Insomnia Crazy part the second

The agony of not sleeping at all (again) during the inky hours does pay off when you can find gems like this Youtube clip.

The music transports me back to 1980 and Miss Smith's primary school classroom where the girls of the lunchtime "disco club" practiced their moves in preparation for Moscow Olympic glory.
I don't think we ever matched the choreographic brilliance that was, evidently, Finnish and "Tisco Tansi"...

(Make sure you stick around viewing until at least 3:14...those moves can't be legal for someone that age)

Hmmm. What now?

The local Christmas lights have been taken down...

and so has our Christmas twig...

and our personal Christmas stuffing (on Boxing Day) is over for another year...



so I guess it's 2008. What now?

It's traditional at the start of every year to think back over past events and make an inventory. Well, since the past 2 years have been—very poorly—described here in this blog, I thought I might go back just a little further in time. Please don't crowd the Tardis, there's room for all!

It's been 10 years since A was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. In fact, A only remembers this because the timing coincided with our great friends Rachel and Mike's wedding day, when she spent the morning of a very warm Sydney summers day in a very, very hot bath shivering, and then later with absolutely no recollection of having read the Bible passage at the ceremony. (There's no link with illness and the wedding in case you are wondering!) 

I say that it's been 10 years since diagnosis because the illness was a combatant in life for much longer. And 10 years is a very long time, especially when you're depressed. And these past 10 years have been the hardest imaginable and far surpasses the anguish and grief of watching her folks suffer and die from cancer. Churchill's 'black dogs' were A's snarling mongrels also. 
Lewis Wolpert  wrote:

It was the worst experience of my life. More terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer. I am ashamed to admit that my depression felt worse than her death but it is true. I was in a state that bears no resemblance to anything I had experienced before. It was not just feeling very low, depressed in the commonly used sense of the word. I was seriously ill.

Professor Lewis Wolpert, CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Malignant sadness: the anatomy of depression, London, Faber and Faber, 2001

So, what now?
The visible darkness is still there; the dogs still occasionally snapping at the heels, but their nip is, thankfully (how thankfully!) less tearing these days.

I'm writing this to thank you, our friends, for still being our friends despite the many times when A has not been easy to be around, and for supporting C when he needs it to cope with living with an ill wife;

To implore you to seek medical help until you find the right treatment for you.

To  encourage you to look after those friends who are similarly so unwell. It will be costly to you as it will be hard, but you may just save your friend's life;
and, because I love my husband, and my God.

Though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the LORD;

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord, is my strength;

he makes my feet like the deer’s;

he makes me tread on my high places.

(written by the prophet Habakkuk (ch. 3), who evidently had a hard time of life too.)

PS. I've learned that it's a really, really good idea to choose with great wisdom which My Friend the Chocolate Cake tracks you listen to when you're not well. Great, great band....but with some seriously endorphine-numbing music. David Bridie, do you need my self-help booklist?