Bugger Bugger Shit

This book is essentially about resilience.  We hear so much about resilience that I think we could all roll our eyes when we hear there is yet another book about it.  But there is a reason why people speak about resilience so much and that is because over my lifetime, according to Jean Twenge who has done a tonne of research on it, resilience is waning at a rate of knots.  As a psychologist of over 3 decades, this worries me significantly, so I decided to join in the chorus of voices trying to do something about it.

When I showed my sister the first draft of the first chapter I started to write, she looked up at me and said “what are you trying to do?  Write a work book or a personal book?”  I said “Both”, she said “well it’s neither and it’s not funny either which is a shame because you’re really funny.  That incident with the kitchen tap was hilarious but it’s not funny in the book”.  It’s only a sister that can get away with that amount of bluntness.

I went away grumbling under my breath but I knew she was right.  If I wanted to make a difference I needed to be open and vulnerable and honest and yes, funny.  I have written as part of my job for about 30 years but I’d never written about me or my life or my experiences.  In fact as a Psychologist in the community services sector I tried very hard to keep a low profile with anything vaguely personal.  I have a silent electoral enrolment, a silent phone number and I never use my proper name on my personal social media pages.  

So, with my sister’s words in my ear, I went back and started again… Bugger Bugger Shit: my quest for resilience is what I ended up with.

I need to begin by saying I never wanted my book to be called Bugger Bugger Shit.  I tried very very hard to find another name but everything vaguely connected to resilience was taken; even really weird things related to stories in the book were taken.  In frustration one day, I said to my publisher oh why don’t we just call it Bugger Bugger Shit and she almost leaped out of her seat in enthusiasm!  

Let me tell you why, well actually let me read you the why from the start of 

Chapter 2 - Bugger Bugger Shit

I was about seven when the phone rang one day. My mum was around somewhere, and my dad was away with work, so I answered the phone. It was my dad’s secretary,  Anne, who asked to speak to Mum. We lived in a big house, so I yelled for Mum to come  to the phone. She didn’t answer me, so I told Anne I couldn’t find her.  Anne told me she had an important message for me to give to Mum. She told me that Dad had missed his flight. She asked me to repeat it and to make sure I told Mum as soon as I could. I promised her I would, but I have to admit, I thought she was making a big deal out of Dad missing his flight. I hung up the phone and promptly went off to play and forgot all  about it. 

A couple of hours later, I wandered back into the kitchen where Mum, my toddler brother and my big sister were. Mum was on the phone, looking really worried.  She was quiet and listening and then said, “Bugger”. She listened some more and said, “Bugger” again. Then she looked even more worried and scared and then said, “Shit”.  She hung up the phone. My sister and I asked her what the matter was, and she told us that the plane Dad had been on had crashed. It slowly dawned on me that I had completely forgotten to give Mum the message from Anne, so I burst out and said, “Oh no, he wasn’t on the plane. Anne rang and told me to tell you that he had missed his flight, but I forgot!”  

Silence. Relief. Then my brother broke the stunned silence by loudly proclaiming, “Bugger, bugger, shit!” as clear as a bell and with a big smile on his face. He was immensely pleased with himself that he had managed to put together a three-word sentence for the first time. 

That was the day ‘bugger m shit’ came into being. Bugger bugger shit is reserved in my family for the really bad things. It can’t be just average bad. It has to be really bad. A few years later, my mum was diagnosed with MS. That was a bugger bugger shit moment. My older sister was diagnosed with malignant melanoma just before she  turned 18. That was a bugger bugger shit moment too. Many years later, my younger sister’s husband was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Bugger bugger shit. A few years later, my dad was told the prostate cancer he had developed had become terminal. Bugger bugger shit. I was diagnosed with endometriosis, infertility, psoriatic arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Seriously!  Bugger Bugger Bugger Shit Shit Shit!

My apologies to those with a sensitive disposition but sometimes, really, the only words you can use to describe the horror of a situation are inappropriate in polite company.

Bugger Bugger Shit!

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Still I Rise 

in And Still I Rise

Maya Angelou

As I’m sure you can imagine, with so much medical trauma in our family, growing up was no picnic.  It wasn’t just the medical difficulties; my parents weren’t great and most of my memories of them are of arguments, and, on occasion, involved flying tins of groceries but that is only one aspect of growing up in my family.  Let me invite you in to just one of many priceless moments as I read to you from 

Chapter 4: The War Zone

Just as much as we argued, we laughed as a family.  I was the comedian of the bunch but we all had a healthy sense of the ridiculous.  My particular talents lie in unplanned physical comedy and saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.  My mouth frequently got me into trouble, ok let’s be honest, it still does.  On one particular evening, both of my talents occurred simultaneously.  

We were having dinner and for some unknown reason we had dessert.  We never had dessert.  Dad asked me to go downstairs to the cellar to get the ice cream out of the chest freezer.  In our house there was a door between the kitchen and the hallway and a second door between the hallway and the stairs down to the cellar.  This was a very old Victorian House with very thick stone walls.  I duly went down to the cellar.  

I am not much over five feet now as an adult.  As a child, I was tiny.  I opened the freezer to discover the ice cream right at the bottom.  There was no way I could reach it.  Not to be deterred however I used my ballet training. I hitched myself up on the side of the freezer and perfected the art of balancing on the side using my body as a fulcrum so whilst I held the chest freezer open with one hand, I could swing down and grab the ice cream with the other.  

It took a couple of goes to calculate the velocity of swinging hard enough and fast enough to reach the bottom of the freezer without losing my grip on the lid of the freezer that I was holding above my head and without actually falling in.   I was quite impressed with my genius problem solving to be honest.  What I had completely forgotten about was that when I was concentrating hard, I tended to stick my tongue out.  As I finally swung down to get the ice cream, my tongue grazed the side of the freezer and got firmly stuck. Bugger!

I had a problem.  I couldn’t pull my tongue off the freezer without using my right hand, I couldn’t let go of the lid of the freezer because it would have crashed down on me and squashed me.  What to do?  Call for help of course.  Have you ever tried to call out when your tongue is firmly stuck to the side of a freezer? No?  Well I hadn’t either but I thought it can’t be that hard.  So I gave it a go.  “Hellllll” I called.  No p because I couldn’t close my lips to get the p sound.  I also discovered that when one is balancing on the side of a freezer one doesn’t have any capacity to use one’s diaphragm to amplify the sound and my head was in the freezer so my voice was never going to go anywhere other than down.   “Helllllll” I quietly called again.  Nothing.  Hardly surprising with my whisper of a yell, two doors and some very thick stone walls.  “Hellllllll”.  I called with increasing panic rising.  

Would anyone realise I hadn’t exited the cellar?  Would my family be so busy talking they would forget about me?  Would they clear up the dinner dishes, sit down and watch a bit of tv and then lock the cellar door on their way to bed, leaving me hanging with my tongue stuck to the freezer for the rest of my life?  Can you actually die from a frozen tongue?  

Eventually after what I swear was two hours, Dad sent my sister Halina down to find out what the problem was.  I’m sure it wasn’t because he imagined his second daughter’s mouth was stuck to the actual freezer.  It was probably just because he wanted his ice cream faster than I was bringing it up.  Halina came down, slightly irritated, saw me hanging in the freezer and doubled up in laughter.  Not helpful.  When she had recovered, she assessed the situation and decided that the easiest thing would be for her to lean in and peel my tongue off the wall of the freezer.  I mean it was effective, it worked.  Whether my tongue was ever the same again is a question for debate.

When your tongue gets stuck to a freezer at an early age, you just know you’re going to have to develop some skills to get out of sticky situations (pardon the pun) and quite a lot of resilience to manage a life that has been marked by multiple transcontinental relocations from my birth in the USA and moving to the UK a few months later as well as a whole smorgasbord of medical diagnoses.  

Chapter 12 - Boyfriend Trouble

It was a reasonably typical northern hemisphere autumn day in 1990, except I was at  St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, sitting in a neurologist’s office who was telling me that, in his opinion, following a battery of tests that I had had a few weeks earlier, I had multiple sclerosis (MS). I needed to have a lumbar puncture to be 100% sure of the diagnosis, but he thought it would be inevitable. He further explained that a lumbar puncture isn’t particularly pleasant and that a new machine had been developed called an MRI. This magical invention would be able to diagnose MS by doing a scan similar to a CAT scan, but a little bit noisier. Unfortunately, the National Health Service only had a few machines available in the United Kingdom at the time. 

Given that he knew I was about to migrate to Australia, he suggested it would be much easier to have one in Sydney when I arrived. I asked him what my future was going to look like? He suggested it would be pretty normal, but I would probably find myself needing a wheelchair when I  reached my 50s. Bugger bugger shit. 

I migrated to Sydney on Christmas Eve, 1990. Following the Christmas festivities, I made an appointment for an MRI at Royal North Shore Hospital in February 1991. I can still remember with a cold sweat that first MRI. Having since had a lumbar puncture, quite frankly, I would have taken one of those any day than lie in that insanely noisy coffin.

Following the MRI, I had my appointment with the neurologist. I expected it to be fairly straightforward, given the tests and preliminary diagnosis in London, but no. The neurologist said there was no evidence of demyelination, that my symptoms were most likely caused by boyfriend trouble, and that I should seek counselling with a psychiatrist. 

I was 23; I was in shock, and I was furious. I’m reasonably confident that if you were to scour the medical literature, there would be zero correlation between MS and ‘boyfriend trouble’.  But I was polite and respectful and went on my way with my tail between my legs; thinking I was a crazy hypochondriac whose weird neuropathy was all in her head. 

I wouldn’t actually be officially diagnosed with MS until 2018 and by then I had missed out on decades of disease modifying therapies however there is absolutely no point in dwelling on what could have beens.  Yes I am angry about it, but what it has created me in is a passion that no one else would be treated in the same way I was.  Life is just too short.

Chapter 6.  Why Not Me

Why not me is the question, not why me?” my older sister Halina said to me from her hospital bed in Preston Infirmary. She was lying face down with her head in a hole in the bed.  She had just had a considerable amount of her back removed due to a malignant melanoma. She had just turned 18, I was 16. She had completed her A levels and I was just finishing my O Levels.  

Halina had thankfully been cancer free since her initial diagnosis in 1983 but everything changed in 1987.  Mum called me at University unexpectedly one day in June 1987.  

Mum told me that she had had a call from Halina’s doctors prior to her routine Oncologist check up, with the results of her latest blood tests.  The cancer had returned and they thought someone should come to her appointment with her so she could have support when they told her.  

I sat in the hospital with Halina whilst she had a series of tests and then we went into the consultant’s rooms for the results.  He explained to her that the cancer had returned, the prognosis was grim and that there was very little they could do.  At that time there was no treatment for malignant melanoma.  The worst bugger bugger shit moment ever.

Halina and I walked out of the appointment reeling. For some unknown reason we wandered into the hospital shop.  There was a song playing and Halina stopped and listened.  It was ‘Old and Wise’ by the Alan Parsons Project.  “This,” she said pointing in the air as she listened to the lyrics.  “This is what it’s all about.”  From that moment on, Old and Wise has been “our” song.  It has no other meaning for me.  It is, and can only ever be, about Halina.

Four months after this appointment, my big sister was in palliative care at our local hospice.

Over the next few days, Halina’s body started to shut down.  I describe it like she died from the bottom up.  On the Saturday she was devastated that her hearing went so she couldn’t listen to her Taize music and the following day her sight went. Her speech had been gradually declining over days.  On the Monday, she drifted in and out of consciousness.  

Our Vicar came in the morning to give her communion but she was asleep.  He came again in the afternoon and whilst she had been awake she was asleep again when he visited.  He came back in the evening.  It was completely unplanned but the whole family, including Eddie, were there at the same time.  Halina was asleep/unconscious again so our Vicar suggested we stand around the bed and have communion together in Halina’s presence.  

He handed out the communion and as he put some wine on Halina’s lips she opened her eyes and looked directly at her new husband, Eddie, who was standing next to me at the foot of the bed.  Clear as a bell, she let , “I love you” and drifted back into unconsciousness again.  She died a few hours later at a little past 1am on the 17th November 1987.  Mum and Dad were with her as they were when she came into the world.

Chapter 21 - The Quest

Resilience can’t be packaged up.  Resilience is unique to every single person.  We can’t compare my resilience to yours and when we compare ourselves with each other, we ultimately fail.  What we can do however, is learn from each other; not compete with each other.  No matter how resilient someone looks, we all have vulnerabilities, things that make us wobble.  

It is the radical compassion that we have for each other that makes a difference.  It is our commitment to loving big; to challenging each other to be the best versions of ourselves that makes a difference.  Resilience can ultimately be a choice if the structural supports that we need are available.  I choose to create a village around me.  I choose, despite my circumstances, to lift up my head and put one foot in front of the other; sometimes that is really, really hard.

What I have learned through the pages of this book, is that fundamentally, when it has felt impossible to lift my head, it has been the people around me who have helped me do just that.  My friends, my colleagues, my family who have whispered in my ear, “Don’t give up.”  I hope that through the pages of this book, someone will hear me whisper to them, “Don’t give up.”

My sense of humour might be genetic but my willingness to see the absurdity in life’s tricky situations; my ability to laugh at myself are all things that I have developed over time.  A lot of people assume that I am outgoing and gregarious; an extrovert.  They are shocked when I tell them, on the contrary, I am actually quite shy and an introvert.  I would much rather sit at home with a cup of tea and my special people than be out and about at large social gatherings.  What I have done however, with the help of my extrovert friends, is find my voice.  

There have been key moments in my life where I have been willing to step out of my comfort zone and take a risk.  Each time I do it, it becomes easier.  I am confident at work now because I have been doing what I do for over 30 years.  I am confident to speak publicly because I was forced to do it as part of my job and I have now done it so many times that I actually love it.  I am confident to sing to an audience because I have done it so many times.  The first time I spoke publicly I wanted the ground to swallow me up; the first time I sang publicly I couldn’t even stand up I was so nervous; when I first transitioned to using a wheelchair I was scared and uncomfortable, but I did it.  Like Maya Angelou’s poem, I made a choice to Rise; the key I have realised though, is that I didn’t do it alone.  

We cannot become resilient on our own.  We choose to allow people to help us; we choose not to take offence; we choose not to stick with the status quo; we choose not to walk past the isolated and broken; we choose to call out injustice; we choose to laugh at ourselves; we choose to forgive and we choose to ask for forgiveness.  When we take the uncomfortable opportunities to build our resilience, we make a difference in this world; it’s not easy but it is better.

We all have voices in our heads; the voices of the critics but also the voices of the encouragers.  It is so easy to hear the voices of the critics; they are usually loud and insistent.  The voices of the encouragers are usually quiet, gentle, calm, compassionate and kind.  What we need to do in this quest for resilience is to become practised at tuning our hearing to the quiet voices of the people who believe in us; so that those are the voices that go with us into our futures.

Angharad

November 2024