I’ve waited this long to write about it because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t just having a couple of good days. I did go to Barcelona and that may have helped too. Time away from the normal every day routine can be the best medicine. But it’s been three weeks now, and every day has been a good day.

I’d like to say I feel like my old self again, and in a way I do, but I feel changed too. I care about life again, I don’t want to die of cancer, but I feel less charged, less hectic, more in control of my own mind than I was before all this started. I’m less inclined to make rash decisions and spend longer deliberating whether I need to do something or not. And why. I’ve learnt about my values and how they play a part in my mental well being. I’ve learnt to be mindful of the present and try and live in it. And I’ve learnt how important my loved ones and friends are in supporting and guiding me.

It’s hard to unpick how much of my illness was down to cancer and how much was the hormonal imbalance of childbirth mixed with hormone suppressing medication. Then there’s my marriage break up to take into account. I’ve often wondered if I’d have been better sooner if I hadn’t had the devastation of that to deal with on top of everything else. I’ve come to terms with never knowing that answer and not needing to. It doesn’t matter, that was part of the journey. Obviously I would prefer that not to have happened, but you can’t make someone love you when they don’t. You can’t make them change their mind when they don’t want to. And you can’t make them take back the pain they’ve caused you when they didn’t want to hurt you in the first place.

As far as cancer is concerned, I still have a long way to go to accept it into my life and learn to live with it. I still worry about a recurrence, I still research what new advances in medicine are being made just in case I need to know again one day. A good friend said to me a few weeks ago that I need to find a new me that isn’t defined by cancer and my marriage break up, and I feel like I’m doing that now. Or at least in a position to start. I’ve walked through the storm and come out the other side a changed person, but I do finally feel like the sun is shining again.

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When I say sectioned, what I mean is ‘voluntarily’ sectioned of course, because they gave me a choice: either come in on a voluntary section, or be sectioned. The psychiatrist told me what would happen if I was sectioned and told me I didn’t want that. She was right, I didn’t want that, but I still take umbrage with ‘voluntarily’ sectioned.

So anyway, Lesley Bushell had to leave me at the Adult Mental Health Unit, and she says it’s one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. She may have said it was the hardest, I can’t actually remember, but I don’t want to claim it as the hardest if it wasn’t. So I’ll go with one of the hardest.

It was terrifying.

I was taken to a room while Lesley went home and grabbed me some things. I sat on the bed and felt more scared than I’ve ever felt in my life. Even more scared than the thought of dying of cancer. Nobody was listening to what I was saying, they thought I was mad. I thought I was fine and they were all mad. I’d had an epiphany after all, so I was clearly right.

I don’t remember much about the first night, just snapshots. I was in a highly emotional state and existing on pure adrenaline. I remember eating a moldy yoghurt and crying in my bed. I remember them turning the light on every 15 minutes all night to check me because I was on suicide watch. I thought they were trying to drive me insane so they could keep me there. Over the coming days I wrote extensive lists of what they were doing, how they were doing it wrong, and how I knew what they were doing. I engaged with my psychiatrist but I didn’t believe that she wanted to help me. I became obsessed with every physiological test she ordered, convinced I either had a brain tumour or a thyroid problem. And wasn’t just, you know, batshit.

One day my psychiatrist held out her hands to me, palms up, and she said while holding up her right hand, ‘Here is me, here is everyone you know, we are all saying one thing.’ Then she held up her left hand and said, ‘And over here, on your own, is you, saying something totally different. What are the chances you are right and we are all wrong?’ Then she asked me to trust her. She increased my anti-depressant, put me on an anti-psychotic, and ordered a sleeping tablet for every night. That night I slept a full night’s sleep for the first time in over a year.

Then came the difficult task of accepting she was right. And the absolute terror that if I was really psychotic that I might never regain my sanity. I lived for visits and the rare times I was allowed home and for the first time in days I stopped wanting to kill myself and stopped making lists of how to do that. I started writing short stories. I did intricate drawings. I crocheted Lesley an Ocean of Emotion cushion. I felt alive and creative, but tired. So very tired. I slept at least once a day, if not more, and learned to love my nightly sleeping tablet and the bliss it brought.

Throughout all this, even when I was crazy in that first week, I chatted on WhatsApp to Lesley, Dave and Heather in a group conversation. They were there for me tirelessly, keeping me grounded but at the same time relentlessly taking the piss. They treated me like normal but they also painstakingly explained things to me and talked things through with me. I either text, spoke to, or saw Andrea every single day, and was eventually released into her care after two weeks and two days. She spent hours talking me through the early days of recovery and explaining what I was experiencing and why. And slowly I started to feel better, to be able to understand that I was ill but that I could and would get better again. My friends were paramount in nursing me back to health, everyone who visited and brought me books and magazines and ideas to write about, everyone who sent me cards and presents, everyone who went out of their way to send me love and hope – them and my children are what got me through.

This year is different. The 23rd March will always be a day of bad memories, but that’s all they are now. Memories. Much like that time I went batshit…

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Don’t worry, I’m in the middle of my 18 week course and still hanging in there. I like my therapist, she can think on the spot very quickly and is inventive with her methods. She is also shrewd as hell and catches me out constantly. Fair play to her. The idea of the therapy is to provide people like me, who went a bit over the edge but not all the way to the bottom of the abyss, with strategies for coping with the stresses life throws at you so that you don’t end up back on the edge again. So to say I was relieved when the therapy started while I was in the middle of a marriage break up is an understatement. I couldn’t have come this far if it weren’t for my always brilliant friends – and the therapy.

But one thing has been bugging me, and that was that all the visualisation – and I can do this easily – wasn’t sitting quite right. I can do the mindfulness bit and keep myself in the here and now, aware of my thoughts but not overwhelmed by them. But the diffusion bit – where you send the thoughts away from you visually – has proved more elusive, with many of the techniques and ideas not working for me. For instance, say I was annoyed about something or someone, I could visualise a word or their name, maybe in script font, and then put it on a leaf and send it down a river away from me. Or I could type that name on a computer screen and play with it, make it a different font, make it smaller, bigger, bolder – and then delete it. Things like this.

Thing is, I find it hard to get that distance. I might still be tense or angry even after trying these techniques. When you’re immersed in a marriage break up you do get tense and angry from time to time, like when your ex posts on Facebook that he’s had a tough year and you just want to scream YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TOUGH IS SUNSHINE!

There is no point, I know.

So I’m relying on the therapy to help me keep my dignity by giving me techniques to distance myself from every day stresses and annoyances, like a 9 year old screaming at the X box and waking his sister up, or an 8 year old refusing to put his own washing away because he can’t be bothered and I’m annoying him. When I want to just scream, I use the mindfulness or the diffusion, or both, because I don’t have time to stand around screaming and being angry. And I don’t want to end up near that edge again.

Today my therapist finally hit on a visualisation technique I can really get to grips with. I told her I was angry and wanted to blow shit up, so she told me to imagine a cartoon character and Wile E Coyote came instantly into my mind. She told me to imagine he had a pump, and was attaching it to a word associated with something causing me stress. She told me to imagine him pumping and pumping and blowing that word up bigger and bigger until it was swollen and distorted until BANG! It bursts.

This made me feel a lot better. So we sat and discussed the many ways Wile E Coyote cans himself in Road Runner, (off a cliff, a bow and arrow, tying something to train tracks,dynamite, ACME Batman outift etc), and I came home armed with several ways to diffuse negative thoughts and emotions and get them out of my head. Ways that make me smile.

I’m grateful that I have this support, and I know what I’m learning now will help me well into the future with many different events and life stresses. I’m hopeful it will keep me well away from that ubiquitous edge, and they are techniques I can pass on to my children to help them to deal with stress too. The NHS is a bloody wonderful thing, and I seriously hope we don’t see it dismantled and privatised during the next four and a half years, but I have a horrible feeling we will #putsdavidcamerononacatapult

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