father fell ill while teaching abroad in South Africa. He was flown back to the UK to receive healthcare. I shut down my company and my amazing wife agreed that we could move out of London to look after him. Collectively my wife and I gave up our careers, our friends and our city in order to look after my father.
For the first 8 months my father lived with us until he had to go to hospital with an obstruction in his bowels and we were told then that he couldn’t come home with us as we didn’t have the facilities he needed to properly look after him.
We found a nursing home for him, but he was so paranoid that he wouldn’t let the staff do much of anything for him, so I came every day, sometimes every other day. He wouldn’t even let them wash his clothes, so we would wash them at home and bring them back for him. As time passed I fell into depression looking after my father and I stopped working. Luckily the money I saved from shutting down my company and a few projects I’d done since moving out of London allowed me to focus on looking after my father.
I was my father’s sole source of comfort and happiness and I couldn’t be there with him all the time. I put so much of my empathy into appreciating how my father was feeling that I lost any sense of myself and my entire reason for living became looking after him. I began having panic attacks just outside his door before seeing him, worried about what state I would see him in that day. If it was a good day, I would be elated, if it was bad, depressed, but whenever I came home, I would be thrown into the same state of depression and anxiety about how he was doing without me there.
Over those last three years he occasionally went to hospital for some major operations. During the biggest operation, he had part of his bowel and stomach removed. When I came to see him each day he was lying on rubber sheets in a pool of his own blood, urine and faeces, hallucinating that his three other sons were also with me visiting him.
I never let him know how badly looking after him was effecting me, always slapping a smile on my face and pretending as though everything was wonderful. The nurses told me “The only time he smiles is when you’re here, you know!”, which I know was intended to make me feel better, but instead it just made me feel unbelievably anxious about how he was doing whenever I wasn’t there. At the time I told myself that going through this was fine because I would be allowed the time to recover once my father passed. However, my wife and I then became pregnant! Which was miraculous considering we were told that we would never be able to conceive naturally.
My father passed in August of 2019. At that time my wife was struggling with pre-natal depression. Our amazing son was born a month later during a horrendous labour in which my wife was left horrendously scarred by an episiotomy where the stitches came out, which led to her experiencing quite severe post-natal depression.
Our son has been the light of our lives and a true blessing. He’s so well behaved, sleeps well, eats whatever we put in front of him and is such a happy baby. However, just as everything was settling down and my wife was coming out of her depression, I finally deflated and have fallen deep into the most horrendous depression of my own.
I’ve been having regular nightmares and intrusive thoughts remembering my father at his worst in hospital and I can’t seem to get passed thinking about him. I did a course of six counselling sessions but all it did was bring all of the bad things that have happened in my life to the surface without helping me understand how to deal with them/process them. I spent the first couple of months trying to ignore it, wondering why I was grieving now, expecting myself to be feeling 100%, but I’m just now coming to terms with the fact that I’m grieving and need to accept that I’m not going to be okay for a while. This whole experience has been riddled with panic attacks and depression.
I’m 38 and every day I wake up, do 20 pushups (barely), go for a jog (a short jog and a long walk) and I’m eating better than I ever have in my life. I was expecting the exercise and eating well to miraculously fix me but understandably it hasn’t. My typical response to any kind of illness or feeling depressed is to mule kick into feeling better, but understandably this is a different process I need to go through.
I’ve lost connection with most of my friends/colleagues in the industry and getting back into work hasn’t been easy, but more importantly I need to get through this depression first.
Thank you for reading. <3