by Ann Fogarty
40
BREAKTHROUGH
It was the summer of 2003-4, a year after the disastrous summer when my ongoing anxiety over the hot weather had come to a head and I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This summer would be different, I promised myself. My fears were now out in the open and I had learned several positive ways of managing them. I was living in the centre of Narre Warren next to a major highway—well away from the possibility of a bushfire—all good reasons why I’d be okay; I figured I could relax and let down my guard. The first total fire ban day would be the test.
I’d always watched the weather forecasts carefully during the summer months, partly due to my trepidation, but also so that I’d know if, or when, I could go out on any particular day. Since having my breast removed and becoming even more temperature-sensitive, I found that anything above twenty-three degrees Celsius was too hot to manage well and it was better to stay inside.
Eventually, one evening in late 2003, it was announced on the television news that the following day would be forty degrees. My stomach did its usual somersault and the familiar sense of anxiety started rising. But now I know what to do, I reassured myself. I would take one of the tablets Wes had prescribed before I went to bed to help me get a good night’s rest, then I would take another one in the morning to keep me relaxed during the hot day ahead. The drawback was I’d have even less energy than usual with the medication, but it seemed a small price to pay to have the edge taken off the anxiety.
I managed like this for two or three very hot days, an enormous improvement on the way I’d coped in previous summers, but felt there must be some other solution. The medication was helpful but surely there was a better and healthier way to handle the summer days than taking chemicals, I thought. I didn’t like the idea—in general—of depending on drugs.
‘There’s still a piece of the puzzle missing,’ I told Wes, when I next visited him. ‘I have no idea what it could be, but I’ll definitely know it when it’s in place.’
‘Perhaps you could try some hypnotherapy,’ he replied, suggesting a doctor in the same surgery who practised it.
The thought had never occurred to me, but I agreed to give it a go. My hopes rose. About a week later, I was sitting in Colin’s room, at ease with him straight away, discussing hypnotherapy which he thought could help in my case. We made an appointment to begin. I had visions of lying back on the couch gazing at a swaying watch, falling into a deep trance and waking up cured. I did lie on a couch but there was no watch. Colin spoke slowly, evenly, as I relaxed into the session. His words became sluggish, almost a drone, as he made suggestions for me to absorb. At one point, early on in the session, I began to feel physically ill and for about five minutes or so was convinced I was going to be sick. Fortunately, the feeling passed and by the end of our time I had relaxed. We agreed that I’d come the following week for another session and I set off to walk to the station to catch the train home.
The walk only took ten minutes, but in that short time I began to feel more and more tense. By the time I’d reached the station I felt dreadful, not physically, but emotionally; a huge dark cloud seemed to be pressing lower and lower, taking away the light. I had gone from peace to panic in no time at all and needed to get home and shut myself away until it passed. Perhaps some deeply buried emotions had been stirred up during the hypnotherapy session, I thought, relieved to finally arrive home. I paced around. I didn’t feel like eating. There were chores to do but I couldn’t do them. It was only after several hours that I could relax. I hope this doesn’t happen after every session, I thought.
The next week I told Colin what had occurred. I’d planned ahead and arranged to meet a friend after the second session in case I had the same response as last time. I needn’t have worried. The therapy went well and I had no trouble relaxing afterwards. This time I felt great. The doctor gave me a photocopy of the calming thoughts he was using which I practised saying to myself every day: ‘Just let it happen. It will pass in a few minutes. I mustn’t fight it…’ and so on. I would relax and say them slowly and meaningfully out loud to myself. In due course, they would pop up in my mind automatically during stressful times. I went for two more hypnotherapy sessions, each time feeling more and more in control. I wasn’t sure why it was working—all I seemed to be doing was lying on the couch while the doctor talked—but it was.
The breakthrough came with the next hot day after Christmas. The old sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I always experienced wasn’t there and I remained calm throughout the day. I still followed my management plan and took the pills, but they didn’t seem as critical. I decided to put the hypnotherapy to the test; on the next total fire ban day I’d see what happened if I didn’t take medication at all. Coincidentally, I had an appointment to see my GP on the day. I didn’t take any pills, and not only did I feel calm, but exhilarated. It was hard to believe you could get such positive results in such a short time. Wes listened with interest to my account of the results, then said, practically, ‘Well, let’s just take your blood pressure and see if you’re as calm as you feel’. I held out my arm confidently.
He smiled as he looked at the monitor, and nodded. I left the surgery that day convinced there was an answer to every problem, big and small; that perseverance could win through every time. True, it had taken me twenty-one years to find this answer, but having found it, the time didn’t matter. Knowing I had the tools in place to manage the summer months—not being captive to the whim of the weather and the fears that had loomed so large—came as a huge release. I left with a jaunty step. The breakthrough had been worth the wait.
41
RELEASE
The hypnotherapy helped with the dread of the bushfires in everyday life but undergoing some minor surgery the following winter sent me right back into the flames of that fateful day in 1983.
The procedure to remove a polyp from my uterus was a small one but from the moment the nurse at Berwick Hospital fixed the cuff of the blood pressure machine around my arm, I panicked. Without warning, I flashed back to those early months after the fires when having my blood pressure taken was such a traumatic business. My heart pounded furiously. The nurse exclaimed as she looked at the machine.
‘Your blood pressure has just shot way up’.
‘I know exactly why,’ I said, shakily. ‘I just went back twenty-one years.’
It was all I could do to endure the surgery mentally, and the night after I was released from hospital was hellish. I fell in and out of sleep seeing fireballs, people being caught in flames, people screaming.
I remained shaken for weeks afterwards. It unnerved me that I’d been making such good progress with the challenges of my life yet could be thrown back into such turmoil so unexpectedly. I pushed on as routinely as I could, but the anxiety filtered back. It was all so gradual, so insidious. I couldn’t pinpoint anything specifically wrong, nothing that I could deal with actively—just a sense that every little thing was hard work. Medical procedures, and even a visit to Wes, filled me with a near-overwhelming dread. I could barely make myself go to appointments for blood tests or mammograms.
Unexpectedly, getting into a car now became a major source of anguish. Wave after wave of panic would sweep through me just sitting in a car, any car, and outings with friends loomed as events to be dreaded. I would suddenly feel myself lying helpless in the back of a police car as the world around me burned. Dark limbs of trees dangled, edged in orange. We are going to be hit by one. I know it. I can’t sit up. I feel helpless. We’re going to be trapped in this inferno. Flames flicker and taunt on my eyelids. There is no escape...
The intrusive images dismayed me. I’d struggled for so long and overcome so much. Why was this happening now? At the same time, I was ashamed—I seemed so weak—and just wanted to retreat from the world, again. The old me had returned.
The panic attacks struck without warning. It felt as if I were a marionette; I could feel the strings jerking me but cou
ldn’t tell what was pulling them. I could be coasting along, when suddenly an event or an image, however small, would trigger a reaction. I was eating my evening meal alone one night during the spring of 2005, quite contentedly, when a fishbone stuck in my throat, lodging there. I tried to swallow it, then cough it up. I couldn’t get it to move up or down. I was choking. The panic brought on an horrific flashback of being in the Burns Unit in March 1983.
I am alone. It is long into the night. I feel the tube in my oesophagus shift. It is moving up, pushing hard against my throat. I’m choking. I’m gagging. Help me, someone come in and help me! I can’t get anyone to come in. No one knows. No one’s going to come in quickly enough to save me. I’m going to choke to death. I can’t bear it. The minutes tick on as I battle to quell my alarm. Minutes, then hours stand still. I can’t bear it. I want to be done with all this.
I coughed and strained until I managed to dislodge the fishbone and swallow it, but was so rattled afterwards that I sat in my kitchen trembling. Over the next three or four days as my throat became more sensitive, I felt as if I couldn’t swallow, that at any minute my windpipe would close up completely and block my airways. I took myself off to the doctor. Tests revealed that the fishbone had dislodged, but my throat was going into spasms which were causing the impression of choking. Wes patiently showed me his anatomy books and explained that while it felt as if my throat were closing, the air I needed to breathe was passing into my lungs normally. Rationally, it made sense, but when I got home my throat was still contracting and the alarm returned.
In the days and weeks that followed, well after my throat returned to normal, I fell deeper and deeper into anxiety. I would dream of fires and wake with a start. Nowhere seemed safe any more. I still didn’t comprehend the persistent, debilitating effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or how pervasive it was. By now I was almost unable to leave the house. Just walking across the road to buy groceries seemed like climbing Mt Everest.
On one particularly bad day, I opened and closed the front door twenty times before I could step outside. Tentatively venturing to the end of the drive, I slowly made my way the short distance to the end of the street and stood at the traffic lights for long minutes trying to make up my mind about whether I could get myself across the busy highway to the supermarket. It was the stuff of comic mime, only it wasn’t funny. After much dithering and deliberating, I crossed the road and as I entered the supermarket I prayed that I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew—I was completely beyond rational conversation. After grabbing the groceries I needed as quickly as possible, I made my way to the checkout, looking in my bag for my purse. Oh no, I’d left it at home! Fortunately, about half-way home my sense of humour kicked in and I started to laugh. This eased the tension and I was able to make the second trip more easily than the first. I decided, philosophically, that the universe had forced me into this second trip because I needed the practice!
One Saturday morning, I needed to go further afield to the big local shopping centre, about fifteen minutes’ walk away. This one was like Kilimanjaro. I planned my assault. There were two items on the itinerary: one really necessary (a lay-by), the other not so urgent (some banking). If I were in reasonable shape after attending to the first item, I’d attempt the second. The walk to the Centre became harder the further away I was from home. I looked down at the footpath and concentrated hard, trying to ignore my thumping heart. Just one step at a time, just cross one crack at a time, I willed myself. My body began trembling so much that my legs wouldn’t hold me up. I crumpled and folded down slowly where I was on the pavement, one hand supporting my body on the gritty, cold concrete. The traffic passed, oblivious to the sorry figure on the footpath. Half of me wanted someone to rescue me, the other half was mortified. I sat on the footpath shaking, until I could get myself together enough to go on.
I made it into the shopping centre and paid the lay-by instalment. Unfortunately, the bank was on another floor. The thought of having to repeat the journey in the near future spurred me on. As I made my way to the escalators I passed a little boy of perhaps three or four, crying loudly. I looked around for his mother and hoped that someone else would help him, but no one stopped. ‘Oh please don’t let me have to be the one to take care of this,’ I pleaded to myself. I waited, hovering a few feet away but no one approached him. I bent down and tried hard to smile, speaking to him as gently and evenly as I could. He stopped crying immediately, and took my hand reassured, as we walked off and at last located his concerned mother. The incident, and that little hand, comforted me momentarily, too. I finished my errands and returned home with greater ease.
The days ground on. Just getting myself out of bed in the morning was almost beyond me. On many days I’d just make it to the couch where I’d have to lie down for a while before deciding to attempt a shower or breakfast. I felt as if I’d come to the end of my resources; I just didn’t have the energy to work my way out of this desperate place.
The only way I could operate sometimes was to put myself on automatic pilot. I’d always been a neat freak, enjoying everything being ordered and in its place, but now, this became magnified. I sensed that something indescribably bad would happen if everything weren’t as perfect as possible; so I spent my limited energy obsessively straightening the house. Crazy stuff, but whenever I stopped myself from doing it, my anxiety would soar through the roof, and so I kept doing it. I’d get up in the morning, start in the kitchen and work around the rooms in an anti-clockwise direction: laundry next, bedrooms, lounge, dining-room and back to the kitchen. I didn’t like to jump rooms. When I finished, I’d think, ‘Oh, I’ll be right now for the rest of the day’. At night I’d start in the lounge-room and do it the other way around with the kitchen last.
Everything had to be symmetrical, lined up with the edge of tables or straightened up. My bed was always made very neatly, no stuffing the sheets in under the mattress in lumps; they were always tucked in with perfect hospital corners. I fussed about the cushions until they were perfect. I’d have all my herbs in alphabetical order, and my music and DVDs too. I arranged my books by author, which created a bit of a conflict sometimes because they’re different sizes. I liked to have my shoes in the cupboard with the laces neatly pushed into them, all my T-shirts together, then all my cardigans in piles, not a folded sleeve out of place. I ironed my tea towels so that they sat flat in the drawers. For some strange reason I’d have the toilet seat down until four in the afternoon then put it up.
Later, when I understood what I was doing and that this behaviour had a name—Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—I found it, and the plethora of oddball phobias that went with it, tremendously funny. In the meantime though, in 2005, it was plaguing me.
I knew I was headed for a major meltdown and I prayed for the help, when my old friends Barry and Joan visited one afternoon in late June 2006. Barry had lost his wife, Alison, and daughter, Kerry, in the fires; we’d long been bound by a shared suffering. He had married Joan ten years later. They saw immediately that I was struggling and invited me to spend a few days with them at their home in Upper Beaconsfield.
During the first couple of days I was there I slept a lot, thankful that I didn’t have to force myself to cook, clean or make dreaded trips to the shops. On the third day, Barry and Joan were busy with some workmen who had arrived to work outside. Barry lit the fire in the lounge-room, put on some soothing music and left me to a relaxing morning. I was okay with open fires as long as the smell of the smoke wasn’t too strong.
I settled into the couch. From where I was sitting I could see a photo of Kerry, taken in her school uniform. She was smiling. I gazed through huge windows at one end of the room to the bush outside. Without warning, I started sobbing. And couldn’t stop.
I wept for the people who were gone, and the person I had been. I wept for the teenage girl in Barrowford who had run like the wind and was now hobbled, and for the small frightened girl at the top of the stairs. I wept for the woman who had lo
st her marriage, her face and her home. I cried for two hours, as Barry kept coming in to check on me. Never before had I cried like that. Never before had I let anyone see the depth of sorrow that underpinned my life. But he understood what was happening—he’d been there, too.
42
CHASED BY FEARS
As the summer of 2006 approached, I decided to find a psychologist. My anxiety was rampant. I was sitting at the computer one day, when I came across an invitation by Monash University for anyone diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to apply for a place in an online counselling course. The course would span ten weeks with professional guidance provided via the internet. Bingo!
The treatment—exercises of increasing difficulty in which you’d think about anxious things and ‘reframe’ your fears—was useful and at the end of it, the online therapist recommended that I consider seeking more help. I arranged to see a nearby psychologist and was keen to get started, but it took me until the spring of 2007 to go—dealing with the anxiety was just something else to get anxious about. I needn’t have worried, though. Maureen, an open, friendly woman in her late fifties, relaxed me with her warm smile, her eyes crinkling from behind her glasses. Sitting on a comfortable velvety, blue chair in her consulting room, I began to talk about the trepidation that was with me almost every moment of any day and which ruled my life. Maureen listened empathically. She picked up on the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder within the first twenty minutes, and explained what it was. What a relief to find that the unaccountable behaviour had a name and that I wasn’t the only one who had it.
She taught me practical ways to manage the panic and anxiety while it was happening; and helped me to look at important matters that troubled me in new ways that helped to lessen their impact. She encouraged me, for instance, to stop judging myself so harshly about what had happened on the night of the fires. Although I’d saved my daughters, for years afterwards I’d grappled with the guilty belief that at the time I really wanted to save myself. That I could even have entertained that thought, convinced me I was a bad mother. Maureen introduced the idea that I didn’t have to be perfect all the time and that there are natural reactions in times of extreme danger. It’s what I did that counted, not what I thought.
