The other day I was browsing Facebook and came across a disturbing post a friend had uploaded. His beautiful wife, a former teammate has been struggling with anxiety and depression and has required inpatient treatment. I felt a crushing feeling and as I thought about the journey, she had ahead I did revisit my own nervous breakdown.
I’ve always tried to find the positive in every situation and have experienced lots of soul crushing events in my life but have managed to get through. 2018 was possibly one of the most difficult of these. I was on a day off supporting my sister who was have day surgery. Received a phone call that changed my life forever. I won’t go into the phone call because my heart rate has already lifted, and I am starting to feel a bit anxious but, in a nutshell, someone had made accusations about me, and an investigation took place.
Normally organisations try to finalise things like this as quickly as possible to ensure no one involved suffers adversely. This did not happen for me. It took six months to finalise the process. Christmas occurred during this period and work had a shut down period.
Imagine working with these people every day and never being able to speak about it but to pretend nothing was going on?
Imagine spending every day with people who had accused you of things that were not true?
Imagine not knowing if this would impact your job and therefore your family?
Enter Christmas Holidays – three weeks in 2018/19 where I was able to just relax and not be forever on alert and watching everything I said and did. I had a near death experience and completely and utterly fell apart. I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Most people say your doctor is always right, but I must say in this instance she most certainly wasn’t and in fact made things worse. I went for someone who only ever takes medication for migraines when they occur to being on eight different medications. I didn’t sleep for 10 days, and my family were so worried about me they called an ambulance and admitted me to hospital.
During one of my tests, they discovered a lump in my left breast and a biopsy followed. Luckily it was malignant, and my stress test eliminated angina. Basically, I was just having a breakdown caused by a traumatic situation. I didn’t make it back to work after the break and in fact needed another 6 weeks of treatment to get there. I worked with a different doctor to get back off the medication and with a psychologist to get myself back on track. My original doctor said I couldn’t do it without medication. My Mum, who went with me to all my appointments, told her we accepted her challenge and I proved her wrong. Some people need medication. One of my sons takes it but I didn’t believe I did. I just need to come to terms with a stressful situation and rediscover myself in the process.
This is a brief summary of this difficult time but I guess you could say my midlife reset actually started in 2018…… and now that I am fully recovered we are building on that by creating new memories to overshadow the old ones.
My heart is with my friend. It’s a tough journey but one I believe she can make. Her soul sparkles and she is one of the most caring and genuine people. I wish her laughter and light.
Rachel's Midlife Reset 