So I am sitting in my living room. In pure shock. I should probably be crying but the shock of what just happened will be stuck with me for about 3 days. I'm not sure how long I sat there, but when I eventually did get up it was just to go to the bathroom and be sick.
On Sunday (Day 1) I managed to drag myself to Tesco and buy some food, but half way round the shop I have my first panic attack. I wanted to just run out of the shop and lock myself in the car. I managed to take my trolley to the checkout and pay for what was in it, but it wasn't until I got home and unpacked that I noticed I didn't actually have enough food. That turned out not to be a problem as I still couldn't eat anything. I tried to occupy myself by watching a film and checking on facebook.
I noticed on my profile that it said I was "in a relationship with" blank. I checked her page to see what she had changed. Rather than just changing her status to single she had hidden it first so that it wouldn't show for anyone to see. Then she had posted up a status update about how pretty her hair was now that she had dyed it. I think this pushed me further into shock. Not only was she so heartless as to hide the truth about her walking out on me, but she was posting meaningless updates as if nothing had happened.
I went to work on Monday, trying to get back into my life and manage my panic by getting into as much of my routine as possible. It felt like that was working, I was a bit snappy with people at work but I got through it.
I think at some point on Tuesday I started to come out of shock. She replied to a couple of emails with some excuses about why she left. They didn't make any sense. The first couple were obvious lies, but I didn't even challenge them, I just asked to meet and discuss them face-to-face. Instead of agreeing to meet me she just kept coming back with more excuses why things weren't working, and they were getting contradictory as well as untrue.
That was the last reply I got for a week. I asked a few more times to meet and talk but she kept refusing.
At some point I might write a post and run through her reasons, I had expected to put them in here and I even included details in my pre-Day-1 post so that I could point out the lies and contradictions. For now I am going to pass over her nonsense and stick to the facts that I have.
I tried to go to training on Tuesday night but I couldn't even keep up with the slowest of the beginner group. It took me nearly 40minutes to cover 3 and a half miles and by the time I got home the tears had started. For the rest of the week I was getting by on auto-pilot at work and spent my evenings sitting at home in floods of tears.
I hardly slept, or ate, for the first week. I couldn't face going out anywhere apart from work, and even that was giving me random panic attacks. I was vomiting what little I did eat, and within the first week I dropped from 84kg to 74kg (that's a stone and a half dropped in 7 days for the non-metric amongst you).
Saturday was when it got really bad. I had survived the rest of the week by focusing on work and trying to keep my life as normal as I could, but a whole day on my own hit really hard. I had planned to go and visit my parents and I got as far as 'her' mum's house. It was on the way so I detoured to drop off some of the things she had left at my house but had refused to come round and pick up. Even though I knew she wouldn't be there and I just left the things outside the door rather than ring the bell and see her mother, that was enough to set me off on a major crying attack and even locked back in the car I had another panic attack and decided I couldn't drive to my parents and went home again instead.
Mid-morning I tried to go from the sofa to the kettle to make myself some tea and never got there. Maybe half an hour later I regained enough of my senses to realise I was curled up in a ball on the floor trying to decide on the easiest way to kill myself so that I wouldn't have to feel so bad.
By mid-afternoon on the Saturday I had been through 3, or maybe 4, of those attacks and I realised I was in real trouble. After the last one I had managed to drag myself upright and wander through to the kitchen and I was trying to decide which knife might do the cleanest job on my wrists. I stopped myself for long enough to call the NHS emergency line and spend an hour talking to a psychiatric nurse. She calmed me down enough to drive to the hospital for a proper appointment.
After two hours talking to her she told me I would have to be admitted. I refused to stay in. I don't really know why. Maybe it felt like I would be accepting the scale of things if I had to be kept in the hospital. Instead we compromised that I would take diazepam (she watched me take the first one to ensure I did) to help me sleep and I had to arrange for someone to collect me from the hospital and stay with me. I also had to start weekly appointments with a psychiatrist.
The diazepam didn't help. I didn't sleep any better that night and the Sunday was as bad as the Saturday had been. I tried to race on the Sunday morning but as soon as I got on the bike I had a panic attack and had to quit and rush home.
On the Monday morning I went to my GP and she took me off the Diazepam in favour of Buspirone and signed me off work for the week. Tuesday was first visit to the psychiatrist which I think did help. Then Tuesday night I asked a friend to contact her and try and convince her to meet me so we could talk about things. Instead of a sensible response I got a one line email about how embarrassed she was that I had involved one of our friends and that I shouldn't contact her again. That was the last I heard from her.
I struggled through Wednesday and Thursday with TV and tears and then Friday I started this blog. So that brings you pretty much right up to date with the "why". There is maybe still a blog at some point to go through the detail of her emails and point out how stupid they are, but I think I need to be in a much more vindictive mood before I go posting the contents of her emails on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment