Going to war

I have always considered myself a writer.  Since my teens I have enjoyed being able to express myself by putting pen to paper although I was never able to do with any regularity.  Something about committing to sitting down and writing about the same subject week in and week out seemed daunting.

It wasn't until I hit a brick wall with my anxiety that I decided it would be time for me to start putting pen to paper.  Mainly because I was getting tired of having all these things happening to me while I was at sea, the recurring thought was FUCK, I'M GOING TO DIE.

This is a perfectly reasonable response the first time your heart is bouncing around your rib cage like a brick in a clothes dryer.  But after the third or fourth time it happens and you don't die you start to get scared on a whole different level. Scared that your not going to die.... Yet.  Its a bit like playing Russian roulette by yourself.  Every pull of the trigger brings you one click closer to the chamber with the bullet.   It is going to get you eventually.  Because the doctors have told you its "unlikely" that anything is wrong,  not that nothing is wrong.  So there is always that little pestering niggling voice in your head when your heart starts banging away and you feel hot and tingly that maybe, just maybe this is it.  This is the one with the bullet in it.. "click" goes the hammer, and nothing happens. the time when something really is wrong and what do ya know?  FUCK, I'M GOING TO DIE. comes screaming back out of the recesses of your mind.

What defenses do you have when this happens ? Try and convince yourself otherwise!
You say to yourself.  Self, i'm not going to die. and self replies, YES YOU ARE, YOU'RE GOING TO DIE.  Being the tough person you are, you believe yourself because you don't have any further ammunition to prove otherwise.  You accept the argument that you are going to die.  Thus the logical thing to do is to half shit your pants and start to lose the plot

With all this talk of defenses, ammunition and attacks.  It feels like war.
In a sense it is.

So, Lets go to war then.

First we need to find a weapon and some ammo.

I started keeping a journal while at sea, when my anxiety was worst.
I made daily entries, and forced myself to do it even if it was a tough long day and I was wrecked.  I committed to it.
these are the main things I focused on
1) Writing what had happened during the day
2) How I was feeling both good and bad
3) Writing something positive that i had done that day
4) Telling myself that I was really proud of myself for getting through it, no matter if it was a success or a failure

Secondly we need intel so we can thwart the enemy at every turn

Reflecting on my journal, I started to see that I wasn't having nearly as many shit days as I had initially believed.
The first week was pretty much the same as it was when I wasn't writing the journal, I was still feeling pretty crap and like I was all panicky and jumpy.  But gradually, day by day the journal got thicker and more powerful and carried some strong arguments that I could use when the old self started trying to tell me that I was going to die.

Finally we take the fight to em,  full frontal attack and defeat the enemy

Old self would say shit, I feel bad, my heart is racing and I'm hot. I feel like I'm going to die.
Then new self would run back to the cabin and read the blog.  Then new self would say "Old self, you are hot because you are working in a hot area, we did this yesterday and we are not dead.  Maybe we are not going to die"

And so it went, back and forth. At first frequently, but as the old self found that he was getting beaten, he stopped arguing so much and eventually gave up on a lot of fronts.
For me, this was the breakthrough I had been searching for.  It gave me the backup to have the confidence to push on when i got scared or anxious.

With this technique I came forward in leaps and bounds, it was the single biggest step towards living a positive healthy life I have made.  Having that bank of positive outcomes there on hand whenever things went south, the ability to reflect and see that I was actually doing well, and that maybe I was being a little too critical of myself and expecting to run a marathon when all I really needed to do was put one foot in front of the other.

below are some of the more persuasive entries that I wrote to myself on that first trip away, which was a 3 week crossing over the Indian ocean, from Cape town, South Africa to Perth Australia.

8/11/11
I had a really good day today, at one point I looked at myself and thought, this is how I used to be.  Working hard and getting things done. I think the last few days of not sleeping very well and working hard have caught up with me though.  I was just congratulating myself on a good day and thinking about emailing my psychologist and telling her how well I was doing when I started feeling funny, the strange thing is that it wasn’t the normal anxiousness that I usually get, it was tired and dizzy.  Which I guess is normal considering that I was working hard all morning and the last 3 too.  I had to stop what I was doing and go and have a drink and a rest for ten mins, then I went back to what I was doing and finished the job, I wasn’t proud of myself for walking away but I really wasn’t feeling well.  However I was proud of myself for going back and finishing the job.  I know that im not always going to have a great day and sometimes im not even going to have a good day, but ill cope, ill get through and ill show this anxiety whos boss.. despite still feeling a bit anxious, im really proud of the way I managed today.


17/11/11
I actually had some success today which was pretty good.  After 4 days of fucking around with the purifier I finally managed to get the damn thing running, mostly it was a fuck up because I had never done one of these ones before.  After a few messy angry bits I managed to get the thing back together, the last two days have really taken it out of me and I feel a bit exhausted, but I have been having trouble sleeping... once I get to sleep I feel a million bucks, but I haven’t been able to get to sleep for ages.  This makes me run down and feel anxious a bit, having said that the last two days I have been doing pretty well, most of the time I actually felt like I was doing great, like the old days.  That's at least 3 days where I have felt how I used to feel which is something I thought would never happen again... Im pretty proud of myself for that!! Also today I had one of the worse panic attacks that iv had since I got here.  It was mainly coz I got really hot and a bit dehydrated which I guess was pretty close to what it was like before...
I cooled off and had a few drinks of water and after about 5 or 10 mins I started feeling much better, and whats cooler is that I went back to work and spent another 5 hours down there, finished off the purifier and all in all was pretty damn proud of myself!! Once again im pretty bloody happy with how im doing.  Its not always great but I feel like the good is outweighing the bad right now !

22/11/11

Today and yesterday were surprisingly hard work.  I am finding the mornings much harder than the rest of the day and its because I'm by myself for much of it.  I had horrible chest pains yesterday and it really really threw me... I got all panicky.  Which I actually delt with really really well.   It just really scared the shit out of me not knowing what was going on.  Then today at the end of the watch I got all anxious while I was working in the purifier room.  It just made me feel like I'm writing a self fulfilling prophecy at the moment where I'm going to start feeling worse and worse as they days go on.  I am trying my best to get myself positive and changing the way I do things, I'm going to try and chip away at a blog for the next few days and hopefully that will make life much better.  I'm still really proud of myself for getting through a pretty tough few days.  We are under the two weeks mark now which is a MASSIVE achievement!  I just have to remember to look back and think about the amazing things that I have achieved this year and even this trip.  I have worked hard like I used to.  Yeah I might not be back to where I was a few years ago but I'm getting better and better every day, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.  My whole outlook has changed so much in the last few months for the better.

26/03/2012
Been having trouble getting much sleep lately.  But I managed to get a bit more last night and have been feeling better. I was feeling a bit low earlier today, when I realised I had been sitting around achieving nothing and doing nothing today.  But I recognised that.  And did something about it.  And achieved something today and it made me feel better.  I have also started getting back into my routine of going up on the bridge or out on deck one day and then going back to the gym and the cabin the next day.  It does two things, gets me out of the cabin and helps the time pass faster.  Im doing pretty well at the moment.  Time is passing quick and I have a few projects to do at work which will be good. 

moving my blog!!!

The time has come for me to move onwards and upwards !
this blog has been moved to :
www.transientserenity.com
please follow and share
cheers
brendan :D

Overlap

Its Pretty incredible to think that i started writing this blog over 18 months ago.
I have reached a pretty special point in my story, special because when I started writing this blog I wrote it thinking I was better (not perfect, but certainly much better than i had been) and this blog I'm writing now is written about how I was when began writing Transient Serenity.  I'm so much much better now than I was back then

I can hardly believe its been that long.
So much has changed.
I have grown and learned to accept my anxiety for what it is.  Maybe not 100% but to a point where i am happy with whats been going on and how i am dealing with it.

When I started writing this blog I had two main goals
1)  To document what was happening so i could reflect back on how i am doing today
2)  Help someone else going through the same thing see that they are not alone and there is a way through
The idea of the blog came to me when i was halfway across the Indian ocean, doing a very long swing back at sea (my first real one since I acknowledged the anxiety as a problem) I penned a letter to my close friends and family explaining what had happened to me and how I was dealing with it.  Where I had been and what I had done.  Thanking them for their support.  The reaction to the letter proved to be the catalyst for transient serenity.

That trip was for me one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.  Hard because i really felt like i was better but I was scared that I would find out that I wasn't.

I think one of the most powerful tools i have learned is reflection.  By writing this blog 18 months post datum I have been able to objectively look at what I was doing well, and what I was doing wrong or could be done better.

I still reflect on it today.  Am re-reading parts of it now and thinking about how it felt at the time, and how I feel now looking back

Since I started writing this blog I have been to see a Councillor  and a psychologist.  I found both helpful, but the psychologist really came into her own in terms of developing myself to be that person I needed to be to not suffer anxiety on a large scale day to day.  She challenged me to challenge things that were happening to me.  To not accept a failure or an inability to complete a task as a negative thing but as a step to recovery.

Allowing myself that freedom to recover, accepting that I'm not OK and that I wont ever get back to being the person I was before this all started is a very powerful tool for healing myself. It gave me the ability to look at things I was doing and bit by bit start to build up confidence in myself and allow me to cherish the times that were good, and even the times that were bad.  Because I could then look at the bad times as something to achieve.  " OK I didn't do well with this, I'm going to keep at it until I do"  everything in small steps.

Accepting that I wont ever be the person I was before this all started, then realizing that the person I had wanted so badly to get back to wasn't a healthy person.  I may want to keep some of the traits from him, but a lot of the things he was doing were detrimental, both short and long term.

I didn't end up in this situation without good reason.

Below I have attached an edited copy of the letter I penned to my good friends and family about what had happened to me.  This is where my recovery really started :

 My life hit a major hurdle nearly a year ago and a lot has changed since I last threw some words around.. Iv been to 4 continents, spent months on holiday, purchased a Beautiful automobile, wakeboarded at dream lake, got a new tattoo, taken a photo outside Hank Moody's apartment, driven a brand new Camaro, scared myself shit less in bear infested hills, laughed like I was a kid, Driven a big ass Jacked up Chevy truck.  Allegedly been up the empire state building in an earthquake.  Got off a train in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with a guy we didn't know on a whim of adventure, lied about being on  my honeymoon to get a free bottle of champagne.  Iv flown over Antarctic pack ice, Watched the Blue man group live at their home theater  gambled in Vegas, Missed 2 flights, slept in an airport, gone par for 6 holes in a round of golf, reconnected with some really good mates, taken chances, lost weight, put on weight, given up drinking, taken it back again, then given it up again.  Been to a ball game, been on a train across America, heckled a stand up comedian, been fucked out of my mind on beer more than a few times, Caught my first trout on a fly line with my dad and lastly smiled like I meant it. I have Cried myself to sleep at night, been too scared to get out of bed in the morning , wondered how im going to live through the day, week, month.  walked off a golf course in disgust, embarrassed myself, felt foolish, hurt other people, hurt myself, lied to myself, lied to other people, thought I would never be able to go back to work again, hell there was a time that I didn't think I would be able to do any job, let alone continue the one im doing now. Its been an eventful, emotional year... that's putting it lightly.
To those of you who don’t know I was diagnosed with anxiety at the start of this year.  A-n-x-i-e-t-y; sounds pretty harmless.  It rolls off the tongue.  Sadly for me it didn't, it kept me from myself and from other people.  I never thought I would wake up one day and not feel like myself in my own body, but sometimes things happen for a reason, sometimes you need a wake up call to figure out what is important in life... Before I got sick I was living a great life, so I thought , 6 months holiday a year.  But I wasn't being honest with myself, I was living for nothing, had nothing.  No, that’s not true, I had something but I didn't know what to do with it. Now, 9 months later I'm doing what I thought I would never be able to do again, I'm sitting back on a ship, have crossed the Indian ocean, flown the equivalent of the whole way round the world! I'm cautious about how I'm doing because I still have a long way to go before I get off the ship, I have my good days and I have my bad days, but I feel for the first time in a long time that I have started to find the old me again, the one who enjoyed life, not shied away from it because he was scared or worried.  Got back in touch with friends I had lost a long time ago, only to find that they never left, it was me who disappeared.
To all of you whom are reading this I just want to take the time to say thank you, somehow or another inadvertently or otherwise you have helped me through the toughest time in my life and I am eternally grateful for your support and friendship.  May the summer bring you all the happiness you all deserve.

How i deal with flying

One of the biggest fears I had developed around the anxiety was the fear of flying.  I had never been a huge fan in the first place but the anxiety made it even more horrible.  Suddenly I was very aware that I was locked in a tube 10Km above the earth, completely at the mercy of the pilots who were flying it.

Flying turned out to be something of a trigger for me even before I was  aware that I was experiencing anxiety. 

Looking back on the days when I first started out in the offshore industry, I had  developed a cunning coping mechanism which involved consuming copious quantities of alcohol before and during the flight to numb myself from the scary reality of flying

So how did I get to the point where I could fly again without losing the plot?

I had better explain why I needed to change my initial coping strategy.

I often think of the time before I suffered my first attack as my “stupid period”

As so often seems to the story with me and this stuff, I never really realized it at the time, but the way I was acting and behaving was heading me towards some kind of downfall.

 

I think the thing that knocked me around initially was that I didn’t sleep very well on planes.  I think it’s a bit of the old brain ticking over and not letting me relax along with the anxiety that often seems to be just lying under the surface.  Oh and throw in a bit of having a hard time getting comfortable sitting upright for hours on end….

You can start to see why I started drinking before flying.

My flying and drinking strategy was pretty fine tuned… I knew exactly how much I could handle and not get totally obliterated.  Over the years I grew into quite the alcoholic at airports.  But there came a point where I started slipping a bit, maybe over-shooting the mark just a little too much. Like the time I wrote on the Australian departure card under the “which country are you travelling to?” I wrote Australia.

I learned all the tricks to travelling under the radar when it came to being drunk in the airport. 

Write your departure card out before you start drinking if possible (hence the failure above!) Look at your feet, don’t talk unless spoken to and only one word answers - that way you won’t slur so much:

But then I started messing up more and more:

Leaving my cellphone at the bar because I was drunk and running late for my plane.

Nearly missing flights because we were drinking in the flight lounges and getting completely rancid… We found out that once you were through customs it was less of a hassle to put us on the plane and let the stewards deal with the mess than for security to have to take us back through customs and recover our bags of a fully loaded plane.

Never was this more true and more proven correct when our flight was delayed for 4 hours on the way home from Perth.  My drinking plan was thrown well and truly out of kilter because I had been drinking to be shitfaced as I got on the plane…. by the time the plane had been delayed I was well on the way and hadn’t planned on having to develop a mechanism for putting the brakes on.  So after a 4 hour delay, a very very very heavily intoxicated Brendan trots (stumbles) down the airwalk and into my business class seat for the flight home ..  I’m just clipping my belt up when I realize that I have made a very serious mistake. I look up and I can see the plane spinning and I know I’m in some serious trouble.  I vaguely remember a voice booming over the PA system as the plane was taking off and I was halfway to the bathroom “COULD THE PASSENGER IN THE AISLE PLEASE MAKE HIS WAY BACK TO HIS SEAT IMMEDIATELY” 

The rest of the trip as I’m sure you can imagine was awesome… I think I may have passed out in the bathroom and then somehow woke up at the back of the plane… (I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination).  That was the end of that messy episode and time for me to start winding back my drinking on planes and trying to find a new strategy to survive the flights.

What is intriguing about this moment is it came about barley 6 weeks before I had my first anxiety attack.  So the timing was almost perfect when it came to reassessing my coping mechanisms.

After finishing on the drill ship, I travelled around the USA for a few months.   My company emailed me asking if I was willing to come back from the trip a little early as they had a ship on a long term contract that they were intending on mobilizing.  Conveniently the USA trip had put a larger dent in my coffers than I had first anticipated. Securing an income for 6 or 7 months really appealed to me.  

What didn’t appeal to me was that I would have to fly halfway round the world to get back to work.  I arrived home in N.Z. and received the flight details arrived for the new job, only to discover that I was not going to Perth Australia but to Cape Town, South Africa - a much longer and more demanding flight.

So I arrived home after a 12 hour flight from LA to Sydney and then a 4 hour flight to Auckland, spent 3 days in town and then flew out 4 hours to Sydney again and then another 14 hour flight to Johannesburg and then 3 hours down to Capetown.  I found the thought of this very daunting and to be honest I was not looking forward to it one bit. 

So how I have learned to deal with it ?

The short and curlies of it are that I haven’t.  Not completely.  I still get the racing pulse every now and then, I still get hot flushes… sometimes I feel like I have to just escape. 

And then I remember something a good friend and fellow sufferer once told me. 

You need to learn to take control of what you can when flying.  Even the smallest of things make a difference. 

In his words “If you have to get off the plane you can get off the plane, anywhere, just about any time” What he meant by this is that yes, it’s scary being in there when you are feeling anxious.  and you feel you can’t get out.  But you actually can.  You can take back that little bit of control, tell the hostess while you are still on the ground that you need to get off.  Hell, make up a story if you need to.  You can even do it in the air…  Feign a heart attack… sure you may not ever be able to fly with that airline again.  But that doesn’t matter.  Because you are in such dire need of getting out of there that you are willing to do anything to get out at that point. 

For me this is the amazing thing.  When I’m there, when I feel that bad, when I have made that decision, I feel in control and then I feel better.  And then I feel I don’t need to say anything because I know that I have a way out if I need it.  But I don’t need it.  It sounds perverse, but I have found a way to take control of my situation, just through thinking the action, not actually having to do it!

It sounds a tad on the crazy side… but just knowing that there is a way out makes a massive difference when I’m on the slope towards a panic attack. 

It’s just one more little weapon I can tuck away in my arsenal against this illness.  And every little bit counts.   

Other things I do are plan, take books, have things accessible, bring things to keep me entertained. 

I generally request (often firmly) to have an aisle seat as it helps ease the feeling of being trapped.  Although my last flight (Perth to Bali) I had a middle seat and I coped, now that I think about it Ha!

I steer away from alcohol when I’m on the planes these days too. 

I try and strike up a conversation with the person seated next to me early in the piece. That way if I’m feeling anxious I already have a dialogue with them and I don’t get more anxious trying to figure out what to say.

Since I suffered my first attack I have flown to Australia, South Africa, Bali, Singapore, America and Canada and many other places in between.  Very rarely do I enjoy the flights, but I do tolerate them now, with very few episodes of panic.  There is a way through this! 

The next step.

I Have never really been much of a religious person.  I think I can count on my fingers the number of times I have actually set foot in a church.  But ill admit that there have been times in the last 18 months where I have begged someone or something to intervene and make all these things happening to me go away.  The one that springs to mind the most was the morning after the overnight I had in Singapore before flying back to NZ. I had been very heavily out on the juice the night before ( a celebration of sorts for surviving my first trip away that got out of hand ) and made it to bed with about 3 hours to sleep before getting up for the flight in the morning.  Waking up still drunk with the first licks of a hangover brewing in my head and knowing what that was going to do to me in regards to anxiety was a very very shitty feeling.  For the first time in my life I actually managed to get down on my knees and pray.  I prayed like a devout christian that had been going to church daily for his whole life.  I prayed through teary eyes with shaking hands that whoever was up there would listen and see what an idiot I had been by knowingly getting myself into that state.  To somehow fix me and make sure that I would be able to get home.
I stumbled out of my hotel room and made my way through cloudy eyes to the shuttle.  One of the guys was looking in a much worse state than I felt. turns out he decided to do a cliff hanger impression from the balcony of the 15th floor of the hotel.  The hotel security apparently tried to kick him out at 4 am. which just had the rest of us in hysterics for the rest of the trip to the airport.  This did much to improve my spirits and helped me put the first positive step towards learning that my attitude towards my fears could make them far worse.

I'm by no means convinced that falling on my knees made any real difference that day, or at all.  But I do know that one way or another, I have been very very fortunate with both the vessels I have ended up on and the people I have worked with since I made it back to sea.

Work dried up in Auzzie temporarily, which saw me working for the first time since qualifying back in NZ on a drill ship, the very same drill ship in fact that Lucy Lawless recently made a brief appearance on.  http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/lucy-lawless-and-greenpeace-activists-plead-guilty-4928581 (which incidentally ran aground the other day in Dutch harbor en route to the Arctic circle to drill some holes)
That swing was the thing that really gave me confidence that I would be able to get back to work consistently.

This trip was a full swing, 5 weeks long, and for me was quite a daunting task.  To work on this type of vessel it is required to have a HUET (helicopter under water escape training) certificate.  Which is basically a certificate that says we are trained in how to survive a helicopter crash.  Part of the course involves being put in a makeshift helicopter being submerged upside down and having to escape from it once under water.  A great way to face your anxiety.  If you don't pass the course, you cant have the job!

The Noble Discoverer tied up in New Plymouth

The ship its self ended up being tied up to the wharf for most of the swing. So I was able to get back into the hot engine room and confront a lot of the demons I had left down in the pit.  The atmosphere was structured and I was basically able to learn to deal with being back on a ship, while still being tied to the wharf.  This had Two major benefits, the first being that i had phone reception the whole time and could call home if i got really scared.  The second benefit to this is I was able to realise that I felt the same way being on the ship alongside the wharf as I did when it was in the middle of the ocean.  From this realisation I was able to make good in my head that if I could survive alongside the wharf, then I could survive while I was at sea.
Just to really prove the point to myself, the weather got up and we were forced to leave the port in case we were blown off the wharf and broke something.  So in some not particularly nice conditions we put to sea for a few days to wait out the storm.  It was a great time for me because it just cemented to me that I would be ok.  That I could handle this job and these conditions.

my first trip back to sea

One of the things that concerned me the most about going back to work was the fear that I was not OK after all.  It was heightened by the fact that in order to be back at sea I was supposed to be fit and ready for work in every sense of the word.  While I knew that for me to really be better I needed to go back to work and face the demons that I left out there.  Which in my mind meant that I wasn't really fit to go back.  In reality this meant that I was not able to to tell my company and fellow crew members what was going on or they flat out would not have let me back on the ship, swiftly ending my seagoing career.

My first stint back proved to be both an incredibly good; and bad experience.
I survived a number of firsts during the first trip away.
The first flight in a plane proved to be pretty tough, however using the breathing techniques I had learned, I survived the entire flight without a major crisis.

Spending the first real time alone and away from my chief supporter and wife proved to be hard.

Being back onboard on the other hand was another challenge altogether.  It was like being thrown from the frying pan; straight into the fire.  All of a sudden I was back onboard, working long days and going back into the heat that I was working in when I had my first attack.   

An unexpected side effect from this was that I began to doubt that it was actually anxiety and started to believe that it was possible that it was my heart.  A seed had been planted in my mind when the doctors couldn’t replicate the problem when i got home.  So from a medical point of view, it was only “unlikely” that something was wrong. 

In my world there was no such thing as “unlikely”.  I deal with engines and mechanical things.  When I started in my profession we were taught be inquisitive.  Why? Why does it sound like that? Why is it leaking oil? What makes this work, or not work?

In my line of work there is ALWAYS an answer. 

Hence that tiny seed of doubt began to fester. 

The first thing that I really noticed about being back in the engine room was the heat; and what the heat did to me.  After a few mins of being in the engine room my hands would get clammy and all tingly and my skin would go pale.

At the time I didn’t realise that what I was feeling was normal.  So I started freaking out that something was wrong.    I had suspected the heat would give me some grief so had been spending time trying to get used to the heat in saunas at the local swimming pool.  It really helped with getting used to my heart rate increasing as the temperature went up.
The difference was that I could walk out of the sauna if I couldn't handle it.  The engine room was slightly harder.  If I left because it was too much, I would still have to go back down there pretty quickly and finish off what I was doing before anyone realised something was wrong.

Somewhere in the back of my mind the little seed that had been planted started growing.  So there I am, trying to deal with the fact that I was back at sea, absolutely freaking out that maybe it wasn’t anxiety after all and that I was going to have the exact same thing happen again.  This blabbering mess on the inside, trying to put this brave face on so that none of the rest of the crew knew what was going on with me.  Going through this horrible cycle of getting all these weird signals from my body that made me feel very uncomfortable, which would start the anxiety cranking, which in turn would get the fear that it wasn’t the anxiety going, which would get my heart racing.  It was a vicious cycle.

The only way I knew how to deal with it was to go back into the breathing patterns I had learned and try to calm myself down enough to convince myself that it was just anxiety.  And I knew how to deal with anxiety.  It was something I could control.

The other unexpected problem I ran into was that of support.  I had absolutely no idea over the last few months how much I had come to rely on other people, particularly my wife.  We were constantly talking about how I was feeling and what I needed to do to feel better and so on and so forth.  Then, all of a sudden I had no support, none except for my own will.  So when I got anxious or felt that something was going wrong I was really struggling to find a way to break the cycle.
I began by writing down a series of positive things to repeat to myself if I got anxious and put them on the wall of my cabin.

I set myself a daily routine to keep my mind occupied and tried the best I could to stick to it.

When I got really really anxious and I felt like I was going to lose it completely I went to the gym and ran as fast and for as long as I could. 

All of these things worked really effectively to control or to counter act the anxious feelings I was having on pretty much a daily basis. 

I found that my anxiety would get much worse when things changed that I didn't expect, like when the company decided that my ship is going to Singapore.  Thinking about the implications of me being that far away from land such as not being in range of a chopper or medivac if things went wrong really didnt do me any favours. 

I think the hardest part of that entire trip was when we were departing Auzzie and making our way north.  As we fired up the engines and started picking up anchor I could feel the fear building up bit by bit, until my face was flushed and my hands were shaking.   But I survived, and survived the whole passage.

I survived a night in Singapore, the 8 hour flight back to Perth, and the 6 hour flight to Auckland from there.  

It didnt kill me.  Yes it was hard and I disliked much of it.  But I also learned a lot about myself and how much mental toughness it takes to get back on the horse when horrible things like this manifest themselves.

I had hoped to publish this blog months ago but have been back at college studying for my next seagoing qualification... the show goes on!

Im not Bullet proof

To get an understanding of why It took me such a long time to get myself in a state to get back to work I feel its necessary to explain in detail the events that lead to me being evacuated from the ship.

This has been something I have wanted to write for a long time but honestly its scared me shitless just thinking about what happened, let alone analysing it in detail.  However, I believe this is integral to my recovery so I feel its time to bite the bullet.  

You have read that I was heavily depressed and not in a good space in the months leading up to my first anxiety attack.  Some other very stressful and equally important things were going on in my life that all came to a head in a short time frame to a point where I just couldn't keep it all under wraps any more, in a very sudden and at the time unexpected turn of events everything unravelled with terrifying consequences.  

The leave before I got sick my wife and I had planned to go on a holiday around NZ. Being the thrift that I was; I opted to buy a converted van to live out of for the holiday, rather than pay practically the same price to hire a flash camper.  This way we would be able to sell the van at the end and get some of the money back.  

After spending a considerable sum of money on a van,  It turned out that the "newly rebuilt engine" was a dud and the seller had done a number on us well and truly.  

We had planned for this trip for a very long time and I absolutely refused to have something like this ruin it.  At a huge additional cost I purchased another engine and replaced the dead one in the van by myself.  The time frame for the trip was short so there was a huge amount of pressure on me to get everything back up and running.  So, In just under two days I managed to completely replace the fucked engine with a new one.  Any Mechanic will know how much of a pain in the ass it is to do this in a van.  It literally requires you to lift the chassis off the engine and remove the gearbox, then the engine, replace and re-install the new engine before putting the gearbox back; lowering the chassis back down.  So 5 weeks at sea, home on Friday, new engine and running van on Monday. 

Two 16 hour days after a long hard trip away and my mind and body were drained.

On reflection.  I realise now, the only person who put the pressure on me to get things up and running was me.  My attitude, although commendable at the time, actually ruined the whole trip.  I was busy thinking that I needed to get it going for the trip and for us.  But to be honest it would have been far less stressful if I had just accepted it and moved on.

We eventually set out on our holiday (nearly a week later than planned), made it as far as Hamilton (about 2 hours away) and the gearbox started playing up. 

the rest of the trip ended up being a stressful combination of trying to nurse the van along and not destroy the gearbox.  We got to about 10 days and it was becoming painfully obvious that the gearbox was on its last legs.  

I had a new box sent to a friends place that had some floor space and a bit of gear and proceeded to rip the broken box out and put the new one in.  The new one didn't fit, so I had a replacement sent that turned out to be a dud too.  I managed to bodgy up a running box out of the 3 I now owned.  we called the rest of the trip off and decided to head home to lick our wounds and count the horrific costs.  on the 3 hour trip home the gearbox properly packed up again.  leaving me and the wife copping a ride home with a tow truck.  A very very stressful end to a very very stressful and expensive trip from which  I should have cut my losses much earlier.

This was the most bitter defeat I have ever tasted.  I always believed that I could get through anything.  That if I kept trying I would always succeed eventually.  This stark realisation that I am not capable of fixing everything really changed my outlook on life and I have been struggling to get past it ever since. 

Not long after getting home I went back to sea again.

Due to the exhaustion from the lack of rest on leave I was drinking large amounts of coffee on board and they were getting progressively stronger as the days went by (I had no less than 3 Very strong black coffees less than 2 hours before the attack).  I was incredibly fit at the time and was hitting the gym harder than I had ever done before.  Up to 90 mins a day six days a week, eating protein shakes etc for breakfast and cutting out salt, fats and most of the other bad shit.  

The day before the attack I was doing some very physical work for a prolonged period of time in the engine room which was somewhere around 50 deg C (125 F).

I'm convinced that these five factors ( the van, the depression, the coffee the exhaustion from the gym and the heat at work) all collided at the same time and both my mind and body couldn't keep up.  So my body shut down.

I remember watching TV in the mess (lunch room) about an hour after watch (on board ships we are manned 24 hours a day and this is what we call a shift),  had just been to the gym and cleaned up.  Finished breakfast and put an episode of Californication on the box.

I'm not sure exactly what happened but at some point during the show I felt like I couldn't catch my breath.  I got up and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge.  Sat back down and tried to resume watching TV.  The feeling didn't go away, so I got up again and walked up to the bridge to have a chat to the guys on watch.  I still had the uncomfortable shortness of breath and couldn't shake it.  While talking to the guys up on the bridge I became dizzy and had that odd feeling of seeing stars.  I remember telling one of the guys I thought I was going to faint.  As he guided me to a chair the heart palpitations started.  I felt like my heart was going to burst through my chest and the guys commented that they could see it pounding through my shirt.  The Captain was called to the bridge and everybody started to really panic.  

I could see in everyone's eyes what they were thinking..... Heart attack. 

Just after I was removed from the ship, The heart monitor tabs still attached

An emergency Dr was contacted by phone and tried to assess me but kept coming back to the same conclusion.  Heart Attack.  

All the crew were now on deck and helping out where they could.  The Dr had one of them taking my pulse frequently, another was massaging the carotid artery in my neck to try and reduce the risk of it blocking up, another was standing behind me trying to make small talk and keep me busy and occupied so I wouldn't get wound up and put undue strain on my heart. 

While I was talking to the Dr, he more or less told me that it sounded very serious.  I think that's when the panic really started to set in.  The realisation that I could very well be staring down the barrel of a gun.  That in a matter of minutes I had gone from being healthy to there being a strong chance that I was about to die.
Thats when the feeling of going over the edge on a roller coaster first kicked in and I found myself in complete free fall into panic.  To be honest Im surprised I didn't piss my pants.  

Its not until something like this happens that you start to realise how isolated you really are when working at sea.  For me it was fortunate that we were so close to port, a transfer boat was dispatched to pick me up and take me to the waiting ambulance.  But that was bad enough.  We were still 1500Km from Perth and in one of the more remote reaches of the western coast.

We all knew what a heart attack meant.  We had no defibrillator on board to re-start my heart and although  close to port it was still a full hour before I was to set foot on land.

All of the officers on board have done some extensive first aid courses and we all know that when a fit 25 year old is having heart attack that the odds are much higher of not pulling through (even more so when you cant get to a hospital).  So it was absolutely terrifying and to a degree almost surreal to be sitting there having all this unfold around me.  It was a horrifying realisation that i'm not going to be here forever.  That even though we joke about death all the time, that it was inevitable and that very possibly the reaper was about to wrap his veil around me.

I have heard people say the idea of meeting your maker can be a humbling experience.  I often wonder if they were on crack at the time because it just plain scared the shit out of me.  This is the crux of the anxiety I suffer and why I have struggled so much going back to sea.  The idea of this happening again absolutely terrifies me.  

As always thanks for hearing me out.