Following on from last weeks suicide post

I just wanted to publicly thank two people who saved my life in 1997.

I was in my first year at University with all the stresses, excitement and intoxication that this entails.  I was discovering who I was, and who I wasn’t.  I had no idea, but the freedom to be anyone I wanted was liberating and terrifying at the same time.

I was in sparkling new halls of residence sharing a flat with a couple of lovely girls who I was friends with through the first year, but drifted away from when we moved out in the second year.

I had great neighbours and a host of luscious people to befriend.

My neighbours in the flat directly above me caught my attention.  I can’t remember quite how we all met, but I am pretty sure there were buckets, alcohol and chair-dancing involved.  They too were 2 lovely girls, one looked like Kate Winslet with a smile that lit up the whole room and the other looked like Cameron Diaz even at 8am lectures.  I was smitten.

We quickly became good friends and spent many happy hours talking rubbish, eating strange concoctions and getting uproariously drunk.  When they were home and wanted to call me they would stamp on the floor (which was the ceiling of my room), when I wanted to call them I would bang on the ceiling with my broom.  We sometimes used the in-house intercom, but it wasn’t as funny as trying to tap out the rhythm of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees with a wobbly broom handle.

Occasionally they would send down aid packages tied to a belt which they swung down from their window to mine, other times it was notes asking to borrow sugar.

One time, I remember them asking for help with preparing a chicken to cook.  They couldn’t bear to touch it as it reminded them of babies or something.  I was a vegetarian, so naturally I danced it around the kitchen like some kind of macabre Buster Keaton.

I am talking about these two wondrous people as if they were one person.  They weren’t quite that inseparable, but they both saved my life together.

I had been simpering after a fellow from the SCUBA dive club for months and was eagerly awaiting his return from the recent break.  I met up with him at a local bar (having filled myself up so much with Dutch courage I was leaking) and he let me down gently, saying he was with someone else.

This would not normally matter, but I was not a normal person back then.  I went back to my halls to talk to my lovely neighbours, but they weren’t in.

I was distraught, destroyed, and grief-stricken.  Convinced that I was a bad person that didn’t deserve friends or boyfriends, I staggered back to my room and attacked my left arm with the blade from a disposable razor.  I wasn’t trying to kill myself at that point, just wanting to let the pain out somehow and seeing the blood flow down my arm seemed to be a physical outpouring of the pain I felt inside.  I wrote a note about it, and sat in my room wondering why no one was coming.  Then my head cleared a little and I thought “I need to talk to someone about this”, so I staggered back up the stairs to my neighbours.

Bless them, I can’t imagine what they must have thought to find me on the doorstep tear-streaked, blood-soaked with a dozen slashes across one forearm, but they took me in and cleaned me up.  They held my hands and cried with me and told me I should get the cuts stitched, but I refused to go to a doctor.  I don’t remember much after that.

Later that week, or month or year (I’m still not sure when), they sat me down and told me that they didn’t think they could share a house with me (we had planned to move in to a shared house in our second year) and that I needed professional help.

I was hurt and angry, but I knew deep down that they were right.  They could not rescue me from myself, and I could not expect that of them.  I went to the doctor, took a deep breath and showed her my scars.

Thus began my journey into counseling, anti-depressants and psychotherapy which I believe has saved my life.  I started healing myself from the day my friends saved me.

I lost touch with my friends after university, but thanks to the amazing power of Facebook I found them just around the time I moved overseas.  I don’t think I ever properly thanked them for what they did for me, so this is for them.

Thank you Sian and Julia, you saved my life.

10 top tips for stress-free childbirth

I emailed this to a friend a few years ago, as she was pregnant with her first baby and terrified.  She asked for realistic but not scary information about labour, so I sent her this.  Someone recently asked me about it again, so I dredged through old emails and found it for her.  Thought it made a good blog post too.:

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1. Remember that the contractions usually start small and take a long time to build up. Don't leap out of your seat at the first twinge and spend the next 12 hours pacing round the house timing everything and worrying that they aren't regular yet. Take some paracetamol and have a long soak in a hot bath.

2. The general rule of thumb is that you'll dilate 1cm per hour once the contractions start, and the point at which you'll feel like you need to go to the hospital is usually about 1/2 way. If you can wait longer, it's very reassuring to hear the midwife say "oooh, you're at 7cm!" when you arrive.

3. Time passes very differently when you're in labour. You go into another dimension where everyone around you feels like it's taking years, and yet you'll wonder how 6 hours managed to go past before you've had a chance to ask what time it is.

4. Every contraction is bringing you one step closer to your baby and they DO end. The finish line is always in sight, you just have to keep focussed on it, and stop staring at your feet, wondering if you can go another step. You can.

5. Anything you say during labour is allowed. It is an unwritten law of childbirth that you can blame your husband or midwife for everything from your grazed knee through to the Rwandan genocide, if it helps you focus through the contraction, anything goes.

6. Feel free to order people around. Your hubby (or birthing partner) is there to serve your every whim, no matter how bizarre they may seem. However, if you have gas for pain relief, some of your more outlandish demands may not be possible (or legal).

7. Make a birth plan but be prepared to be flexible. There's nothing worse than having your heart set on a birthing pool, but your instincts taking over and turning you into a hyrdophobic wildcat on the day. Have a good idea of what you want to do, and more importantly what you DON'T want, but explore all your options, so you know what to shout for when you're halfway through the door and you decide the room smells wrong.

8. Listen to your midwife, she has been through this a hundred times at least, and she will remain calm and professional no matter how much your head spins round. Your partner however, may well be a gibbering mess and incapable of thought, let alone important advice.

9. Have your baby placed straight onto your chest as soon as it's born, it's the gold medal ceremony at the olympics and you're on the top podium :)

10. Sleep as much now as you can, and get walking when you're awake. Do exercises to get baby into the correct position for birth and build up your general fitness. You're about to do the hardest thing you've ever done, but it's more satisfying than winning the London Marathon and climbing Mount Everest all rolled into one.