I’m still alive. Yep, I’m still leading with that.

It’s been three weeks since I blacked out, and collapsed at home with a suspected seizure. My injuries are healed, and I am feeling better. I am still worried it will happen again. Terrified actually.

My referral to the first seizure clinic at UCH was rejected. This is a big setback. The reason is silly, they said I didn’t live in their catchment area. My GP and I chose UCH because I had been seen by their neurology department before, on what may or may not be a related issue, about a year and a half ago. So I was in their catchment area then, and I believe that continues to be true today. My referral should not have been rejected. Hey ho. I’m waiting for another referral to a different clinic. In the meantime, I had a scary-assed, probably neurologically related episode 21 days ago, and have yet to be assessed by a specialist. That seems less than ideal to me. Suboptimal even. 

I have no memory of what happened, just the events leading up to it. I woke up around 10am, and I felt a bit off. I skipped my customary morning coffee, which is unusual. I had a supermarket delivery around 11:15am, and I remember struggling to put everything away. I threw up, twice, quite violently, my stomach expelled what little was in there. I recall feeling extremely unwell, and agitated. The last thing I remember, is thinking something was seriously wrong with me, and it wasn’t a heart attack, because I had no chest pain. I sat down on my sofa, and told myself to calm down. From there, I’m blank.

The next thing I remember is being really groggy, sitting on my sofa, with a paramedic putting ECG pads on my chest. I was very confused, it seemed like a weird, vivid dream. The two paramedics, and Mrs. Hippy explained to me that I was face down on the floor when I was found, and awake, but unable to speak or get up. My partner phoned for an ambulance, and they helped me on to the sofa. The paramedics wanted to take me to hospital, but I refused. They mostly ruled out a heart attack, or a stroke, but they said I should be checked over by a doctor. I didn’t go out of fear of Covid, but from what I have learned since, it is unlikely they would have been able to diagnose the cause anyway. Even after all of that, my virus dodging ways didn’t let me down. 

I stayed on the sofa and dozed on and off for a day, questioning my partner when I could. I was lethargic, and sleepy. I had knocked quite a bit over, and broke a couple things in the living room. As I became more awake, I noticed that I was covered in injuries, literally from head to toe. Here’s a complete list:

Head – 2 scrapes, front and back. Scrape on back is bad

Tongue – back left side bitten

Shoulders – both sprained

Arms – both sprained

Elbows – both scrapped and scabbed

Knees – both scrapped and scabbed

Right knee sprained badly

Right big toe bruised, and a deep scrape

Left 2nd toe scraped, bruised, and broken.

I was a mess, but thankfully nearly all of that is healed. My right knee may have some permanent damage, but it is mostly pain free if I am careful. 

I have been a chronic depressive for many decades, but this episode has sent my depression into the stratosphere, shifted it into overdrive, and put it on steroids. All I think about is death. While I don’t think I nearly died or anything, it still feels like a near death experience. I have a massive gap in my memory. Its like I was dead, and I came back to life.

I have a security camera in my living room, a holdover from my old nightshift days. It recorded the entire incident. That makes the absence of memory even more disturbing, because there is a visual record of what happened. I get up and walk over to my desk, and I sit down at my laptop. After a short time, I fall out of the chair, and the chair goes flying across the room. I’m on the floor, on my back, floundering around. I have not timed it, but I am down there for many minutes. I don’t know if I am convulsing, but I might be. 

After a while, and still on my back, I manage to get into the middle of the room, where I roll around some more. Eventually, I manage to stand, but I am clearly very wobbly and unstable. My face looks blank, and droopy, like I am semi conscious. I stand for a moment, supporting myself against a wall, then I take a couple of steps and fall toward, flat on my face, in the opposite corner, where I manage to tug the security camera power cable, rendering the rest of the footage a bit useless. And that’s the spot where Mrs. Hippy found me.

The whole thing is surreal. I have no history of anything like this, though there is epilepsy in my family. My mother’s sister had it, and I think some of my cousins may have as well. It could also be a tumour, I guess. Whatever possibility I come up with, is depressing and scary. 

There’s a big part of me that’s ready to give up, and let go. I don’t want to deal with a new health issue, on top of my pre-existing health issues. I’m tired of it all, and bored with it too. I don’t enjoy life enjoy enough to put up with any of this shit. Why continue if every day is miserable, and bound to get worse? That’s a damn good question. 

Depression in overdrive, remember? How much of this is clear thinking, and how much of it is my depression? Depression is a vicious circle of self amplification of the desire to not exist. The more depressed I am, the more I wish to not be. How much more am I expected to endure? At what point can I quit?

Writing is therapy for me. Please keep that in mind.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a one way trip to Switzerland. If I’m going to do this, I should do it with my head held high. I have always advocated euthanasia as an option for the terminally ill. Is depression a terminal illness? What if it is combined with a handful of physical, and now potentially neurological afflictions as well? Can I still get the good euthanasia drugs? I don’t know the answer, but I am becoming increasingly tempted to find out. 

I came really close to self-euthanasia 2 years ago, but I managed to turn things around. And for what? To give up my job, and come up with a viable plan for the future, only to have a stupid pandemic come along and completely disrupt those plans. 

Then I spent a year hiding from a virus, and again, for what? To black out and collapse just as things were starting to open up again. Now, I live in constant fear I will black out again, and I still don’t know what caused it. The last couple of years have sucked for me, and spoiler alert, it seems really likely it’s going to just keep getting worse. Shouldn’t I just throw in the towel?

Life isn’t a gift, it is a curse. Whatever happiness and joy anyone experiences, it is exponentially outweighed by the overwhelming amount of suffering, pain, and loss that every living creature is forced to endure. The only way to avoid all this pain, and ultimately death, is to not be born in the first place. I wish my parents didn’t have me. I would have been happy to never exist. But a couple of people had unprotected sex back in 1962, and now I have to clean up their mess. Me, I’m their mess.

I was born 6 weeks prematurely in the early 1960s. It might not sound like much now, but back in the olden days, I was a fucking miracle baby. I spent the first month of my life in an incubator. I bet there’s a psychological impact to that, as I was probably barely touched, or held for the first 4 weeks of my tiny little life. 

I’ve had health problems since then, that are all connected to my premature birth. As a child, as a teenager, and as an adult, I have had health issues that are a direct result of not developing enough in the womb. Chances are I wasn’t viable, and I should have been allowed to die, instead of being a miracle of modern medicine. 

When I was 13, I nearly died. I had various incorrect diagnoses, before they settled on one. And then that one was proved incorrect a few years later, but it was close. I spent another month in the hospital that time. I still take medication for that issue, some 45 years later. I was born with it. No mystery, it’s called a hiatus hernia, it’s a stomach thing. It’s chronic heartburn with a physiological cause. They offered me surgery once, but they said 50/50 it would make it better or worse. I didn’t like those odds, so we settled on a daily pill. 

Whatever happened to me three weeks ago, had a profound impact on my mental state. I wasn’t in a great place before this, but I was managing to muddle ahead, and isn’t that the best many of us can do anyway? I was mostly OK. I was getting by, and getting on.  

Since the incident, and all of my existential angst has erupted like a volcano of death, and every day since my collapse just seems unnecessary. I don’t see how I can be helped, except to get to Switzerland. If I go, I will live-tweet the entire trip, from the airport to the bitter end. It will be a good story, with no possibility of a sequel. 

I’m just being honest. I literally have nothing to gain, or lose from being honest. My life feels over, only my corpse is still walking around because no one has told it to lie down. Dead man walking, isn’t that the phrase? That’s how I feel. It’s not a mid life crisis, it’s an end of life crisis.

Is this really the end of my life? Sure as shit feels like it.  Is it my depression or am I clear sighted? Why not both?

After a 30 year career as a journalist, working for some of the largest news organisations in the world, including Associated Press, and Reuters, and 15 years as an overnight duty news editor for BBC News, Doug – the northlondonhippy is now a full time writer, hippy, and drug law reform campaigner. 

Doug is also the author of “Personal Use by the northlondonhippy.”  “Personal Use” chronicles Doug’s first 35 years of drug use, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry, and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

Doug’s next book, “High Hopes” should have been published by now, but it is hard to write a book about remaining optimistic in the face of adversity, during a global pandemic. Try it yourself!

For the last year, Doug has spent most of his time hiding away from a killer virus. Bet many of you have too. 

You can find Doug –  the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy, but possibly for a limited time only.