Part 1 - How it Began

A blurry Prince Charles visits in the rain

At the beginning of August 2012, I had a very traumatic experience at work.  This resulted in me being officially off work with stress for a full twelve months followed by a period of claiming sickness benefits (which is still the case now). This has proved to be a very difficult and traumatic episode in my life, although I am quite proud of myself for retaining my sanity (just about) intact and managing to fill a lot of my time productively despite feeling really awful a lot of the time – tenacity I believe is the word; some would say downright stubbornness but what really kept me going through the darkest hours and still does, is an absolute determination not to let the bastards grind me down.

From a practical point of view, the situation was ended in August 2013 by my employer dismissing me on grounds of incapacity due to ill health.  This is of course ironic seeing as they made me ill in the first place, but I was just glad it was over.  I felt relieved and that I should now get on with looking to the future except I didn’t actually feel much better.  Very few of the symptoms which had plagued me since summer 2012 had gone.  True, I no longer felt such a heightened sense of tension all the time like I did in the early days, but to this day, I still don’t sleep properly, I feel tired almost all the time, I have very little energy, regularly have to fight feelings of depression and hopelessness, and I find it hard to concentrate on anything that requires more than the minimum amount of brain power. 

Worrying river levels...

The trigger for me actually becoming ill with stress was preceded by a series of unfortunate incidents which started a month earlier.  The first of these occurred on 9^th July when I got caught in really terrible flooding going home from work.  Due to the uniqueness of the summer of 2011, my partner and I had already decided there were two types of weather - rain and not rain.

Even in the context of a dreadful washout summer though, the event was so unusual and freaky that it made national headlines and there were untold YouTube clips of the so-called ‘flash flooding’ that hit our town that fateful afternoon, and this is after severe river flooding only a few weeks before which had rendered the ground totally saturated. The previous flood that occurred on 22^nd June resulted in several businesses, including most of the pubs, (one of which was our local) having to close and predicted to remain so for months.  The situation was seen as so dire that HRH Prince Charles visited the town with his BiC cronies and the predictable accompanying media circus.  Ironically, it rained all day when he came and everyone anxiously watched the river levels rising but the water just stopped short of spilling over the banks before it eventually ceased raining at about 7 p.m.  And to add insult to irony, it was the following Monday that the freaky event occurred. 

As I got in my car to come home from work that day, just by chance as I was switching radio channels, I heard the latest travel news mentioning my home town and the words ‘main road shut, ... avoid if possible... don’t go there’.  There is only one main road through my town which sits alongside the canal, river and railway line for much of the length of the valley. What was I to do?

I considered trying the back routes but reasoned everyone else would do that too and I don’t really know them too well.  Then I thought of driving to the next main town but in the end I decided to drive to the next sizeable town on the rail route and get the train from there.  It took an hour and a half to drive to this station, then the next train that was due was a no show, and there were all sorts of weird stories abounding about which stations were open and not open and whether trains were actually running.  I got chatting to a couple of women also going to the same place as me and we decided to stick together for safety. 

We managed to ascertain that our home station was open although it had apparently been shut due to flooding earlier.  One of these women had only recently moved into the area and when we got off the train, she didn’t appear to have a clue where she was and so I promised to guide her home.  As we got to the station approach road, there was an absolute deluge (and I ain’t even exaggerating) cascading form the small road directly opposite. 

We simply stood and stared in horror for a few minutes, rooted to the spot trying to take in what we were seeing. The road was absolutely strewn with stone and rubble and men standing around possibly trying to deal with it.  It was really quite scary.  I suggested going through the park which lies between the river and the canal just before the town centre, as the road would be blocked. My companion was obsessed with getting her feet wet and I had to practically drag her by the hand saying ‘yes!  If you want to get home, you will get your feet wet’.  We struggled slowly through the park, picking our way carefully through the less flooded areas and hanging onto trees and railings where we could for extra security. 

When we got to the other end of the park, I decided it might be safer back on the road rather than the alternative of carrying on alongside the canal, and also I wanted a nosey.  We walked up the street leading to the main road and I pointed my companion in the right direction for home which was literally two minutes’ away. I saw  a couple of people I know and spent a while stood with them, gawping in wonder at the lake which is usually the main A road and listening to their urban myths as to the cause of this flash flood which included a dam bust  and a reservoir catastrophe.  The main road was awash with mud and debris all the way along, with more workmen cleaning up. I finally got through to my partner on the phone after trying for two hours, and attempted to get across to him how awful the situation was – he promised to take care but sounded very nonchalant and like he didn’t believe me when I tried to explain the extent of the destruction that had taken place.

I was wearing linen trousers and sandals as the forecast for that day was for mainly fine weather with the odd shower so of course I was filthy and wet when I got home. I got in the bath and got washed and dried and changed my clothes. I then managed to make myself a coffee before I collapsed on the sofa - I was so exhausted having taken two and a half hours to get home. I Logged onto social media  and was quite distressed to discover that many of my friends had been affected directly and there was sheer devastation in homes and businesses in the town centre including our local pub, and only two and a bit weeks since the last floods (which may have been exaggerated but this one was not!) and that one of my closet friend’s house had been totally flooded out – she sounded quite distraught.  And what was really freaky was that she lives about a mile uphill from town!

I made a quick salad for tea and my partner got home just as I was eating. He had walked the last seven miles home as the train was too slow!  Our valley was media central again, with both local and national news coverage.  The official cause of the sudden floods was simply billed as excessive rain in a short space of time or a ‘cloudburst’.

I was very badly emotionally affected by this incident. At first, I just felt lucky to have got home safe and sound, even though I was physically shaking, cold, hungry and exhausted. It was only later that I realised I was actually in shock.

Things had calmed down the next day but I decided to wear wellies in case it was still muddy and keep them in the car in future.   I had to run to catch the train to retrieve my car.

The train station as depicted in my collage

On the train,some silly bitch with a smug smile on her face said ‘you can tell who’s going to the Yorkshire Show because we’re all wearing wellies’. 

‘I’m not going to the show,’ I snapped back at her, ‘I had to abandon my car last night due to the floods’.  She said something else in some snotty voice and I retorted ‘some of us have to work!’ 

I was so angry I didn’t trust myself to stay sitting near her so I got up and went into the adjoining carriage  When I arrived at my office, I noted that my boss was in work but at a different location. I did consider ringing her to talk about it but due to other work pressures I did not get round to it; it occurred to me that if it had been one of my staff I would have made a point of making sure they were okay but I tried not to dwell on it.  After all I reflected, when was the last time she actually came to see me or gave me a call other than to talk about some work she wanted doing rather than to just ask how I was?  Why was I expecting today to be any different?

The next day, Wednesday, I received an e-mail concerning an Invitation to Tender for some work with the local College.  We had been expecting this but we had not expected the deadline of just 1 week we were given to submit the completed documents.  I rearranged my diary and informed my team that I would work at home on the tender the following day to get as much done as possible.

Thursday morning I felt really drained and could hardly move my legs bit didn’t think much of it at first, reasoning that I was just very tired. As  I didn’t work Fridays  I told myself I just needed to get through the day and do as much as I could on the tender for the College so I got down to work early on. However, by lunchtime I had developed a headache and I felt progressively worse throughout the afternoon becoming very achy and shivery. 

I tried to ring my boss twice during the day as I had not spoken to her all week and wanted to update her on what I was doing. She rang me back at 4 o’clock by which time I really felt I couldn’t work anymore and was on my way upstairs for a rest. We had a brief chat about the tender and I told her that I had been feeling unwell all day.  She asked me what was wrong and I said it felt like I was coming down with a virus and that I was going to bed in the hope that I would catch it early.  I asked her if she’d heard about the floods and she just said ‘yes’ in a very abrupt fashion making it obvious there was no point me talking about if any further .  I also mentioned that I had promised to help a friend on the Friday whose house had been devastated by the floods and she said something to the effect that I’d better rest rather than going to help my friend out, so that I would be better to come to work the following week, then she cut the conversation short as she was ‘really busy’.

As it turned out, I was ill for about a week. Having rested all weekend, I tried to get up for work Monday morning but could not stand up without feeling dizzy and disorientated.  I felt really bad that I couldn’t get to work bearing in mind what still needed to be done on the College tender and I spent about an hour on the phone and e-mail to let people know I was unable to come into work and to pass on the work I had done, which I felt was in a very first draft stage.

By midweek, I didn’t feel much better so phoned in work again; I rang my boss’s mobile as she was in a meeting off site and she said that the College tender was going in that morning and everything was fine and asked me if I would I be off sick the rest of the week and when I said probably, she again said that was fine and I didn’t need to ring in again.  I was therefore left with the impression that there was nothing to worry about and I could concentrate on getting well.

I was in bed most of the time all week, with my sleep being disturbed by the relentless clean up outside (still, at least the drains were being cleared).  My main source of entertainment was keeping up with the latest news via social media.  It turned out that the brewery was putting the pub up for sale rather than pay for refurbishment, along with two other pubs in the valley for ‘commercial reasons’ which was met with predictable outrage. An online petition was set up and people had  lots of ideas about what to do ranging from lobbying the brewery  to arranging a customer ‘buy out’, to regulars using their alleged ‘royal connections’ (a reference to someone claiming to have made bezzie mates with Bonnie Prince Charlie when he visited a couple of weeks back). A ‘Save the pub’ page was started, a meeting called for the following Sunday and ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ seeped beyond the valley borders.  The Mayor arranged for the press to meet interested parties outside the pub.  This was on top of news reports from an already planned meeting in the Town Hall where locals harangued the council over lack of preparedness for flooding and the pub landlord being interviewed for local television. 

Pub door showing flood water mark

The following Sunday was my first full normal day since coming down with the virus. It was a very uncharacteristically warm not-rain-day.  My partner and I went out for a walk round town and sat in the park for a while then we went to the meeting at our local pub.  We caught up with some friends that we hadn’t seen since before the floods due to my incapacity and my partner looking after me and we had quite a positive meeting about the options for the future. This turned out to be a pleasant blue-sky interlude however, as things got worse for me when I returned to work the following day…