Part 5 - The Early Years

"I Miss You" - Blink 182

I had a pretty easy start to life. My Mother didn’t go back to work until I entered school, and although my Father was often absent due to his R.A.F. career, my Mom did a pretty good job of bringing me up. My Grandparents were around a lot too, as previously mentioned, so I was a warm child, who always felt very loved. My Dad was the disciplinarian of my parents, and during his many work trips away, I would often play this to my own advantage, and was probably a little bit of a handful for my poor old Mom. But we did get along great when push came to shove, and I never felt like I missed out on anything.

The first event that I believe played a part in ‘developing’ my illness, occurred when I was approximately ten years old. My Mother seemed to be going deaf in her old age, despite only being just over thirty years of age. She went to visit her GP to try and rectify the problem, and was sent to a specialist for further tests. She had an acoustic neuroma (tumour). The size of a golf ball. It was interfering with her ear, and that was what was causing the deafness. I have spoken to her about this in more recent years, and it seemed that although her condition was rather serious, she never experienced a single head-ache or migraine. She went to the doctors for a hearing-aid, and walked away with the knowledge that she would have to endure major surgery. Luckily for her, this was to happen over one of the many Summer school holidays where I was staying with my Grandparents. She wouldn’t need to worry about my care whilst she went through this very difficult process. I visited her in hospital only once. It was deemed too upsetting for me at such an early age. She had half of her head shaved and filled with ugly metal staples, and, because the doctors had to touch some of the nerves in her face during the removal of her tumour, the whole right side of her face was completely immobile. She’d lost her hearing in her right ear forever, as they had to remove her ear-drum. She still can’t use cotton-buds to clean her ears now, for fear that without her inner ear, she’ll end up poking her brain. It took her a long time to recover from this procedure, and many years to gain anywhere near normal mobility in her face. We no longer have any photographs from this period in our lives, as she wants no reminders of what she went through. We laugh now, when she can’t whistle or drink through a straw, but at the time it was a massive upheaval for us all.

It hit my Dad amazingly hard. He’d already applied for voluntary redundancy from the Air Force, and due to the circumstances, they allowed him early release. I didn’t see much of him during this time, but have since discovered that this was the first event that really emotionally shook him. He adores my Mother, even though he sometimes finds it incredibly difficult to show it, and the thought of loosing her threw him to the edge.

This was compounded by the fact that during this time, one of his sisters (Aunty Number 2) experienced a mental breakdown and had to be sectioned. During her period of hospitalisation she finally admitted that she had been sexually abused for many years, during her childhood, by her Father. She had never spoke of this before, and only wanted to find some closure on the matter so she could find the strength to leave her first husband, who was extremely abusive. Although my Dad had not been close with this parents, and had very little contact with them, he was devastated. I’m not sure anyone really knows how to come to terms with something like that, especially when already under extreme pressure due to a spousal illness. My Father decided to cut all contact with his family from that moment on, and it lasted for well over ten years.

I say this was an event that influenced my life, but I wasn’t really around to see many of this, and, in the case of my Aunty, was too young to fully understand. But the crushing blow to my Dad was the beginning of his unravelling. An unravelling that I would majorly contribute to over the coming years.