Sleeping With a Psychopath by Carolyn Woods

Author:Carolyn Woods [Woods, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008398668
Google: 9JgNzQEACAAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 2021-04-29T00:33:21.715551+00:00

It was the first week of 2013 and as I left the Bath Royal United Hospital I felt elated. I had just been told that the lump in my breast wasn’t cancer. Over the past few months, I had felt myself slipping further and further into a deep depression, but this feeling of near euphoria at being told that I didn’t have cancer made me realise that, contrary to what I had been thinking over the past few weeks, I still valued my life.

I hadn’t been sleeping properly for nine months now, and my insomnia had been getting worse. I would turn the radio on and off through the interminable silent nights, just to hear the sound of a human voice. Radio 4 and the World Service were the only company I dared keep. I was being troubled by nightmares and horrible recurring visions too. I often found myself deep in the ocean. I needed to breathe, but I was so far down. The water was clear and blue and I could see a shimmering disc of light, high above me where the sun hit the surface of the sea. I felt tired, and although I tried to swim, my legs wouldn’t kick and I knew I was going to drown. Then I would wake up, gasping for air, hardly able to breathe.

At other times I would lie in bed, fully conscious. I could feel my heart racing and there was a terrible weight pressing down on my chest. I felt as though I was being crushed and suffocated. As the weight bore down upon me from above, an equally powerful force pulled at me from below and I felt sure I would be sucked through the mattress into the fathomless void beneath it. It was terrifying. I would reach out to turn on the light and put the radio on and lie there until my heart stopped racing and I could breathe again. If I was lucky enough to drift off to sleep, I was often woken again by a ghastly vision of Munch’s Scream, metamorphosing into the figure of Death, coming to get me.

I was having suicidal thoughts and spent hours on the internet, obsessively working out how best to do it. After two particularly terrifying nights, although I hardly ever went to the doctor, I made an appointment with my GP and told him what had been happening.

‘What you’ve just described to me are typical symptoms of a panic attack,’ the doctor replied. ‘I see you came to see us last month. You said you were depressed. Did the counselling service contact you?’

‘Yes, but I decided against counselling. Please could you just listen to my heart and check my lungs? I’m sure there’s something wrong. I’m not someone to make a fuss about nothing.’

The doctor listened to my chest and took my blood pressure.

‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your heart or your lungs,’ he reassured me. ‘Everything’s quite normal. Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider having some counselling?’

‘Quite sure, thank you,’ I replied.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.