DAY 10 - Playing Cat and Mouse with my Sanity.

The theme for today's poetry prompt is mental health as we join in the international Mental Health Day designed to give recognition to those who still face a world of misunderstanding and discrimination for what is simply another physical disease which manifests in behavioural symptoms. I have walked this path with someone dear to me. I have guided clients through their nightmares and given them techniques to self manage and live happier lives. I suffered a deep suicidal depression forty years ago and came out the other end of the darkest tunnel, never to return to it. Last year I suffered paranoid delusions for five days as a rare side effect of sepsis of the gall bladder. It gave me a deeper insight into what it feels like for your mind to be running uncontrolled scenarios. I know it from inside and out but for those who live inside it every day, I salute and love you for it takes immense courage to do so.

This poem is about a method I used with great success in psychotherapy with some of my clients, I also used it and continue to use it myself. It effectively reprograms trigger events in your life to delete and distort the long term harmful influence, It is effective for most phobias, panic attacks and PTSD. One of my own phobias was approaching junctions as I had been hit side ways on as I crossed it, I used the visualisation while in deep relaxation and when I had finished, the phobia had gone and when I tried to recover the memory, it was as thought it was very far away and not quite in reach. The memory of the shock and fear had gone. A well trained hypnotherapist will know the technique and I advise that you are guided through by a professional, not on your own.

http://www.rewindtechnique.com/


In gratitude for the Rewind Technique

I walk the convoluted pathways of your mind 
The twists and turns, leading to blind alleys
Where horrors attack playing continuous loop.

We find our way tentatively to a distant view
Where safe from the malignancy of memories
We can watch the past from a safe place. 

We can observe, alter the speed, the direction.
All the distinctive markers of those moments
That trap you in a past long gone but still present.

With your courage and trust, you are ready now
To sit with me, relax and let go into deep silence
We can delete the malign influence of the past.

You have the courage to step forward now,
To allow me to guide you, to touch your mind
I have the editing software and you the desire. 

Those fear filled memories, distorted, haunting,
Played faster and faster, forward and rewind,
You hold the power, in your hands the control. 

We clear out the cache distorting your thinking,
Creating those fears that held back your living, 
Taking the gift of finding peace with your mind.


Cat and Mouse with my Sanity

The urology consultant had requested an urgent MRI with contrast to track the path of the snake like tumour stretching from kidney to heart. This was essential to the operation planning and to determining whether I was operable at all. Suddenly the Head of Radiology at Hairmyres Hospital, the original one when I was diagnosed. was insisting that I have an intrusive CT scan called a venogram which carries some nasty risks and yet more radiation as he felt it would give them what they wanted. It seems they would do anything but give me my MRI!!!  It had now been on emergency order for over two weeks. This was on the 14th October,2009.

The knowledge of how far the cancer had travelled weighed heavy on all of us. I think the very idea that there is cancer inside your heart just feels so beyond comprehension. I cried once or twice when I was able to be on my own, a bit tricky when everyone thinks you could drop down dead at any moment. The danger with a tumour in the vena cava is that it could rupture the blood vessel and I would bleed out very fast. That was a really hard one to have rattling around in your brain along with the refrain, "Dead woman walking!"

I researched the proposed procedure and found it to be rather a risky one for someone in the very poor condition I had slipped into as the cancer pumped out its toxins and made me so very weak. I tried to speak to a consultant but no one could explain what was better about this compared with the MRI. All I wanted now was to hear from Mr. Aitchison with an appointment to discuss whether he would be able to perform the very complex surgery I required,I also wanted the scanning done before I saw him and at this rate I was going to die before that happened. 

I decided that rather than sit back and let that be the result of their slowness, I would go down fighting and keep on reminding them of the urgency, going back to my previous suggestion that you must make make then really feel you as a suffering human being with whom they can identify. I spoke to everyone I could get hold of my phone and it was exhausting, Finally, it took my threatening to go to a named person who was senior in the hospital management, to get them moving, I told the appointments supervisor that if by the end of that day, the 22nd October,I did not have my appointment confirmed, I would do just that. I was icy calm and scrupulously polite but they knew I would do as I said. I was beginning to quietly go out of my mind with anger, mistrust and fear, fully justified by my experiences of lost case files, misplaced appointment letters and urgent requests being treated as non urgent. Fifteen minutes later I got a call saying come in on Monday morning to day surgery for your scan. I cannot tell you what it cost me emotionally to do this but my life was at stake and so far no one seemed to share my opinion that it was time to get moving. 

i still had a nagging feeling about the scanning procedure so I decided to directly contact the new proposed surgeon and find out if he had my notes. I spoke with his secretary and explained exactly the condition I was in and that Mr Aitchison was my last and only hope of living, I expressed my doubts about the procedure that had been proposed/ She was amazing, the kindest and the most efficient person that I had the joy to have regular contact with all through the two plus years I remained in his care. 

She remembered the letter coming in and knew that he was trying to get hold of the referring consultant to ask him some questions. She would be back in touch with me as soon as she had spoken to him as she was expecting him out of the operating theatre shortly. Just 30 minutes later. Mr. Aitchison called and was kindness itself. He told me that as far as he was concerned, the venogram was absolutely not the right procedure and he had cancelled it. He wanted an MRI of the abdomen to the heart and he would set it up right now. True to his word the Radiology department phoned back in 15 minutes to offer me a space on Monday afternoon at Gartnavel, a Glasgow hospital where he had set up a centre of excellence in the treatment of renal cell carcinoma. 

This was the fastest anyone had moved since this whole sorry story began 17 months previously. Within 24 hours of the MRI taking place, I was called to say that the results were in and Mr. Aitchison would see me to discuss the outcome on Friday at 9.30am.

Without being melodramatic about this, I felt as though the NHS had robbed me of my best chance at living a long and productive life. I was a  youthful 57, very happily married with a wonderful 19 year old son in second year of university. I had everything to live for and because of constant delays, I faced losing it all.

Tomorrow the results and action plan.