Have a Heart, Eddie: I’m Depressed
Dateline: January 2018
Listen, I don’t expect anyone has too much sympathy for those who get depressed. That’s not what I mean: of course you do. Everyone does. What I mean to say is that sadly it’s nothing new, and we all get down from time to time. Except, I don’t. Not normally, or at least, not before the last few years. I’m generally an upbeat sort of guy. When things were at their worst and it was hard to go on, it was me who was the strong one, as I pretty much always have to be, and still do. But now, well, in recent years I can’t deny it’s got harder to keep a brave face on, to take on the world on my own and not to let the pressure get to me.
So probably won’t necessarily surprise anyone that after the crappy New Year’s Eve we had, January was no barrel of laughs either. Specifically, there was nothing I could put my finger on or point to as the cause of my unhappiness, but then, when you’re in this situation you don’t need any more reason. I’ve been told better men than me would have found it hard to do what I do, and I’m sure that’s true - at heart, we’ll all selfish really - but I’ve always taken the view that this is what I have to do, this is the situation and I just have to get on with it. Sure, I’ve got depressed from time to time - everyone heard about my almost collapsing after eating nothing for three days in 2017 - but never anything you would call serious.
That all changed, however, last year.
I think it was more annoying and frustrating because of my inability to single out any cause for the sudden depression, but it just gripped me one day and, while it didn’t quite reflect the title of this journal, not yet, I did feel very hopeless. It’s a very hard thing, being depressed but trying not to show it, and I’m sure others of you have struggled with the same thing. You don’t want sympathy, you don’t even want understanding and you certainly don’t want idiots saying things like “cheer up, it may never happen” or other mindless platitudes, but in my case there was the added problem of Karen. If she saw I was depressed, she would worry - and she’s a world class worrier; she could worry for Ireland - and then she would get depressed too. Quite frankly, how she hasn’t up to now I don’t quite understand. She attributes her attitude to me, but I don’t know about that. Maybe she’s just stronger than she thinks.
Anyway, going about your daily business and trying not to look too down is hard, and of course in the end, in that situation it’s next to impossible, so she did notice, and I did have to admit that I was depressed. She understood, but there’s something innately selfish about Karen, I’m sorry to say. When something happens to affect her she really only thinks in terms of herself and how that impacts her situation, leading to her at one point telling me in a sort of bored, annoyed voice that I was making her gloomy. Needless to say, my reaction to that comment was not all it should have been!
I think the worst thing about depression is, at least from my perspective anyway, how it grabs hold of you and won’t let you get away. You want to be happy - you desperately want to be happy, or at least not sad - but you can’t see any way to. No matter what you do, no matter how you try to cheer yourself up, or how other people do, nothing works. You remain locked in this dark, dismal, unremitting world of misery and hopelessness, and despair just takes you over. It becomes hard to do anything, or want to; it becomes hard to get up in the morning (how cliched is that? But I did actually suffer from this, and had I not had to, I would have stayed in bed, unable to face the day) and even hard to go to bed at night, knowing that another day is waiting at the end of the relatively brief respite of a few hours’ sleep.
And, as the title of the journal suggests, sorrows tend to multiply when you’re down. I’m sure everyone knows where the quote comes from (“When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions!” - Hamlet) but it’s true. I’ve found the more down I am, the worse things get, the harder life becomes and the more obstacles are thrown in my way, or, to refer back to my recent entry in my Trollheart’s Theme Park journal, the more mountains rise up before me. Although I don’t believe, it’s always seemed to me as if some being up there is laughing at me: think things are bad now? ZAP! Chew on that, pal! This happened back in 2017, as already alluded to, when I was so badly depressed that I forgot to/couldn’t eat for three days and almost collapsed. At the height of this weakness I was forced to bring Karen to hospital, even though I felt the chances of me being taken in if we went were quite high. I felt like, how could I be so unlucky? I feel terrible, unable to move, and ready to black out, and yet here Karen is (no fault of hers of course) feeling sick and the doctor, when called, tells us we have to go to hospital!
So after about a sixteen-hour stay we get through that, come back home in the late morning/early afternoon, I get her to bed then collapse myself for about three hours before I have to haul myself back up, sort out her bags (ie replace all the medication, clothes, other paraphernalia we brought to the hospital in case she got admitted) and do the dishes from last night, and then prepare her dinner, all while feeling like I just want to die. I’ve related this story before, so I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say at that point I really felt that if there was a God after all, he really hated me.
So after that diversion in this story, how did my sorrows become multiplied? Meet Eddie, one of our remaining cats. Eddie is what Karen calls a “big, beautiful boy” and what I call fat. He’s a gentle giant, one of those scaredy-cats who’re afraid of their own shadows, but he’s very affectionate and he loves being petted, to the extent that if he hears our other cat, Millie, being given attention and he’s upstairs he’ll charge down so as not to be left out. Eddie’s a great comfort when you’re down, and at one point I was petting him when I realised his ears felt very rough. As often things tend to get stuck on cats, from sitting in the grass or whatever the hell they do, I assumed it was something he had been messing with that had adhered to his ears and I began scratching at it. Only then did I realise it was more like the skin of his ears was flaking, as if he had eczema or something.
Eddie had also been subject to fits of coughing, not just fur balls, but more a kind of nervous wheeze, which had made me think in terms of panic attacks. All things considered, I resolved to take him to the vet. This is not as easily accomplished as you might think. Look at his picture. He’s a big cat, and big cats are strong. In order to get him into the cage in which he would be transported, I had to grab him while he was asleep and force him in. Unfortunately for me, the cage was in the middle of the floor, and as I pushed forward and he pushed back, trying to escape, I had to move forward, the cage moving with me, until we came up against the wall and I could squeeze him in, locking the door. The few seconds we performed this mad dance seemed like hours to me; I knew if I slackened the pressure or he broke away I would never get him in the cage. You only get one chance, and if they get wary you’ll never catch them, never mind get them into the cage.
Anyway, finally imprisoned in the metal box, Eddie was examined by the vet, who said he was a little concerned, and wanted to keep him in. And so he did. A week later I went back to collect him, to be told the bad news. There was, and is, a problem with Eddie’s heart. It’s enlarged, and is therefore beating faster than it should, to compensate for the larger size. As a result, he is now on medication for the rest of his life. Always knew he had a big heart, but this is something else. I was however told there may be further bad news. Kieran, the vet, took me in to show me an x-ray of Eddie’s leg, where there was a “growth” which he wanted to get analysed, in case the dreaded C-word might apply. It would take another week to get the results, and he suggested I leave Eddie with them until they came back. I did, returning without Eddie and with a heavier heart than I had before I had left the house. Didn’t do my depression any good, I can tell you.
Needless to say (to those of you who know Karen) I didn’t tell Karen about the leg. Karen doesn’t do well with bad news. I mean, she’s almost a child when it comes to that. You have to hide things from her; she gets very emotional and always foresees the worst possible outcome. She has enough problems in her life already, so I never see the point in adding to her worries. I told her about Eddie’s heart, as I had to, but just mentioned vaguely that there were more tests to be run. As it turned out, the leg growth was not cancerous, so that was at least some good news.
The postscript to this was that when I went to pay the bill it came to almost 700 Euro, which equates to about 800 dollars, but luckily Eddie is insured, so we were able to claim back about half of that. It does mean that we now have an extra expense every month for his medication, and that the two cats get a meat pouch every evening in addition to their dry food (other than Wednesday and Friday, when they get fish) because I have to grind Eddie’s tablets up into food he will eat. So although she’s not sick, Millie still wins.
Me? I was still stuck in a depression, with now a sick cat on my hands, extra bills to pay and Karen depressed too over Eddie’s sickness (even though it could have been a lot worse). The next month, it would seem, rather surprisingly, that light could finally be glimpsed at the end of the tunnel. But you know what they say: be careful what you wish for. That light is usually something very fast and very dangerous hurtling right for you…
