I returned to my doctors and asked for my medication to be changed, as I felt too high most of the time. But I think it was too late by then, the Prozac and drink had done its damage. So it was back to a standard anti-depressant and its side-effects. This was fine for a while, until I woke up one morning with the old familiar black cloud hanging over me again.
As you’re probably aware there seems to be a vast difference in side-effects depending on which drugs you are prescribed. If you are not happy with the drugs you are taking, go back to your doctor and ask for them to be changed. Don’t stay on something if it’s making you feel odd. (This is the only way I can describe the ‘vague feeling of being unwell,’ printed on the paperwork in most anti-depressant packets.) This can just as easily fuck up your life in the same way that a nervous breakdown does.
I was showing signs of cracking under pressure at work. I was losing the ability to concentrate and I felt tired all of the time. My confidence was fast diminishing also. The timing couldn’t have been worse for me. Five months into the job I was asked if I would go on a shift rota. I was in a tenuous position financially and felt obliged to agree to my line manager’s demands. I was still biting the bullet regarding spilling the beans about my first nervous break-down.
The shift required was a week of lates and a week of early’s. Things were okay to begin with, but after a few months I found it harder and harder to cope. Until one night I sat in front of a job, when everybody had gone home, for three hours not knowing where to start. My work chum wasn’t best pleased the next day.
He wasn’t just angry, he was seething. I tried frantically to explain, but he had an answer for everything and I didn’t. I’m sure you can imagine the atmosphere in the minuscule room. I could feel waves of hate washing over me for most of the morning. After that one incident I was scared stiff of making any other mistakes. My work partner seemed fine as long as everything went his way. I suppose there is something to be said for nepotism. All the same I had never encountered such hostility over a poxy four colour job before.
It hadn’t occurred to me that a different shift would affect my mental state. I had worked on day shifts for over seventeen years up until that point. But the change in working nights affected my sleep pattern from week to week, which in turn affected my eating cycle. Consequently I drifted into a series of high and low episodes. Eventually after being a pain in the arse for months, I came down to earth with an almighty bang.
My boss gave me a month off to sort myself out, but I was too far gone by then. In the end I asked to be made redundant. The highs only got higher after that; I called this period, the ‘walking on water’ stage. At some point during my well months, I stupidly reduced my medication, over a three-month period, without my doctors’ knowledge. Don’t even contemplate trying this.
Prior to all of my stays in hospital there was always an abundance of incidences leading up to admission. This was largely due to the Mental Health Act of 1983, which roughly states, that unless a person is a danger to themselves or others, they can’t be picked up by the old bill and carted off to the nearest fun factory. On this spree of events Mum, Bill and Seron helped to fill in the blank spaces of my second admission into Claybury Hospital.
Mum was coming over to see me knowing I wasn’t quite the whole nine yards again. My sleep pattern was all over the shop, and I had stopped eating. On this particular Saturday morning, I had phoned Bill begging him and his wife, Seron to come down to my flat.
The night before, I had painstakingly re-assembled my drum kit in my front room. For some reason I had decided to do this in the pitch dark at about 3.00 a.m., don’t ask why, I haven’t a clue. I was doing everything in slow motion at that point; I believed my patience was being tested in some way.
Normally it would take me forty minutes or so to put my kit together, but on this occasion the conditions were far from normal. I had it in my head that my flat was bugged. To add to my dilemma, I had to take each piece of equipment from a back bedroom, up the creaking hallway and into the front-room.
Rhyme, reason and time-scale had abandoned me yet again, save the odd glance at the clock. It took me over two and a half hours to put up my drum kit, which I managed to do in near silence. Bill and Seron arrived about mid-day. They were visibly taken aback by the sight that had met their eyes. They were equally surprised to see that I had taken the mattresses off the bunk beds and was now using them as sound-proofing.
Bill and I had played together in a band for a number of years. He was the guitarist. One of our high-points was a Radio 1 session on the Janice Long show. The creative buzz that I had all those years ago had returned and, three months prior to this, I had blown the dust off my sticks and begun to practise again. Of all the music I listened to, one song held my attention, ‘Seven Days’, by Sting. It’s a peach of a track in 7/8 time, and after weeks of warming up to 4/4 music it became the only song I would play.
Initially I sat for hours listening to the track as a whole, and then gradually broke the drum-patterns down into sections. Once I had the bass and snare firmly fixed in my mind, I concentrated on the cymbal pushes and finally I worked on all of the drum-fills. The only part I couldn’t perfect was a short section just before the song fades out; the drummer does too many fills for my little head to remember. Now all I wanted to do was play it at the proper volume and see if I could still hack it as a drummer.
Bill and Seron sat and listened dutifully as I cranked up the stereo and put the tape on. I played the song once, and once only, using my speakers as a make-shift fold back system. One to the left of me standing on a stool and the other, to my right, angled up at forty-five degrees at the base of my Hi- hat stand. When the track finished I said out loud, “Still got it.” That single performance was all the gratification I needed or expected. The next couple of hours were spent rifling through my record and tape collection reminiscing.
At 2.00 p.m. Mum arrived to find Bill, Seron and myself knee-deep in vinyl, cassettes and album covers. “What’s all this then?” She asked. Seron assured her that there had only been one floor-show that afternoon.
“Just as well really,” she replied starring at me in disbelief. “What must have the neighbours thought?” “Sod the neighbours,” I said. Unfortunately my words opened up Mum’s entire book of stock phrases, volume one. Starting with, “Well that’s all right for you to say,” and ending with, “And another thing, did you think about that?”
By the time she had gone through her entire repertoire, I had made a sandwich, eaten it and poured her out a cup of coffee. This was the only way to stop her drifting into her second volume of nagging for the Home Counties North, advanced level.
Part three next week…
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