243: Life Update Volume 7

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 243 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/243.

Before we get started, I want to mention that I’m currently taking on new clients at the moment. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders, disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and poor body image, exercise compulsion and overexercise, and also helping clients to regain their periods. If you want help in any of these areas or simply want support improving your relationship with food and body and exercise, then please get in contact. You can head to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I am a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food or body or exercise.

This week on the show, it’s a solo episode, and it’s me doing a life update. This is the seventh time of doing one of these. The last one was back in August 2021, and there’s a lot to catch up on. I made reference in my end-of-year roundup with my favourite books and documentaries and that kind of thing to a couple things that had happened, and I definitely want to go into it in more detail here.

00:01:53

Ali’s injury + recovery after being thrown from her horse

To start with, back in November – it was very early November – Ali was just about to ride her horse, and she just got on and she then got bronked off her horse and landed on her elbow and her head. She went to hospital and they gave her an x-ray and she was initially told that they just couldn’t see anything on the x-ray.

All the people in the hospital were super excited to have a look at the x-ray because her whole elbow had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit, so they were really excited to see and were expecting to see – I think, to use the words of one of the people there, this really ‘gnarly’ x-ray with suspected really badly broken bones, and when they looked at the x-ray they just couldn’t see anything. They said to her, “We don’t know what’s happened; it doesn’t look like anything’s broken. We’re going to put you in a cast and then we’ll have a consultant call you on Monday”, because it happened on Friday.

So she went away obviously in a lot of pain but thinking, “Okay, maybe I’ve dodged a bullet here. Maybe this thing isn’t going to be as bad as I originally imagined.” That night, we were meant to be going to a spa hotel for my birthday. That didn’t happen. We called it off. I was also planning on going to Portugal the following week for the first time going overseas since the pandemic to go and see a friend and hang out with him for a week for my birthday, and that also didn’t happen.

But yeah, she then received a call back on the Monday, and when she received the call, the person was not in the same agreement as everyone else when they looked at the x-ray. They said, “We can see some bone fractures as part of it, and what we think is that you’ve done something with your tricep. We want you to come in and have an MRI so we can confirm what’s going on.”

She did that, and it confirmed that she had a tricep avulsion fracture. Basically what that means is the tricep – as the name would suggest, ‘tri’ is three, so there’s three bits of muscle that are attached to your elbow, and they had been torn away from her elbow. I think two of them had been torn away and the other was hanging on by a thread. Ali did some research on this, and it’s a really rare injury, especially considering she didn’t break anything else; there were no broken bones, it was just the tricep that came away. It’s linked often with predisposing factors, and Ali has rheumatoid arthritis, and that affects the connective tissue. So that can be part of the reason why it happened for her. But it meant that it was something serious and she had to then go in to have surgery for that.

So she went in for the surgery on the Saturday, and that was definitely not a great experience. She woke up from surgery and, to put it mildly, the anaesthetist had fucked up. She woke up with no pain relief. She’d been given something so that she went under for the surgery, but when she woke up, she had excruciating pain in her arm. Then they spent the next couple of hours trying to pump her full of everything to take away the pain. Obviously, this was hugely traumatic. No-one wants to wake up from surgery and be in pain the way that she was. But to really rub salt in the wound, they then said to her, “Look, you’re going to need someone to come and pick you up here because we don’t have a bed available for you to stay the night.”

I had to pick her up from the hospital when she was clearly not in a state to be leaving the hospital; she was terrified about what would happen once the pain relief wore off and where she would end up with that. The first night, she was in huge amounts of agony for a lot of the night, so we were up for a lot of the night.

Ramsay, our son, who’s four, woke up with a nightmare, and he doesn’t really have nightmares – but obviously all connected to the fact that he knew his mum had gone in for surgery that day, and he had a nightmare and was just completely hysterical. Was in the bathroom, pushing the door so that we couldn’t get into the bathroom, and just completely beside himself where we couldn’t quite work out if he was asleep or awake or what was going on.

Ali was able to coax him out and get him back to bed, but it took the best part of an hour, and she had the patience of a saint in that moment where she’s in excruciating pain to then sit with him and be with him and help him to move through that and get back to bed.

The next day she was in a pretty terrible way, and in a lot of pain. After the surgery, when we were leaving the hospital, it was late at night, so there was no pharmacy or anything open at the hospital, and they gave her – I think this is the way it is in the UK – enough medication for the night. Then the next day, it’s like, “Here’s your prescription. You need to go and get this prescription to pick up the medication you need.” So I went to get the prescription for her, and at the pharmacy they said, “We can’t give you this. It’s been written incorrectly. One of these things is a controlled substance, and it has to be written in a very specific way, so we can’t give you this.”

We then had to go back to A&E and spent a couple of hours in A&E when Ali did not really want to be doing that and was obviously in a lot of pain, to then go and see someone to say, “Hey, we need more of this medication and we also need a new prescription.” So we did that and then the next day I went to the pharmacy again, and the prescription was also written incorrectly, so they wouldn’t give me the drugs again. The thankful part of this was it was now Monday, so we were able to go to the local GP surgery and they were able to finally sort it out. But it was a lot of additional stress and a lot of time at hospitals that we really didn’t need and Ali really didn’t need.

She then was having terrible times at night and being in agony, and that was definitely when things were at their worst. I can’t remember – it was like day 3 or day 4 after the surgery or whatever it was – I said, “Why don’t you have more of the medication at nighttime?” She was having way, way less than what she’d been prescribed. So I said, “I will set an alarm and I’ll get up at midnight and I can give you the medication, and then hopefully you’ll finally be able to get a better night’s sleep”, because she was functioning off very little amount of sleep.

So we did that, and then at about three in the morning, she woke up and was like, “I just feel really nauseous and I feel horrible.” I fed her some bread and some banana, and that dampened down the nausea and she was able to get back to sleep, and then woke up at 7 or 8 a.m. and proceeded to be sick and was vomiting for the next 8 to 10 hours.

Then after that point, she just could not take any pain relief. Any time she tried to take anything, even paracetamol or ibuprofen, it would make her nauseous and vomit. So basically from about four days after surgery, she was just dealing with the pain and wasn’t able to take any pain relief.

It then got worse, as she started to get really terrible headaches and neck and shoulder pain. This would be acute and get much, much worse any time she would eat. Something about the chewing motion and eating would bring on this horrible headache and neck pain, just completely debilitating. We went to see her osteopath; she’s been seeing him now for the last five or six years and he’s been great with so many different things. He looked at her and said, “Your whole neck and head is out of alignment.”

It’s likely that she had concussion and whiplash from falling off the horse that hadn’t been picked up, and this just got really bad about four or five days post-surgery. Then for the next many, many weeks, she would be going to the osteo once, sometimes twice a week. He would be correcting it and slowly making improvements, and then it would slowly slip back. It was getting better, but it was just this ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process.

That was where we lived for a long time, and it was a really terrible, terrible time with her and how it was feeling. It was awful; she had one day – I think this was about three or four weeks in – where she finally started to feel a little better, and then she had a fall and caught her whole weight on her bad arm, and then that swelled up again and she was in agony for another couple of days. Then there was a lot of worry about “Have I completely undone the surgery? Have I ripped off the tricep that’s just been reattached to the bone?”

We didn’t have a very good experience in terms of the aftercare with the NHS. Two weeks after, she went back and they were mentioning putting a brace on her arm. That appointment lasted all of about six minutes. She felt very rushed by the guy; the guy was moving her arm, creating huge amounts of pain. She didn’t feel like she was able to ask him anything. And then they put this very heavy, cumbersome brace on her arm that was so big that you had to really tighten the straps to the point where it was causing lots of pain and lots of swelling. This was worse than when she was in the cast, or potentially worse than with nothing on. That then caused its own issues.

It was about at this point or shortly after this point that Ali’s mum came down and stayed with us. This was a huge, huge, huge help. Between Ali’s lack of right arm, which is her dominant arm, and all of the debilitating headaches and the pain and her being completely exhausted and really not able to function, we were desperately in need of some help. She stayed for three weeks, and I am so, so grateful that she was able to come down and be with us in that way and to be able to look after Ali, to be able to be with Rams at points when I wasn’t able to be there. It was the assistance we really needed.

As I said, we didn’t really get great follow-up support from the NHS, so we just decided to go private because it didn’t feel like we knew what direction things were going, and Ali was very concerned about the fact that she’d had a fall and that there was still huge amounts of swelling and pain and what all of that meant. So she had an appointment, and the appointment was great. They did an x-ray as part of it.

But as part of the x-ray, that was still somewhat inconclusive, and she was told, “We need to do an MRI, but that can’t happen for a couple of weeks. We will then know whether the surgery’s been successful or not.” That was a pretty worrying time for a couple of weeks where she just really didn’t know what had happened.

Finally, she was able to get the MRI, and that was able to confirm that everything is as it should be and it’s healing properly, so that was a really big relief.

This is something that’s going to take a long time to get her full strength and range of movement back. We’re looking at 9 to 12 months from the surgery. At this stage, Ali is mostly back to her usual self, emotionally at least, and energy-wise and that kind of thing. But there is still pain, there is still limited range of movement in terms of being able to bend her arm properly and straighten her arm properly, and she’s not allowed to use her arm to lift up anything. So it’s going to take time for all of that to correct and for her to build up her strength. But we are feeling positive about that, and she is noticing improvements.

One of the things that happened as part of this is that Ali then rehomed her horse. I think when she realised that she was looking at the fact that she isn’t going to be riding for the best part of a year, she made the decision that she needed to part with the horse. This was a really, really tough thing for her to do, and it was something she wrestled with and then made the decision, and still there was a lot of, and probably still is a lot of, grief around that.

She’d spent three years getting the horse to a really good place, and she was just getting to the point where she was starting to have more fun and enjoy herself, and then the accident happened. But I think – and it was interesting; Ali and I had a chat about this earlier this week – it’s been a real blessing.

She is really happy that she’s had this lesson in being able to let go, but also, she’s noticed how much she’s enjoying the extra time and space, and that there isn’t the added stress of having to get to the horse X number of times a week and that being the thing that was monopolizing so much of her time, and the fact that when she would be there, Ramsay wasn’t particularly enjoying it. There was this undercurrent of stress that this thing was creating that I was aware of, but if I mentioned it, it kind of fell on deaf ears. It was only really through experiencing this that she was able to realise how much of an impact this was having. So I think it’s been quite freeing, and all of us are enjoying this.

She will definitely get back into riding again, and I imagine as soon as her arm is in a place that she can do that, that will be one of the first things that she does, but hopefully it’s not on a horse that is going to bronk her off with excitement, and it will be riding someone else’s horse as opposed to having a horse of her own.

I think reflecting on all of this, it’s truly appreciating how incredible the body is, and the body’s ability to heal, and also just seeing the resilience and the strength that Ali has had through this whole ordeal. I’ll get into this more as I go on, but there’s definitely been some really good things to come out of what was a pretty hellish time.

00:18:20

Update on Ramsay: kindy, behavioural changes, starting therapy

Coupled with all of this that was going on was stuff with Ramsay. Last year was pretty challenging with him. I made reference in the last life update to the fact that he’d been going to forest kindy and he’d been struggling with that, and we were at a point where we were about to increase it to three days, because it had been one day, and that was where we were at last time I did the podcast.

That just didn’t go particularly well. Rams has never been that much into other kids. When kids are young, you just don’t notice it so much because when you’ve got two one-year-olds or two-year-olds playing, they’re just doing parallel play. They’re not really interacting that much with other kids. He’s obviously an only child, so there’s that. And then we had the pandemic and the lockdowns, so again, even more isolation.

When things then started to open up a bit more last year and he was struggling, we originally thought this was just a lack of practicing, and when he could start to do more and do this more regularly, things would get better. Then, as I talked about in the last life update, he started doing kindy one day a week and he struggled with that. He never really took to it. He just didn’t want to be there at all. Actually, when we reflect, even when he would go to groups with Ali where she wasn’t leaving, he just wasn’t that into it and he would be saying “I don’t want to go.”

This was happening with kindy, where it would be on a Monday and the rest of the week he’d be telling us, “I don’t want to go to kindy.” Then Sunday he’d be really anxious and often be in tears, and trying to get him to go to sleep on a Sunday night, he’d just be saying “I don’t want to go to kindy.” It was this really big thing. Again, we just thought “He just needs a bit more practice with this.”

When we then upped it to three days a week, things rapidly got worse. He’s always been someone who enjoys doing toys on his own at home or doing puzzles, and what happened in September time and then October and November was he became unable to be with himself. You could just see this chaos within him. He would try to, for example, listen to music on our phone, but he couldn’t even get through a song before he’d be skipping on to the next thing, or he’d be trying to watch a show on TV and he’d spend 45 minutes trying to pick a particular episode to watch, and then he’d start watching it, and then halfway through he’d want to flick to another episode. There was just this chaos within him where he couldn’t make it through any activity. He just couldn’t be.

And even though that was happening, he would be constantly reaching for distractions. He’d be always wanting to ask for our phone or always wanting to ask to turn on the television, but then not being able to actually enjoy that experience.

We’d always known that he is highly sensitive, and one of the characteristics of this, and one that he’s always displayed, is this real ‘pause and check’. We would never have to worry about him jumping off a table or doing something where he was going to injure himself because he was always really measured. We’d go rock climbing with him, and by the end he was a great rock climber, but to start with he’d always climb up a little, then come back down, then climb up a little bit more, then come back down. If you saw him at the end and where he could get to and what he can do now, you’d think “Oh wow, he’s fearless.” But he’s really not. He’s very measured. He would be methodical about practicing it again and again and again.

What happened during this period was his impulse control completely disappeared. He would become really dangerous with this. We would be standing next to a road and he would be intentionally wanting to walk into oncoming traffic on his bike, or you’d be heading towards a road and you would have to be in front of him because he was just going to ride out straight onto it. It was like there was no filter. If anything would come into his mind, whether it’s “I’m going to throw this plate at the wall”, “I’m going to throw the washing into the stream”, it would just happen. Unless we could get there in time and intervene, it would happen.

It was just heartbreaking watching him, because he was just in this constant state of struggle and unease. Every moment was a challenge, and he was unable to be the kid that he’d been. For us, it was so hard because there was explosion after explosion where he would be inconsolable and things were being broken, and there wasn’t really much of a moment of peace. Every meal, there would be plates flying, and every activity where it felt like it was going well, something would explode.

It got to the point where – I’ve read so many books on child development, same with Ali, before this was going on. This is something we’ve been really interested in and prioritised. So we were very much at our wit’s end of like, “We don’t know what to do here, and we really do need some help.” So we reached out and found a child psychotherapist, and we had some sessions with her and some sessions for Ali and I to understand what was going on and get some ideas and recommendations.

It was really interesting in terms of the first session; the whole focus was on “Tell me about what the first four years of Ramsay’s life have been like.” It was really interesting when we went through that of just how much of a challenge that has been, especially the first year of his life. If you’re a regular listener and you’ve listened to previous episodes that I’ve done in terms of life updates, this is stuff you potentially already know about, but within the first year of his life, Ali had to have three surgeries. She’d been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. There’d been times where she was in absolutely excruciating pain where she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t hold Ramsay without pain. It was a real challenge, and that had an impact on all of us. I was incredibly stressed; I didn’t know what was going on.

What the psychotherapist was pointing out was that because of all of that, he did not get the attachment and the attunement that he needed. This wasn’t about blaming us, and we had definitely given our best effort with that, but what she pointed out was that kids are able to pick up on all of these things. So even though we’re trying to put on a brave face, even though we’re trying to attune with him and smile and engage and all of those things that are so crucial, he can see through all of that if we’re living in this place that we’d been living in.

What she was pointing out was that she felt like he’d missed out on that attachment and attunement – and that this wasn’t too late or anything along those lines, but that was what he really needed, and that was where we needed to put our focus. And a lot of the time it felt like we were already doing that, but she then asked him certain questions and made some recommendations of different things to read that really demonstrated that we needed to be doing things differently than we had been.

She asked me, “When was the last time you were on your belly, playing with him and really being present and fun with him?” I reflected and I couldn’t really remember when that had been. I would definitely play with him on the trampoline or we would go rock climbing or we’d go to the pool, so I felt like I was playing with him a lot and giving him a lot of attention, but not in the way she was pointing out that he really needed. There was a realisation from me of, yeah, I just wasn’t that fun, often, when I was around him. [laughs]

What that then meant over the next little while was it turned into me feeling like I was in an improv troupe and playing along with different storylines that he would make up and be acting out with that and just really getting into that mode.

I really do feel like the silver lining of Ali’s accident was that I got to put all of these things into practice, and I got to take the recommendations that the therapist was making and then spend my days being with Rams and doing this. When Ali was sick and before her mum turned up, I was trying to be out of the house as much as possible because Rams wasn’t dealing with the fact that she was injured particularly well, so we would just go out and play. I would be playing with him very intently for many, many hours a day and bringing all this new information and new way of being into practice.

It made such a difference. On the trampoline, playing games with him for hours a day, and this would be times where it could be raining and we’d be in waterproof gear, and that was what I was doing at that time and it really helped. There were a couple of things that the therapist recommended or a couple of things I consumed at that time that really helped.

00:29:13

How Attachment Play, Scattered Minds, + The Storyteller have helped us

One of the books that the therapist had mentioned – and I mentioned this in the end-of-year roundup that I did – it’s called Attachment Play: How to solve children’s behavior problems with play, laughter, and connection, and it’s by Aletha Solter. It’s just a phenomenal book looking at all the different games that you can play with kids to help them process emotions, move through emotions, process events that happened during that day or throughout their life. This was something I started to really incorporate.

The book talks about different ways of doing these plays. One of them is symbolic play, and this would be – for Ramsay, he would recreate the scene of what happened at the nursery, and then he would be the one who was the parent or the teachers at the nursery and I would be the child going to the nursery, and that was his way of dealing with that.

We did another one called contingency play, and this would be, for example, he’d be on my back and I would say, “Push my right shoulder if you want me to go right, my left shoulder if you want me to go left, my head at the top if you want me to go forward, my head at the base if you want me to go back”, and then he would be pretending to drive me, and he’d be driving me into the walls or into plants or whatever and be laughing about it.

This is the thing; so many of these are about how to get kids to be laughing as a way that breaks through a lot of this, but also putting them in a place of power where they’re able to be more in control of things.

We also did separation games, so we’d play hide-and-seek, and then he would be able to find us or we would find him. It got to the point where we were able to do this in the dark, so we’d be outside in the dark playing with torches. One of the things the therapist had mentioned was “Be super excited when you find him, like ‘I’m so glad that I was able to find you’, or be really upset if you’re unable to find him. It’s just demonstrating how much you miss him.”

There’s power reversal games, so he would have this toy that he’d say was a wasp and that it was stinging us, and then we would feign how much it was hurting us and fall to the ground. Or he’d have these pillows that he called magic pillows, and he’d be able to hit us and we’d fall to the ground. So he would be the one in the power place. More recently, he’s started saying, “You pretend to be a baby and I’ll pretend to be your dad” and doing it that way.

There are regression games. This was really interesting. This happened shortly after the first consult we had with the psychotherapist, and this was before we’d read the book on these games or anything. This all came from Rams; he just started saying to Ali, climbing up her shirt and saying, “You’re having a baby, you’re having a baby.” And then she would have a baby again, and in a sense Ramsay trying to get us to do a do-over of how we were with him in the beginning. Interestingly, initially when he was born, he would be a newborn baby, and then as time went on, he’d be born and he’d already be six months old or he’d already be a year old or he’d be two years old. It was really interesting to watch that change as things got better.

So they were a lot of the games that were recommended as part of the attachment book, and they would be things I’d be bringing in as part of my play when I was playing with him and just started to naturally occur.

I also read Gabor Maté’s book Scattered Minds, which is all about ADD or ADHD, and this was really, really helpful to read. What he talks about with ADD is that the two things that set the stage for ADD, if it’s going to occur, is someone who is a highly sensitive individual – which Ramsay definitely is – and for someone who then didn’t get the attunement or attachment that they needed when they were a child. Again, this was definitely what the psychotherapist pointed out had occurred.

It was really interesting to watch how much of what Gabor was talking about in that book was playing out with Ramsay. His inability to sit and be and the chaos within him, the impulse control issues – it all made so much sense. What was then also interesting was when we started to do these different things to re-attach and to help with that, how much all of this stuff started to disappear and to change.

He’s now back to a place where he does have more impulse control. It’s not that that’s completely fixed, but it’s like 95% of the way there. I never feel particularly concerned now when I’m walking towards a road with him because he isn’t in that same impulsive mode. So it was just a really helpful book to read during that process.

Then the final one that I read, which was less specifically about this but just had a bit of an impact on me, was Dave Grohl’s memoir called The Storyteller. One of the things he talked about was how much of a goofball he is with his kids and how much he loves spending time with them, but very much being like them and being silly and all of that.

It just made me reflect that that hadn’t necessarily been my way of being when I’d be with Rams, or at least not for much of the time. I was often in adult mode like “Come on, quick, we need to get out of the house. We need to take the dog for a walk” or “Quick, we need to get to the shops and get the shopping” or “Okay, I’ve only got 10 minutes and then I need to get back to work.” There was always me focusing on the things that needed to get done and less being in that play mode.

And look, it can’t always be the case that I have all the time in the world, but there was a lot of occasions when my way of being was having a really big impact on Ramsay, and it didn’t need to be the case.

It was really interesting; there was someone who pointed out to me during a conversation, “I think Ramsay is a mirror of you.” It really hit home because I think the more I’ve looked into this and noticed, I think it is very true. I think I started to notice how much I had anger and I had resentment, or I had frustration. And when I was in that state, he would mirror that and feel that, and that’s where there would more likely be an explosion or things would go off the rails. So when I could start to notice how I was and what I was bringing to the table, and that being something that I do have much more control over and I can work on, that had a huge impact on him being able to shift.

00:37:20

Positive impact of these changes on Ramsay

All of these things then started to change the way that he was, and it was really incredible in the three-week period from when Ali’s mum was here, the difference from when she turned up to when she left was huge. So many things that feel like they weren’t connected started to happen because that impulse control changed, and because he didn’t feel so chaotic. He was able to sit down at the table for meals; he’d have an ability to move through situations when we would say no. “No, you can’t watch TV” or “No, you can’t have an ice cream” or whatever it may be – when that would happen previously, that would be a complete meltdown, whereas now he was able to deal with a no and move on, and it wasn’t a big thing.

Just the ability to be able to transition from one thing to the next. There would be times where I’d be playing on the trampoline with him and then I’d say, “Okay, I need to go and do something else” and he was unable to deal with that, whereas now, that had all changed. He went back to being able to do a lot of the things he could do before in terms of sit down and enjoy watching TV, or sit down and put on an audiobook and listen to an audiobook, or sit down and do 5, 6, 10 puzzles in a row, or sit down and play Lego for a couple of hours. It was just incredible for him to be able to make that shift.

And obviously, to start with, I was having to spend so much time with him and be really intense with that time, and now he still needs that, but he needs that in less quantity than he needed before. When he gets that and his cup is filled with that, he’s then able to go off and do things on his own, and he enjoys doing things on his own again.

So it’s been just such a huge transformation in him. We wanted to do it in the right way. I didn’t want to just get compliances. I didn’t want our lives to get easier, but underneath the surface, there’s a lot going on that we’re now not in touch with because I got really authoritarian and shouty and all of that. So we’ve very much been of the way of parenting the whole time of “All emotions are welcome, even anger. It’s not that we’re going to ever tell you to stop crying or anything along those lines. We want you to be able to feel the full range of emotions and then learn ways to either sit with that discomfort or move through them, but move through them in healthy ways and ways where furniture and people are not getting broken.”

One of the other things that has then been helpful with this is that we started with a new nanny, and she started in the January time. We actually started looking for someone who had real experience with child development, who has worked in schools with kids with ADHD and with autism, and just having someone who isn’t just “I enjoy looking after kids” but someone where they really do have a background in this stuff and this stuff is a passion for them, and they’re very interested in reading more and learning more.

It was great when she first turned up – within five minutes of her interview to see how she would do with us and with Rams, she was crawling around on the floor with Rams and I pretending to be a cat, and within about 20 minutes she was playing hide-and-seek with us, and Rams was going and hiding with her for hide-and-seek – something he would never normally do with a new stranger. So from day 1, it was great, and they got on really well, so she’s now helping out twice a week.

It’s just made a really big difference to have someone who really knows what they’re doing with this stuff and is able to not just look after him, but help him develop.

He still can be exhausted from social situations, like we went rock climbing a couple of weeks ago, but it was the first time in ages. Any time I’d ask about that, he was like, “No, I don’t want to go. There’s too many people.” But we then went and we were there for about an hour, and he enjoyed it, and then the next day he was like, “It’s a pajama day. I don’t want to leave the house.” So just being in that environment had a real impact on him.

But it is improving. More recently, we have been going to the park more, and he’s starting to interact with other kids. There was a really lovely situation that happened when we were at the park where he had been playing with Ali and I for most of the time and really not interacting with anyone else, and then this girl came over and started to try and play with him and the thing he was playing with, and you could see that he didn’t know what to do and it all became too much, and he started kicking out.

So I grabbed him and pulled him down, and then he went to Ali and just burst into tears and sobbed, and did so for a while. He then moved through it and went back to playing what he was doing, and then the little girl came over again – she must’ve been five or six – and for whatever reason, she was not put off by the fact of what Rams had done before, and then this time when she joined him, he interacted with her and played with her. It was the first time that we’d seen him be able to do that, really ever. It was really beautiful, and I’m really so grateful that that girl, for whatever reason, came back over. But it was pretty transformative.

A little while later, some other kids came over and he was able to interact a little with them, and since then, we had some people come over on the weekend that had some kids. Rams had previously protested to that and said, “I don’t want anyone coming over here with kids”, and he was able to spend time with them and actually enjoy them being here. When they left, he said, “When can they come back? I want to see them again.”

Maybe if you’ve got a child and you haven’t gone through any of these things, it may sound really small, like “Wow, he’s playing with someone, who cares?” But for us, this has been such a big thing. It’s been hugely isolating and a really tough thing to go through. So to be able to see him actually interact with other human beings of his own age and start to learn how to do that, it makes me so happy.

00:44:48

Update on me + the good that came out of this difficult time

Finally, just in terms of me, my stuff, I actually feel really proud of how I’ve been able to handle things over the last couple months. I am definitely an under-functioner in a crisis. Normally, when there has been stuff go on in the past where I’ve had to deal with things like this, I just get bogged down in the negative and I wish things were different, and I find myself being dragged down or dragging myself down. It gets pretty ugly.

I’ve always known that about myself and seen myself as someone who’s not very good in those situations, and actually, this time round I was really happy with the fact that that didn’t happen, and that even though I was spending so much of my day engaging with a human who was having tantrums and meltdowns and was not the easiest to engage with for that amount of time, and then spending a lot of the night being awake and being with Ali, I was able to keep going. And I’m really grateful that I was, and I feel really good that that was able to happen.

It feels like we’ve had a really dark couple of months and that we have finally crawled out the other side. This is combined with the pandemic and how long all of that’s been going on. I’m really at a place now where I’m feeling like I want to be prioritising all of the things that I’ve missed out on, and some of that is definitely self-care and doing things that are about looking after me, and some of that is about having fun and joy, etc.

It was really interesting having the time off work. I had to take off I think three or four weeks when Ali was injured first to look after Ramsay, and having that time off allowed me to notice how much work can affect me. Despite how stressful the situation was, obviously, with Ali, when I cancelled everything in terms of work and all I had to focus on was Ramsay and being in the moment, it was actually really healing. It was actually, after the initial stages where he was starting to move and get into a better place, really enjoyable, and I actually had a huge amount of fun doing it.

I noticed how helpful that was for my own mental health and my own wellbeing and just how much I’d been under stress and living in a way that wasn’t conducive to being a happy, stable human being. I had acclimatised to that place for so long that I just didn’t realise how much it was impacting me. Really having that break was the thing that allowed me to notice what was truly going on.

So it really has had a positive impact on me. It’s a really weird thing to say that after all of this darkness that has happened over the last nearly year with Rams and the last handful of months with Ali that I’m actually grateful for it. I would not be the parent that I am if that hadn’t happened. I would not be the person that I am if that hadn’t happened. It’s allowed me to truly learn what it means to be in the present and be able to notice how things are affecting me much more than I was able to before. So I’m seeing this as a really beneficial time, and I’m bizarrely glad that things have happened the way they have.

As I said, I am now taking more time for self-care. I’ve had a number of massages which have been incredible. Found a person who has given the best couple of massages I’ve ever had, so that’s been really great. I’ve started getting into yoga and am doing kundalini yoga once a week. I’ve started seeing friends more; I’ve been up to London now a couple of times this year already, and the goal is to go up every month and see people. Starting to have date days with Ali again. Just speaking to friends and parents and siblings more than before. Doing all of these things that had really fallen away from my life. It was just the wake-up call that I needed through these incidents to make me reevaluate how I’m spending my time.

I mentioned on a recent podcast the book Four Thousand Weeks, and I think that has had a profound impact on things as well and definitely came at the right time. But all of what has happened over the last six months has really had a positive impact, and out of the darkness has come that.

So that is it for this life update. There’s been a lot that has happened, and despite the heaviness of it and the darkness, it has led to a lot of really beneficial things, so I’m at a point now where I’m feeling very grateful about everything that has happened and where things are now heading.

As I mentioned at the top, I’ve opened my practice again to new clients. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating or chronic dieting or body image or really any of the stuff that I regularly talk about as part of this show, then please reach out. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help and there you can find out more information.

I’ll be back next week with another episode. Take care, and I’ll catch you then.

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