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Nothing can prepare you for a real incurable illness quite like an imaginary one.

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Love is not rare

Love is not rare

Contributed by Ian Marchant

In early 2020 I was diagnosed with the bad kind of prostate cancer, the kind you die of, rather than with. I was told that it had metastasised into my bones, and nothing could be done except courses of hormone blockers, which might hold the lesions in my bones in check for a while, but would strip away my sexuality. I found my inner stoic agreeing with Spike Milligan, like it says on his headstone; I told you I was ill.

Prior to 2020 I am being unfair on myself if I say I did not have a real illness. It was real but some would call it hypochondria. Health anxiety disorder, they call it now. Nor, I’m certain, are doctors allowed any longer to refer to ‘problem patients’. But that’s what I was. In fact, my GP at the time was doing a PhD on the subject of problem patients, and I became ‘Patient M’. He told me this on my last visit, the one where I told him I thought I was through the worst.

When this happened though, or how long it lasted, I’m no longer entirely sure. I lived in Lancaster, I know that at least. I lost somewhere in the order of four or five years of my life to terror, utter screaming shaking nightmarish terror. A ‘real’ illness, no matter how gloomy the prognosis, simply can’t match the horror of my life in those lost years.

I remember its beginnings, 1992, maybe? I was in the car, with my second wife and two children (aged 11 and 2). We had spent a few days with some friends in West Wales, and now we were driving home to Lancaster.

We had stopped at the old Little Chef beside the A483 outside Wrexham; it’s a Starbucks now, but I never feel inclined to stop. Without warning, my arms went numb, my chest tightened, my breathing came in gasps, and my head spun. I was hollowed out by fear. I said to my wife, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack. I am, I know I am.’

She’s a nurse, and I’m not sure she was as worried as I was, but the Little Chef staff may have been, because I insisted they call 999. In the ambulance on my way to Wrexham General, the paramedics worked to calm me down. I think I was seen quite quickly; I remember an ECG printout, and a consultant being kind enough to show me my results next to those of a normal readout and talking me through the results.

‘As you can see, Mr Marchant, they map exactly on one another. It’s almost a textbook example of a normal ECG’. ‘But what was it?’ I asked. ‘Have you been playing golf?’ I had played pitch and putt with my wife and pals the day before.

‘Sometimes you get shoulder pain from playing golf; that can feel like a heart issue.’ He was very kind; we all laughed.

Then, it happened again, maybe six months later. By this time, I had split up with my second wife, and I was home alone with two kids. I had never been so terrified. I called my soon-to-be exwife; she reminded me of Wrexham, but

I didn’t believe it. This time, it was real. Did she come round? I can’t remember. Somehow, once again, I came out of it.

She told me about panic attacks, I know that. And, when I wasn’t in the grip of one, I knew that was what was happening. Then it happened three months later, then a month later, then a fortnight later, then every week, then twice every week.

I started visiting the doctor. He sent me to see a consultant, who ran the tests, and, once again, mapped my ECGs onto a normal example. My doctor didn’t think there was anything wrong with my heart. He just hoped a cardiologist could persuade me of the fact.

Then, one night, I had been somewhere – the pub, perhaps? Or the recording studio where I had been recording an album? I don’t know. What I do know was that it started again; the symptoms of a heart attack, the shaking, the terror, the numbness. I was outside a pal’s house; I knocked on the door and begged for help, and they booked me a taxi and got me home. After that, it didn’t really stop for three or four or five years. A permanent panic attack.

I visited my doctor three or four times a week, weeping, begging for help. He was helping as much as he could. He was determined to prove to me that I was wrong. I prayed, night after night, please God, don’t let me go like this. Don’t let my daughter wake up and find me dead, or gone.

This prayer was based on a previous experience as one night in 1987, my daughter had woken up and found her mother gone, and me, unexpectedly there. As, a few nights later, I had to tell her that her Mummy had died. She was seven. Her mother had collapsed and died from a brain haemorrhage.

You see, the doctor was wrong. I had a heart problem, a deep and serious one from which there was no escape. I had a broken heart.

Time, being a healer, did its work, but I really have no idea of how long it took. Three things happened to mend me. Mend me, but like a Japanese bowl which has been treated to kintsugi, the art of mending which leaves the breaks visible. I am clearly not who I once was.

My three mends; first, I took my antidepressants. Previously, I’d taken them for a month or two, grown tired of them, and stopped, plunging me back into my nightly hell. I also started taking sleeping tablets. I took them exactly as prescribed – two nights out of three, therefore, I was knocked unconscious, and one night out of three I lay awake in the dark, scared beyond belief. It is little wonder, perhaps, that I don’t like horror films; I lived in one.

Second mend – I found a therapist, in my case a Gestalt therapist. She helped me understand what had gone wrong in the far reaches of my childhood to prime me to go off like a bomb. I had childhood convulsions. From the age of 12 weeks, my parents would drop me into a bath of cold water. They were only young; they were terrified that I would die. These days, the treatment for convulsions was to loosen the baby’s clothing, and perhaps mop his head with a cool flannel. I asked my dear doctor for my records- I had been prescribed barbiturates from the age of 8 months. No one meant for me to become convinced I was about to die; it’s just that my parents were, and showed it. My mother never recovered from these episodes; I did, but not until I was in my forties.

The third mend? I discovered that I was loved, by God, and that everything was going to be OK. I hate to embarrass a secular society which no longer believes… but what can I do? God picked me up, shook me down, and let me get on with things.

I can remember the year 1999. Things started going right. After that, slowly, I could live again.

The places where I was mended will always be my weak spots; I will always feel a tickle of fear from time to time when I have indigestion or if I get breathless.

But, as I began by saying, when I was diagnosed with incurable cancer, I was prepared, somehow. Symptoms which I had noticed over a few weeks, rather than filling me with fear, prepared me for what was to come. This old pot, broken, and mended, feels ready to hold the inevitable future.

About Health Anxiety

Health anxiety, which was previously called hypochondria and sometimes hypochondriasis, is an often debilitating anxiety condition that sits within the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) spectrum of disorders

Those affected by health anxiety live with the conviction, and preoccupation that they have a serious illness, or they have the fear of developing a serious illness. The person experiencing health anxiety may fixate on any type of illness; a common example is fear they have/will get cancer.

For support visit:

About prostate cancer (from the Prostate Cancer UK website)

The prostate is a gland which sits underneath the bladder and surrounds the urethra. The prostate’s main job is to help make semen. The most common prostate problems are an enlarged prostate, prostatitis and prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer can develop when cells in the prostate start to grow in an uncontrolled way. Some prostate cancer grows too slowly to cause any problems or affect how long you live, because of this, many men with prostate cancer will never need any treatment.

But some prostate cancer grows quickly and is more likely to spread. This is more likely to cause problems and needs treatment to stop it spreading.

For support visit:

Shirt: Monument Workwear

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