This is a podcast episode that you can listen to above, or with these links:
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Or you can read this episode as a piece of writing below:
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 8 (of 10) - Collapse and Rebirth
Subheadings:
Firstborn
Big Babies
Electricity
Cars
Sleep
CMV
Surgery
Proper Addiction
Dark Night of the Soul
Chapter 8 – Collapse and Rebirth
Lightning crashes
A new mother cries
This moment she's been waiting for
The angel opens her eyes
Pale blue coloured iris
Presents the circle
Puts the glory out to hide, hide
From the song Lightning Crashes (1994)
by Live, sung by Ed Kowalczyk
Firstborn
I was 33 years old when my wife Cate went into labour just after midnight on a Monday morning, the first day of Spring, a seasonal time of rebirth and renewal.
It was early stages of the birth process though, so she told me to go back to sleep, as she tried to do, despite having mild contractions, knowing we had a long day ahead of us. As first-time parents you are highly coiled like a spring, bags packed, ready to launch forth into action at the first signs of movement, yet somehow despite the immense anticipation, we were able to take those first few hours slow.
Watching the sunrise from a McDonalds restaurant at 6am that morning near the hospital, Cate lined up to order a hash brown whilst having contractions.
“How are you this morning?” the aloof teenage cashier asked.
“I’m having a baby, thanks.”
Like so many times in the years past, the idea of eating McDonalds was far better than actually doing it, something that flashed through Cate’s mind when she later spewed that breakfast up as her body wrenched due to intense labouring.
The birth did not go ‘to plan’. First, the hospital sent us home, my wife not being ‘in labour enough’ to warrant taking up space at the birth suites. Upon arriving back at our small townhouse, a 10 min drive from the hospital, she promptly began screaming in pain as the contractions racked her more fully, leaving us undecided about if we should rush straight back to the hospital at the risk of her being labelled not in labour enough once again. We lasted an hour, before panicking and jumping back in the car, having to pull over for each contraction on the way so she could get out of the car and stand because sitting contractions were excruciating. All this was just a mild prelude.
Our little baby boy ended up in the wrong position with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. This meant any and all pushing would drop his heartrate and put him in danger. After much confusion, and the use of a suction cap to attempt extraction that stretched his dome, risking him ending up like Dan Akroyd in the movie Coneheads, it was determined that a C section was needed to rescue him. The doctors pushed a button that triggered a siren and flashing lights and a flurry of motion – nurses swarmed and whisked Cate down the hall into the operating theatre whilst I hustled to get into the surgery scrubs they provided for me so I didn’t miss the entire episode. It seems fitting in the randomness of the human experience that for one of the most important moments of my life I should be dressed like a clown taking a shower, in a freezing cold room full of people I’ve never met and will never see again. I cannot recall any of their names or faces, having only tunnel vision for my wife and our impending son.
It was 6 and half minutes between the decision to operate (and the pressing of the emergency swarm button) and our son taking his first breath of the cold, sterile air in the bright operating room.
Finally, he was here. Edmond, our first born.
With Cate asleep and in recovery, they passed him to me, and I sat in the bustling post-surgery hall, holding him tentatively in my arms.
Those big, sky-blue eyes looked directly into my soul and cracked it open.
So here we are, like a Tarantino movie we have returned to where we started, and the first words I spoke in the prologue of this podcast season.
What sort of a man was this divine creature staring up at and needing to rely on to survive? What were the patterns in this man’s head that would inevitably and subconsciously be passed down to his son if he was unable to understand and illuminate them? What sort of a woman was his Mum? How ‘together’ were these people this teeny person had been fated to rely on? The lottery of life, the grey matter in the heads of the two people who had bumped together to create him would determine in part who he was and how he would be.
I knew in that moment, holding this most precious of bundles, that I needed to fix myself. To make all the changes that I’d previously promised to myself but never managed to achieve - to fix my diet, to stop drinking alcohol, to get off sleeping tablets, to ‘grow up’, because this person, this miniature version of me, required me to be the best person I could be to raise him. He required me to be as well as possible, not an easy equation for someone always dangling into the abyss of unwellness. Everything became very clear, simple even – bring your best self to this gigantic task of parenting and everything will work out.
Yet, I was unable to do this because I lacked one important thing.
What do you get when you cross a child raised on fear and control, with a consumer raised on advertising, a patient raised on powerful medication and its never-ending side effects, and a person who formulated a deficient sense of self whose reflex was to hide and shirk his own burdens by hijacking his nervous system with any and all available methods to escape himself?
Someone who doesn’t really like himself that much. Yet my inability to find self-love and acceptance for myself was now set on a collision course with the immense love I felt for my son.
Big Babies
When Cate and I travelled Australia, we met a grazier called David in Tasmania who produced gourmet, organic beef products. I followed one of his cows from ‘paddock to plate’, the majority of this ‘following’ occurring in the slaughterhouse where they killed the beast and stripped it down. This stripping down was completed by a large, tattooed man holding a single blade – a solitary knife was used to efficiently relieve this cow of its skin, its innards, and then it’s composite, fleshy meat parts to be packaged up and sold for food. The speed at which an entire animal, that second’s prior was very much alive and mooing, could be filleted, turned inside out and into meat products shocked me.
Driving from the slaughterhouse I spotted a herd of cattle in a pasture happily eating grass, and I could no longer see them as I once did. They were walking meat packets, literal hamburgers on legs, waiting to be carved up, cooked up and chomped down. As innocuous as this frame breaking event may seem, the way I saw animals as meat and the way I related to our consumption of them had been flipped like so many patties on a hot plate.
Much like watching a cow being eviscerated (but of a hugely greater magnitude, and not quite as gory), a breaking of my framing of the world began as I attended to our newborn for those 2 or 3 days in the hospital. The way I ‘saw’ humans from that point on was transformed. All humans, no matter their age, were framed in the light of the miracle of birth that I had just experienced, because they had all been there at their own beginnings.
We were all babies. Every one of us, as miraculous and precious as my son. Sentient, fleshy lifeforms, as confused as each other, deluded in our certainties, deserving of the monumental love that was washing over me as I carefully tucked my precious boy into the car seat we had preorganised for his first drive in a car home from hospital.
I have never driven more tentatively in my life.
The people in the cars going past on that journey were babies, oversized infants steering vehicles and swigging coffee cups and changing radio stations. There were huge newborn humans walking pet dogs and chatting to one another and laughing and listening to podcasts and music in their headphones. There were massive rectangular boxes on wheels (buses) full of giant babies all dressed up and off to their places of work for important meetings with other big babies, or heading home to meet their baby families. Infants everywhere, looking at Instagram and conversing on Twitter, all tarted up and pretending to be adults, pretending to know what they were doing.
The love I felt for my son was more monolithic than I ever understood love could be and it was rewiring me completely – and I think this is a common reaction to having kids. Nothing can prepare you for that smashing of the frame of yourself. You can't know what that responsibility feels like until it's warmly nestled in your arms, innocently staring up at you. My best guess is that parenting is supposed to sort of break you as a person, because you need to change from being a primarily self-focused animal, to a more community minded creature. And we all achieve this or not to varying degrees.
Less common perhaps was the emerging question inside me that If I was just a baby dressed up in adult body, like every human, if I was as precious and divine and lovable as my newly arrived mini-me, did I not deserve as much love as I was freely giving to my own offspring? No, a deep part of my mind said, ‘he is divine, you are a piece of shit’.
In learning how to care for another person, you can learn how to care for yourself, especially if that other person is ‘you’, or a mini version of you, your own child. They are the ‘outer child’ to your ‘inner child’. Dr Nicole LePera (aka The Holistic Psychologist) explains our ‘inner child’ as the ‘childlike part of ourselves’ that is ‘free, filled with wonder and awe, and can be accessed only when we are safely in our nervous system’. (62) I think of it as the part of you that never really grew up, the part of you that still needs to be loved and cared for and consoled, the part of you that didn’t sign up for the huge burdens of human life yet must carry them regardless. The part of you that just wants someone else to say ‘it will be ok’ and for that to be true. May be the part of you that sometimes wants to stay in bed, shades drawn, scrolling YouTube and ordering Uber Eats deliveries, avoiding the world and all its complexity - avoiding yourself.
As the weeks and months went by, I was beginning to understand that parenting is a biological wisdom delivery mechanism, but this mechanism required the parent to actually have some wisdom, and be able to pass it down. Damn it, screwed again!
Knowing how to live is intrinsic to the showing how to live (also called parenting).
I was having a scary realisation, that I would pass to my children what I was, how I was, and the knowing that ‘how I was’ was a bit of a broken piece of crap with a limited ability to make sense of the world. The only way to share with my children the wonder of life was to slap myself, sort my shit and feel it with them. Otherwise, I would be pretending, putting on a show for them, being inauthentic (that feeling that I was surrounded by for so many of my formative years)) by trying to sell the amazing parts of life to them, trying to get them to see something that I was unable to.
This is partly the realisation that whilst you’re a parent and raising your kids, you need to be a parent in some ways to yourself – more than ever – because your kids really need you to be looking after yourself.
I was about to undergo a series of unfortunate events, each frame breakers in their own way, helping me to illuminate some yet unforeseen part of reality that was previously hidden, grinding down the residual patterns of thought and ego that I desperately clung to even as everything changed around me.
These happenings were like a simulacrum of the many decades of my life battling my health and my skin, simply condensed into a short period. I was a pinball, bouncing from one thing to the next, disorientated. A passenger on a boat looking out at the wake of my life receeding rather than setting the course or steering in any direction. The only response available to this series of overlapping, dizzying experiences was total collapse - physical and mental.
Electricity
One afternoon I was hanging up some washing and thinking about Scott, my friend who had died in Japan, as I so frequently did. As sunlight filtered down through the leaves on the giant Jacaranda tree in our small courtyard, I was struck by the fleeting nature of human life, how much I missed him, how precious it all is, and how it makes no sense that he is gone and that at any moment it could all be over for anyone, less than a blink of cosmic consciousness.
I then walked into my townhouse and came as close to dying as I ever had before.
I was placing a wireless energy meter over a shielded electrical cable next to my circuit breaker switchboard so I could monitor how much electricity we were using and, you know, do my bit to prevent our planet from becoming a lifeless, carbon-engulfed hellhole. I had turned off the power to my unit and was carefully placing the alligator clips over the wire, which I wrongly assumed to be not live, unaware that there were central circuit breakers located elsewhere on the townhouse grounds that would need to be switched off to safely complete this simple 1 minute task.
When I touched the live wire with the alligator clip, I created a circuit that ran from my right hand, around my arms passing through my chest and out through my left hand.
I was immediately and viciously attacked by an animal. This invisible, nightmarish creature of immense power seized me, taking control of my hands and closing them around the cable so I couldn’t let go, couldn’t get away. No escape from this surging beast.
I then heard some fake, cartoonish screaming from the corner of the room, as if Bugs Bunny, that rascally rabbit, had set a trap for Elma Fudd by electrifying a doorknob and poor old Elma had touched it and was shouting “Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay “ with lips undulating and hair standing on end.
My brain chugged slowly. The space-time continuum became sluggish, somehow aware that I was having a unique moment and assisted proceedings by slowing the cosmic temporal engines so I stood a chance against the unfairly powered fiend that was mauling me.
Then, 4 very distinct and clear thoughts arose in my head:
1. What’s happening?
2. I’m being ELECTROCUTED
3. That odd screaming is coming from me
4. I’m going to die now
Finally, I could take some action! Let there be no more motivating thought to arise in the human brain to trigger our sympathetic fight or flight system than “I’m going to die now.”, because to have that thought, you have to be very much alive (even if it’s not clear for how much longer).
Systems activated. Adrenaline surged. Cortisol pulsed.
Throwing myself backwards with the full force of my electrified muscles, I arched my back and flew through the air like an Olympic backstroker launching themselves off a starting wall. For a part of the distance during my elegant diving move the entire switchboard came with me, still clinging to my fingers via the power of the animal. Once it reached its maximum extent however, it disconnected from me and finally, mid-air, I was separated from my attacker and left to finish my graceful flight solo and unencumbered.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we will be able to replay everything that happens to us via some sort of personal video log recorded by our own private drones always hovering near us. If that future was now, I would be able to turn my gracious reverse swan dive into a slow-motion GIF and sell it as NFT digital art on the internet for millions. In the absence of any recording of my epic Wright Brothers flight, we shall have to be content in knowing that I hung in the air like a condor gracefully riding the surge of thermals up a mountain pass.
I didn’t feel myself hit the ground. Jumping straight back up, profanities flowing from my mouth like wine from a decanter, my heart rate surged as I sprang around our townhouse like a meth freak after a big hit. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I passed and it wasn’t me that I saw, it was an amalgamation of me and ‘the animal that lurks in the walls’, the electricity in my eyes flashing before me.
The electricity in my veins had a half-life measured in days, it seemed to take weeks for it to seep out of my body.
The lesson from this frame break was how easy it seemed to be to extinguish one’s own life with one’s own stupidity.
What kept me awake each night for the next 2 weeks was not the memory of the force of the God of Lightning coursing through my chest, nor the fear of not being alive any longer – if I wasn’t alive then I would have no concerns, but I very much was alive and having serious concerns. I would run through the events of what happened leading right up to getting zapped in my mind. Then the image that would haunt me was of my pregnant wife arriving home that afternoon and finding me dangling from our switchboard still locked in an argument with my electric interlocuter. Even worse was picturing her rushing to help me, as she no doubt would have, and getting electrocuted herself. Of course, none of these things happened, but what if. This is something the brain does – it gets stuck, looping the worst things that happen to us, and then taking it further by extrapolating imagined futures that don’t, and never will, exist.
After two weeks of cold sweats at bedtime I went to see my psychologist and told her my conundrum, of the repeating story that was disturbing me and the haunting of the ‘imagined tragedy’. She asked me to tell her the story, so I did, stopping at the part where I electrocuted myself by explaining how I could have died and how my son would have grown up learning his father was a doofus for trying to save money on an electrician.
She said to me “You’re forgetting the most important part of the story”.
“Which part?” I queried.
“The part where you survived and are fine. Tell yourself the rest of the story, the part where it could have been bad but it wasn’t really in the end. You’ve learnt a lesson and you’re still here and your life continues pretty much exactly as it was”.
But, I thought, I have negativity bias! I am merely human after all! I can only focus on the extremely negative part, the part where I transform into a piece of crispy Kentucky fried chicken dangling from the cupboard! And even though this part didn’t happen, that doesn’t stop my biased mind from looping it like a record stuck in a groove of doom.
She was right though. It really was that simple. When I found myself inexplicably recounting the story of the day I was a moron and messed around with electrical shit that I shouldn’t have, once I got to the horrible bit I simply kept going and told myself the bit where it all worked out and even ended up being pretty funny. 2 or 3 nights later I was back to my usual level of insomnia, no longer haunted by the version of me that died and didn’t get to meet my first-born son. (Apologies to that Nick if his ghost is out there in the multiverse somewhere – I will never do anything electrical nor try to save the world from global warming ever again. *drives off in diesel powered car).
Cars
My next frame breaker was a few months after our son was born when I took my first, tentative steps outside our ‘cocoon home’.
We had been living in a time-warp sleep-deprived love-bubble as we figured out the best way to keep this tiny human not just alive, but well fed and well rested (a herculean task). Considering eating and sleeping and crapping is pretty much all a baby must do, our first son made these tasks remarkably complex, not least of all because he was unable to breastfeed, despite gargantuan efforts from my wife, because of an inherited overbite and a jaw recess issue created by his traumatic birth and the suction cap they used to attempt his extraction. Of course, we didn’t diagnose and understand these things for years, stuck in our limited frame, battling away as best we could.
Nevertheless, the time arrived for me to venture out into the world to see some friends lest they forget what I looked like (I looked like a half-starved, messy pony-tailed nomadic panda bear courtesy of the enlarged, dark circles under my sunken, lifeless eyes). It was a Saturday night and I skipped 5 minutes down the road in our VW campervan to visit a friend’s house for an hour to have a yarn - there were a few beers being consumed, but I was going sober that night, a rare change for me - I didn’t want to leave my wife and baby at home for too long. Tentative steps. My body and my identity were being rewired by the new person in my life, so there was a semi-urgent sense of keeping things as simple as possible – it was good to get out and reconnect with some mates after so many months of nesting, but I’d had enough by about 8pm (complete rager), said my goodbyes and started down the hallway to the front door.
Halfway there I paused, turned back and said a final “Let’s catch up in so and so a time and so and so a place in the future” etc which was met with much nodding and agreeing from everyone about this non-specific future catch up. Turning back to start my journey to my van once again, an almighty metallic tearing sound split the night sending shockwaves of crunching glass and shredding plastic bouncing through the atmosphere. Everyone surged with adrenaline, leapt up and bolted down the hall and out onto the street.
An incredibly drunk man had been driving his shiny red Ford XR6 down the narrow road when he slammed into the back righthand corner of my parked VW camper, shearing off his entire left-hand wheel and suspension assembly and sending it bulleting down the street where it finally settled 80 meters away. His vehicle, now unable to steer, had careened ahead, scraping along and then across the front of my van, then crashed into the back of the parked car in front of my vehicle some 10 meters down the way.
We arrived out to the street to be greeted by a chaotic scene; people staggering out of the surrounding houses in shock, his car an instant write off, haemorrhaging fluids all over the dark asphalt. The man got out of his car and was also haemorrhaging red fluids from his face, despite the airbag being deployed. He began to scream and yell and demand someone give him a phone. He was a large bloke, and everyone’s hackles were up with that thick, bristly tension that activates your nervous system’s fight or flight. No one was particularly keen to offer this bloodied man their phone. Tow trucks and ambulances and police were there within moments. We heard later that he refused to be breath tested.
actual photo of Red XR6 of doom taken by me (2014)
I looked at my written off van and the way his car had swept uncontrollably across the front moments earlier. Then, it (metaphorically) hit me. I abruptly knew, was absolutely 100% certain, that I would’ve been standing exactly in the location that his car ended up if I had walked out the door on my first attempt, before I paused and said my one final goodbye. The timing was ‘perfect’, and the position was chilling - I would have waited on the road for his car to pass before stepping out and up to my driver’s side door. His car would have chopped my legs off and wedged me between his and my friend’s car, or the impact would have knocked me down with his car travelling over the top of me. Of course, it’s theoretically possible that I may have jumped back in time when the initial impact and sound occurred at the rear of my van, but these were not the thoughts pulsating though my brain at the time. It was another “I came quite close to dying just now” moment, the first since my son had been born on my first hesitant steps into the big bad world since everything had changed. With my jangled nervous system floating 3 feet above my body, I got a lift home with a friend after calling my wife to say “honey, there’s been an incident” followed rapidly by “BUT I’M COMPLETELY FINE”.
Cate and I sat up most of the night talking about life and our baby boy, and I spent more time than normal gazing at our precious sleeping bundle, trying in vain to dissipate the adrenaline from my system so I could finally shut down and get some rest.
It was a timely reminder of the varied states of consciousness that people are in at any time, and that these people may find themselves unconsciously getting into a large metal and glass box on wheels and attempting to navigate it and themselves through a 3-dimensional space that is coming at them a lot faster than their impaired brains can process, sometimes resulting in loud bangs and blood and carnage.
And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I, I am feeling a little peculiar.
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
What's going on?
From the song What's Up (1992)
by 4 Non Blondes and sung by Linda Perry
Sleep
I’ve never slept well. My body compensates for that by requiring me to sleep for longer than an average person. The compensation doesn’t quite work though, because there seems to be an inverse correlation point where if you’re horizontal for too long you wake more groggy and disorientated. Learning this is like learning that if you brush your teeth too vigorously, you can harm your gums. “What? I thought I was doing the right thing, or simply more of the right thing?”. More sleep does not equal better rest.
The stupid Earth takes exactly 24 hours to rotate so I was essentially playing time shift each night, which is akin to attempting to pay back a perpetual sleep debt yet having to borrow heavily just to cover the interest payments.
Having a baby changed all that, for the worse of course. To my wife’s absolute credit, she took on the majority of the night-time disrupted sleep burdens knowing that they would destroy me and that she needed me to be ‘on’ during the day.
I used to walk my son each day in a baby carrier to get him to sleep, and then after his final feed at night I used to come in and rock him to sleep (this is referred to as ‘The Finisher’, a super hero type role whose only job is to get that baby to sleep so you can collapse on the couch and wonder how the hell you are going to do this for another day, let alone another year). We didn’t know what we were doing, we locked in unsustainable patterns of behaviour to get our little bloke to sleep – the nightly rocking and the twice daily walking and eventually the driving him around in the car listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was insanity, and we were completely fried. The long hot afternoons of that first summer were like excruciating hallucinations. Any understanding that the world was made of solid, physical matter disintegrated, the insides of our little townhouse becoming an undulating mirage seen through red, watery eyes processed through delirious minds.
My wife poured boiling hot water all over her hand instead of into a teacup one morning. I made and consumed an entire ham and salad sandwich only to find out later the ham was raw bacon. We were happy and in love, but the new parent struggle was real. In our minds we thought we were normal people, intelligent even, but the trial of new parenthood was exposing things about ourselves that we loathed to discover.
In Cate’s case, her anxiety about her value as a person and her ability to make the correct decisions as a mother began to slowly strangle her. She battled for months attempting to breast feed our son, holding ever tighter to the stories about how she ‘should’ be as a parent. The thoughts arriving in her head, the obsessive and negative self-talk that she was getting it wrong, failing, became relentless.
Whilst Cate was struggling mentally with the primary carer role and the inability to breast feed, and I was navigating my own calamitous and faltering body, it became harder for us to ‘see’ each other. Her OCD began to bloom unbeknownst to both of us, the exhaustion of tending to a newborn was amplifying all her unhelpful stories about how she felt faulty, deficient, unlovable.
We began to lose each other in the darkness of our own personal states. This was despite physically inhabiting the same home, and putting our minds to the same task, and still existing in a loving marriage. It was like a thin curtain had been placed between us, and its opaqueness was increasing the more our own personal struggles increased.
Then, I caught CMV.
CMV
For the longest time, even back to my teenage years, I used to wonder about ‘if and when’ I would have children and what it might be like. The immediate anxiety that would tighten my throat was the potential for passing on a faulty immune system.
Eczema is a genetic condition, my Mum had it briefly for a few years when she was little. To young Nick coming up in the world, battling his reactive body, the thought of inflicting this on another person was completely inhumane, and despite a deeply held desire to have children, I was anxious about it for quite some time. When my wife arrived at a place where she was keen to have children, I was still years away in my head because I hadn’t processed what it would be like to have a sick child – also because I’m a man and men think they have longer to get married / have kids than women do. We talked about it a lot, and in the end, I decided that if I let this fear control me, I would stand to lose a lot of good in my life, not least of all my relationship with my fabulous wife!
To be brutally honest, for the longest time I figured I was most likely infertile - just another mind made hypochondria story I'd mentally chew on in fear of all the health problems I’d had over the years. The story was another protective mechanism – “I won’t be surprised If I can’t have children”, as if not being surprised would mean that truth wouldn’t still be difficult to accept. With the universe happy to show me once more how little I knew and how ridiculous the stories we punish ourselves with are, we conceived instantly.
Our son arrived and was like an Adonis. On the outside that meant he was tall, lean, muscly, blue eyes with wispy fair hair. On the inside, he was built the same, with a seemingly bullet-proof immune system. He barely ever got sick and would shake illnesses super easily. He was a sight to behold, I was in awe and immediately put my fears of my ‘chronic health genetic pass-the-parcel’ to rest.
Once again, I had it all wrong.
It never crossed my mind, not for a single moment, that it may not be good for my health to have children. This seems so stupidly obvious in hindsight, but like most things, until you’ve lived the lesson, you can’t learn it (let alone conceive of it, pun intended). Also, remember, I was a master at ignoring my own needs, this is a life long thing that I was very talented at.
When at 4 or 5 months old our son caught CMV, or cytomegalovirus, which is a type of virus that most people will catch eventually and presents like a cold or flu, we didn’t even notice. He didn’t really have any significant symptoms. CMV is a very common virus, yet it can have very bad health effects for some people, especially pregnant women, and their foetuses. Also, as it turns out, it can knock the crap out of a tired, skinny, immune-compromised dad who was flat out not poisoning himself with raw meat or getting mowed down by drunk drivers.
Cytomegalovirus hit me like a shinkansen bullet train. I was so nauseous that I couldn’t look at my laptop screen for more than a minute, I could barely work and couldn’t chill out and watch TV or gawk at my phone for hours (a favourite pastime of every new parent in the world since 2009). It was 2 months of vertigo, dizziness, and nausea, like a constant sumo slap of disorientating, head-spinning delirium.
Like many viruses there is no treatment for CMV, your body needs to mount an immune response, overpower the virus and then you become effectively immune from catching it again. Of course, this took a lot longer for my body than the normal 1-3 days for everyone else given my depleted state. I would look at my 5-month-old boy, and marvel at how easily his tiny body has dispensed with the exact same virus that was running rampant in mine.
His body was incredible. (And in my head, mine was disgusting, incapable)
It was wild to know that I was raising a little immune system with a boy attached, and each time he got sick it was like he tucked that experience away inside and it helped him grow, made him stronger.
Back in the 80s, a maternity nurse cheekily told my mother-in-law (when she had given birth to my future wife)
“Dont worry, they (babies) are actually really hard to kill.”
Oh, the relief to be found in those words! Babies are precious, but that doesn't mean they are delicate (they can be). As they navigate a world of sickness, they will often appear weaker, right at the moment that they are getting stronger. The paradox of expanding, right at the moment of contraction.
Back in the CMV infused 2010’s, I was declining in every way, contracting, becoming fainter. I felt like a shell, the discarded carapace of a cicada, shed and left on the underside of a leaf whilst the green, renewed body from inside had moved on to a better life.
Eventually, I required a long stay in hospital were the doctors helpfully outlined how the virus had attacked my stomach, kidneys, and spleen.
Hospital is its own kind of necessary hellscape, an altered state of consciousness that absorbs you into its beige walls and regimented meals and eye piercing fluorescent lights and strong medications and un-sleep-able beds and constant, exhausting interruptions. Once you have been asked your name, your date of birth and what you’re allergic to for the 3 hundredth time, the words, as well as your understanding of reality, lose all meaning.
You become a sybiote with an IV machine – a tall, metal contraption that becomes your illness comrade. You cannot change your shirt because you have a canular in your arm for delivery of fluids or meds. You must take the machine with you to the bathroom, rolling it awkwardly around on its gangly shopping trolley wheels to the toilet or hiding it behind the shower curtain as you inelegantly wash yourself. You must unplug it to walk anywhere, but don't worry, it has a built-in battery, so it can come with you! It beeps at you when it is cross, waking you constantly by tripping alarms when fluids are finished, or if your blood is travelling up the canular line when it shouldn't - which happens often.
Eventually, my body got its act together, mounted that all important ‘response’ (with much assistance from steroids and antibiotics and fluid drips and repeating my name and date of birth over and over) and I was able to leave the hospital and head home to my exhausted wife and baby boy.
Almost immediately once home and resting, I started to feel a sharp pain stabbing down my right leg.
Surgery
I’m a nearly 6 foot fellow, and at this point I weighed 50 kgs, doing my best impression of Gollum – wispy hair, bulging eyes, rake thin and fading. In this diminishing state I’d often also have uncontrollable Gollum-like conversations in my head:
“You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you!” *Covers ears. “Not listening”. (67)
This new earth-shattering pain cascading down my sciatic nerve was like nothing I had experienced. Silent, thunder-less lightning bolts of electric pain crackling down my right side, sudden bursts of shock if I stood up or sat the wrong way.
Pain of this sort just brings you closer and closer to the ground, until you find yourself lying there unable to raise yourself up. The Oxycontin they prescribed had a similar effect – you simply wish to melt into the floor and remain there wrapped in heavy, floaty bliss.
I was still recovering from CMV when they booked in an emergency microdiscectomy to fix my back because the pain was intolerable. I had a crushed a disc in my lower spine, most likely from my rocking moves as ‘The Finisher’, or simply from walking with Eddie on my front whilst my depleting muscles struggled to hold my vertebrae apart. Or simply from living with an asymmetrical Schwarzenegger / De Vito body. Who knows exactly why? All I knew - disc was crushed, pain was triggered.
Invasive surgery is a frame breaking experience too. Immediately after the surgery I was flooded with an immense gratitude for the many good people who assisted in the operation, the nurses and doctors who were caring for me, and the systems and strictures of hospitals and all their regimented administration – the marvel of human organisation and expertise! Indescribably appreciative!
Then the drugs start wearing off.
I was stuck in a room, sweating and uncomfortable, flirting with withdrawal as my body slowly reminded me what has just occurred. Someone had been fiddling inside me. With a knife. They have cut things; they have severed nerves, and whilst fixing, they have also created damage. The pain seeps back, with compounding interest. Like a barrel of bricks placed slowly on your midsection, the full transfer of weight lands on you and you become crushed.
This sort of insufferable, post-surgery pain is best mediated with face melting and addictive pain medication – which the doctors are happy to give you! Another miracle! Thanks, Sacklers! Here is a small white pill, made of heroin, and it will take you away from your inflamed and upset body, uncoupling your ‘self-carriage’ from your angry ‘body carriage’ so it can continue forth along the train tracks of time. What I had always wanted!
Fortunately, I retained a small section of brain cells in my grey matter that knew that heavy pain relief meds were addictive, and that there was an opioid addiction crisis occurring in the U.S, thanks in part to Purdue (owned by the Sackler family) and their unscrupulous pushing of opioids into the hands of every doctor in America. I did not want or need an opioid addiction crisis occurring in Nick Gilpin too, so I took it slow. No opioid dependency for me – take that limited amount of will power!
That’s why I got blindsided by another medicine I was also prescribed post-surgery called Lyrica, or Pregabalin, which is a nerve system suppressant given to patients after surgery to lower their nerve system reactivity and decrease pain.
Uh oh, a suppressant. I was screwed.
Hello, Hello, whats going through your head,
Hell there boy better get it read…
You used to be so real
And all of your love everybody did feel
But now your turning into a fake
And all our hearts yeah you do break
Cause all those drugs that you do take
One big asshole of you it does make
From the song Hello (2004)
by the John Butler Trio
Proper Addiction
Like alcohol consumption, when you suppress your entire nervous system, it can reduce pain, but it also reduces anxiety and stress, and makes you feel sleepy and calm, floaty and content. It reduces your ‘nerves’. Lovely! In fact, Lyrica is used to treat obsessive compulsive disorder and psychosomatic anxiety symptoms, amongst other things. I didn’t understand any of this at the time, but I had unwittingly found the perfect drug for me – it helped me sleep, it calmed me, it reduced my back pain, it basically made me feel drunk without the side effects of drinking alcohol. And it was prescribed to me by a doctor who said here, take this.
Researching Lyrica a few years later as I attempted to taper off this medicine, I read stories on the internet of the horrendous withdrawal that can occur when you stop taking it. I had been taking it for years by that point, wedging myself into a situation where I couldn’t sleep without it (physical dependence), and couldn’t leave the house for work or social catch ups without the safety of having some on hand if I felt anxious or stressed (mental dependence). I have never slept as well in my 4 decades of life as I did for that year or two when I was scoffing Lyrica. My nervous system would be enveloped in a fluffy white cloud of suppression, caressed to sleep by the soft, loving hands of the Care Bears that lived in the clouds like back in my youth.
I was a very high functioning addict – I could work, parent, make decisions, communicate, and do all the normal things, in many ways for a time I was paradoxically a ‘better’ person. Yet I was reaching daily for this powder to sooth my angry nervous system, to modulate my state, to carry me forth into the future on a wave a disconnected drunken dizziness. Without it, the way that I was felt was unbearable, so the solution I employed was to modulate myself to escape my reality. I do believe people do this all the time – shopping, sex, drugs, TV binges, food consumption – we re all trying to cope in some ways. I had turned myself into the snake eating its own tail, like the ancient symbol ouroboros, although that symbol represents unity and the natural cycles of rebirth and renewal, whereas I was simply devouring myself.
Weening myself off this drug was one of the most horrid ongoing bodily experiences of my life, and that’s saying a lot for a guy whose body often flagellates like a frenzied flag flapping in the hurricane winds of life. The cascading physical anxiety rolled forth into the future, building energy like a giant wave that would crash hourly over my entire body. My nervous system felt like it was being electrocuted again and again. As I slowly removed this drug from my system, the shock I found when my nervous system ‘bounced back’ to a new normal was agonizing, like being torn apart from the inside.
I was so confused, and constantly asked myself:
“How did this happen to me? This happens to other people, lesser people, people not in control of themselves, not to me! I'm a father now too. Time to grow up, dickhead! I thought I would be different by now, I thought I could handle this (life, that is).”
Battling a drug, going through withdrawal, relapsing then attempting to taper off again, all the stages of drug dependence playing out over my life, I couldn’t believe it. I was a sweaty, angry mess of a man for months as I walked the excruciating path down the other side of the Lyrica mountain, battling my own personal moloch of anxiety.
It's difficult to explain the deep sense of failure I felt during these months and years as I battled to clean myself up. I was a great dad to my young son, and I was always supportive of my amazing wife, but I was abusing my body and I didn’t really understand why or how to stop. I felt 100% culpable for my actions in allowing this drug, as well as alcohol, to have the grip on me that they did.
It felt like a purely moral failing.
The sense that my lack of will power, my weaknesses, were causing my life and health to further unravel created a self-fulfilling prophecy – I felt like I was ruining my life, and that feeling made me actually do that thing.
And in my waiting hand I will land
And roll out of my skin
And in your final hours I will stand
Ready to begin
Ready to begin
Ready to begin
Nail in my head from my creator
You gave me life, now show me how to live
Show me how to live.
From the song Show Me How To Live (2002)
by Audioslave, sung by Chris Cornell
Dark Night of the Soul
This was a period of barely surviving.
I was staggering through my blurry life seeking clarity but finding incoherence, the fuzzy edges of my pickled brain struggling to make sense of its predicament, of parenting my new son as best I could, whilst dishonouring myself in many ways, digging and re-digging the trenches of my youth-derived coping mechanisms deeper and deeper.
Unsurprisingly, my body entered a prolonged state of collapse. The energy required to care for my son and to manage my health whilst drinking and taking sleeping tablets and pain medication was unsustainable. I would catch a cold and it would last months, the duress of my immune system causing chronic inflammation everywhere. I would wake in immense pain, my leg muscles so cramped from dehydration that I could barely walk for the first few hours of the day.
Eventually I found myself catching a cold that lasted 3 months and I ended up contracting walking pneumonia. I quickly found myself in the respiratory ward of the same hospital, being attended to by the same health staff as I had the year before when I was in the exact same situation with my lungs.
In that room I felt like I was dying.
The truth was most likely that I was a fair way from actually dying. The ‘truth’ wasn’t necessarily correlated with how I felt, which was that I had reached my own existential nadir, my apocalypse.
I was going to cark it, alone, in a cold white room in a building a long way from my wife and child, repeating my name and date of birth over and over. As an oxygen breathing creature, not being able to absorb oxygen through my inflamed lungs was enough of an indicator that things were not going well. Struggling to breath, puffed up on steroids and inflammation, after a week of hospital and no less than 5 courses of antibiotics, I felt something let go inside myself.
The weight of my ego, the stories I was running about who I was and how I might get out of this predicament, the constantly running lines of code looking for some action, some decision to take to escape my ill health, the anxious search for certainty, for control, and the desperate holding on to a version of myself who could live pain free and have easy access to oxygen (shock horror) and a balanced immune system, collapsed spectacularly.
It was a feeling of mentally 'giving way', a spontaneous 'letting go' but one that wasn't enacted by conscious choice but enforced by necessity.
I exhaustedly handed over my body to the full care of complete strangers, to meet its needs and to tend to it, to measure it and medicate it, this blobby lump of flesh and bone that was barely reaching for the future. This handing over was a symptom of my letting go, not a cause. I was wholly unable to help these kind strangers care for my own body, my mind so starved of oxygen and delirious from so many months (or was that years?) of struggle to hold up the weight of it's me-ness that It could offer no assistance.
It was a complete collapse into the acceptance of my predicament, whilst paradoxically holding the deep uncertainty contained within. It was a classic ‘dark night of the soul’ moment.
For the first time, perhaps ever, there was no 'Nick' to filter my experience through, no ego to rationalise or fantasise or proselytise. In some ways it was the exact opposite of a paranoid experience. I was in a situation my ego could not process, could not deal with, could not project on to. It was crushed out of my body completely; it had no control. The illusion that it ever had any control was revealed. It was like a sort of ‘flow state’, like musicians or athletes get into when they aren’t thinking, just being, only unlike them I wasn’t being masterful at anything. Unless you count being a bloated and delirious carcass as a skill.
Alan Watts speaks to the wisdom that emerges when we give up resisting our feelings, and instead adapt to them like flowing water does over contoured ground. I believe that same idea can be applied to chronic heath. He also speaks to collapse, and when life 'compels us at last to give in' and surrender to 'the terror of the unknown', our suppressed feelings then morph into 'a fountain of the purest joy' and an 'ecstatic sense of freedom'. (66) This is the best explanation that I can find of what it felt like to have the burden of my own warring mind lifted from me as I faced death in that hospital room.
Death always seems sufficiently far away that we can put it out of our minds and continue on, disregarding and ignoring, even if it is secretly hiding there influencing and terrorising us. When it arrives right in front of you, there is no escape, and it can transform your understanding of life.
Sitting in the gigantic discomfort of my body for the first time, I had to finally accept. It was a reconvening of 2 parts of myself that had long since made adversaries of one another – my body and my mind.
Then the strangest thing happened. The acceptance morphed into trust. It's not a big leap between these two states. The acceptance of my body and whatever state it happened to be in was a new sensation for me, brought about by collapse of my egoic stories about it, and this acceptance was a placeholder for an emerging trust in knowing myself that I had never felt before.
I knew I would be ok. I knew that I could get out of this. I knew that a 6th course of antibiotics was not going to do the job (unsurprisingly), that the hospital had helped me heal in ways that couldn't be quantified by the effects of medicine and the measuring of temperatures and the taking of bloodwork. That in some way, if I followed the lead of healing my mind – where all of these ego-death sensations were emerging and attempting to be noticed, that my body would follow. This ‘knowing’ was inexplicable, unchosen, emergent, and confusing.
Wanting to wish away my diseases for so many decades meant I was wanting to deny and wish away a part of myself. It was a part that created pain, suffering and isolation, a confusing and horrid part of my reality that didn't seem to have any benefits, so it was natural to want it gone. The wishing away created in my mind a split, an unwillingness to accept or even acknowledge. All I wanted for the longest time was for these burdens to be gone, so I escaped myself. I wanted to be 'away’; my own personhood shrouded in disgust.
I'd lived my whole live in the panic of the instinct to survive, activated by fight or flight, burning up my limited cortisol, when the simple answer I required was to face the terror of my own destruction. Easy!
The biggest thing to emerge from this experience was another whole person, our second son, Walter. My wife and I had always desired to have two children, yet we were so scared and depleted and crushed by our dysfunctional reactions to our first angel boy’s arrival, we did not think it was going to be possible to do this process again. In hospital, as I grappled with the immense idea of having to raise another divine creature with my depleted body and mind, an ultimate epiphany occurred –
“In this moment, probably for the first time, I accept I get sick. And it is hard. But things are hard anyway. You do not want this ‘thing’ - these illnesses - to prevent you from (at least the attempt of) making a brother or sister for your firstborn. That prevention and its regret would be worse than the challenge of having two 2 children.” These clarifying words, floating through my otherwise delirious head constituted the first time I was more fully able to accept myself as an adult person.
I walked out of that hospital and towards my greatest fears as fast as I could (another child to care for!), somehow knowing that some information about how to be a better person and live a better life was being hidden from me by my own dysfunctional mind.
And I was right.
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Thanks for reading episode 8 / 10.
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Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
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Vids, Links and References
Click below for the page of all the links, clips and references for this episode, including a link to the Shedding Skin Spotify Playlist that has all the songs that I quote and reference in this podcast.
S1 Ep08 - Confessions of an Itchoholic