Feeling down and depressed

Feel so depressed

[8SofMB]

Good morning,

You've said nothing about the situation you find yourself in or how you arrived there, but having posted here I assume its health/illness related. Life can me massively traumatic and upsetting when it goes wrong. There is always an answer and it always involves talking , you've just taken a very big step perhaps the biggest one.

My top 3 most important things to consider are 1. Find someone to talk to. 2. Find someone to talk to, and you guessed it 3. Find someone to talk to.

Also, when times are good and easy not many people think about mental health, but working on it all through your life is vital. Regardless of the relationship you're in or anything else you do, treating yourself to something you exclusively enjoy to the exclusion of everything else is a positive thing to do. Its not selfish, its confirms that you are important to you and deserve to feel special even if its for a short time.

I really do wish you the best.

Pete

[Rhyl1 Partner Moderator ICUsteps]

If you can’t find anyone to talk to please reach out to ICUsteps through our contact page at icusteps.org/contactus

[qmcsurvivor]

Hi,

So sorry you feel like this currently but remember our moods change so better times will return. Depression is treatable and you need to speak to someone even a person you don't know like The Samaritains (116 123) it is free and helps to release your thoughts and feelings.

Everyones situation here is different I was in ICU on a ventilator with Covid 18 months ago and I do get down at times but this has improved, I was also frontline NHS staff working in mental health.

Stay safe depression does lift and if things are really bad each NHS trust has a crisis team.

[Tedsdad]

Everyone here has been through this. PROMISE!!!!!!!And when things start to get better many of us choose to hang around here to help others who like you at the beginning of you recovery. Obviously as you don’t feel safe to share no one can connect directly and to be fair as the details of how we all ended up in ICU differ and the experience in there differ and what we come home to and have to face differs no one can understand the whole of anyone else’s circumstances But there are many people here will understand much of yours even if you feel talons at the moment.This is a safe place full,of people who have a lot of idea of what you are going through. Trust the folks here they are here either because like you they need help or because they want to give help. And if you listen to those in the first category hopefully it won’t be too long before you are in the second.

[Hidden]

I apologise for the lack of explanation , I cannot seem to control how I feel. Recently it's been a few months now, I accidently broke my ankle and ended up in hospital a few times . The first time I was taken to theatre then only to find out a few days later that no operation had been done, then called back after a few weeks for an operation, in the meantime I've been in a cast . After that operation I was called back for an xray only to find the operation was not successful so was kept in for few days before they could find a bed on a ward for another operation . The day of the operation apparently the surgery had only just started and I cardiac arrested and they lost me 3 times so the operation was aborted and I was on a life support for 4 days then on ICU for almost a week, but things which I believe I remembered I've now been told had not happened it's all in my head. I was then put on a ward and taken to theatre the following morning to have manual ankle fusion as I could only have local anaesthetic . The ward was 75% patients with mental issues to the point that not even the nurses could cope as there was screaming constantly that I just left the following day as I told them I couldn't cope with it. Although I left and was told that would be it, I am actually under the care of the actual consultant who began the operation and I am beginning to walk but I cannot seem to piece everything together I remember clearly seeing a bright light and being pulled back. I remember things about nurses on ICU but they apparently are not real, so I'm so confused so low , I have good support but it doesn't seem to help. I don't want to do anything or go anywhere I'm always tearful and cannot snap myself out of the way I feel.

[Hidden in reply to Hidden]

Most of the people posting on this site suffered ICU delerium which is very common. I personally was living in a parallel world in various situation which appeared true to me. Quite often the dreams were violent and involved hospital staff, also took place in strange locations ,such as a marquee, or different countries , I was in Scotland France Cyprus for example. The dreams were vivid and most of them I remember but am not haunted. I stopped dreaming once I came round in ICU and my nurse said I had been in the hospital all the time. I had the delerium when sedated and on a ventilator for 5 weeks with Covid. Also when first admitted to ICU with sepsis.

When I was finally out of ICU and in a holding ward before being transfered to a community hospital for rehab, there was a dementia patient in the ward which made it quite a difficult few days until he was allowed home.

Hope you get over your experience soon.

[Tedsdad]

I can see why you feel alone alienated and confused,

In my case the original operation was succesful although more complicated than first planned and I think would have been put home and recovering if I had not developed a blood clot in my heart which led to a catalogue of other complaints all potentially fatal in their own right. Kidney failure. Collapsed lung emergency tracheostomy which refused to heal etc etc.

Somehow because I never thought about whether what went wrong was anyone’s fault I never had any problem accepting that all of these complications just happened maybe because when I understood that I had been to the other side and had a lot of people not done the right thing for a long time Inwouldnt be here at all.

So a total acceptance of what happened meant I only felt grateful for the oitcome even though the original operation itself a d the complications which followed were obviously different things. I always thought that considering the operation a success was a bit odd when all of the complications that followed it happened.

As with most if the people here I cannot possibly offer any properly informed advice but it does seem as if one of the things that is causing you so much difficulty is coping with the reality that not all operations are succesful and then on top of that sorting out which of the memories you had in ICU were real and which weren’t.

I remember thinking that I was told before my operation that 5 per cent of the people who had this operation died but if I didn’t have the operation of my aorta had ruptured and I was not in a hopsital at the time that I had no chance of recovery whatsoever and die a very painful,death. Even though my problem was totally asymptomatic.

And what I realised after was that the figures quoted to me were in effect a summary of what had already happened. That in effect that had I not recovered the next person offered this operation would have been told there was a 6 percent chance of dying, And had it gone without me dying there would have been a four per cent chance. I don’t know what the position would be in my case, It was made very clear to me that I had actually died and been brought back and from my records it looked as if it happened a couple,of,times. So regarding having been told what the odds were as a summary of past experience and a prediction based on that rather than as a way of making me feel better about what was due to happen. A sort of surgical Ladbrokes helped me cope with the temptation to get emotionally involved and Josef abiut what had happened.

As regards recovering from ICU I have taken a really analytical view of my memories from there, I have three categories. 1 Things that definitely happened 2 things that definitely didn’t happen 3 things that due to my lack of total consciousness seemed real but only got into my mind because I wasn’t in control of my faculties and were only there because this lack of total awareness led me to misinterpret them.

Notice I am not saying that things in the third category didn’t happen.The really sad but is that some of the things in the third category were really rather nice, like my greyhounds coming in to see me dressed as nurses walking in their back legs with covid masks on taking my temperature winking at me and sayng “don’t tell em “dad” As much as I wished that this didn’t happen it goes into the third category as does all of the staff coming to work on Hawaii 5 0 canoes. And some of the very odd unpleasant things that didn’t happen.It took me weeks to accept that I had been in Basildon all of the time but as I managed to move HMS norfolk and Rotterdam and the West Indies and New Zealand and an operation on a helicopter flown by Prince William into the third category consciously I could see that this was a way of making sense of it, And I have deliberately faced up,to any of the memories that troubled me and asked my self if I was sure about them because of how real they seemed to a me that was not really in full,possession of my faculties or because I really saw them happen when in fact I might have had no sense other perhaps than a sense of smell working and I Made sense of that smell and wove a fantasy round it and then saw what I had fantasised.

Of course although we understand things that other folks don’t we can’t understand all of the details of each other's journey, they are all,unique.So none of us can actually tell you anything, I think I was very fortunate to be as mentally unscarred as I am, Atone stage it looked as if I might end up,in a vegetative state. Fortunately this has been avoided .

I had no counselling to help me get over the experience other than a ten minute chat with the surgeon when I came around and I don’t know if it would have available even if I had needed it