I come from a very dysfunctional family where there was so much violence going on and immense mental abuse from which I only escaped 5 years ago when aged 45 years of age. So many shocking events occurred, I’m unable grasp the enormity of it all. And yet, the abuse in the home was only part of my shocking life. From the age of about 3 years old when I endured my first trauma (which I now know to have caused my undiagnosed, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and from then onwards the only memories I have are of people using, abusing, mocking and rejecting me in the home, the area I lived, at school, in the street and at work. I really had no one to turn to and I felt no one cared.
In June 2000, my life changed forever. By chance one Sunday night I tuned into the Julia Booth Show, a problem line broadcasted from Radio Newcastle & York. After speaking to Julia on Air, I was directed towards the mental health system and unexpectedly staggered into the world of the mental health service user. I have no doubt at the time this saved my life and just in time. But even though I have been heavily involved in various forums, support groups, steering groups and much more, over the last eight years I have attempted suicide on many occasions. Such has been my crying out to the whole World, “Someone help, please help!’’
How ironic I try to kill myself, as I have cheated death in the most incredible of circumstances. Plus there are all the violent attacks and accidents I have endured, along with the physical and mental scars. The memories of which are my soul companions, feeding my obsessive destructive thoughts and desperate crying out. And lets not forget… the alien spaceships I have seen numerous times, plus the plane crashes and the lorries that have squashed me.
Everything bad in my life is at the front of my mind and anything good that might have happened is a distant memory I would dearly cherish. No one can imagine this person’s pain so great.
And yet…nothing I hint of above, could have prepared me for the most tragic of events that surrounded the death of my only son aged seven month’s, to a horrendous genetic disease in 1998 - Gauchers Disease (pronounced GO-SHAY.)
I met my son’s mother in 1973, along with a few friends one of which I went to school with and guess what, she married him and not me. They also had a son who died. I did not know why or when he died. Even worse, no one valued me enough to tell me for several months that my son was going to die. Finally someone told me it was Gauchers but no one wrote the word down or told me anything about this terrible disease. Imagine waiting almost four years to find out what killed him through a Library Assistant surfing the web for me. Imagine my horror finding out it was the same disease that killed both of her sons (one of which was mine!) This type-2 Gauchers disease only affects ninety children worldwide and I was later told, I had more chance of getting run over by a bus than it happening anywhere else in the U.K.
Well as fate intervened, it did happen again not in Belfast or Cardiff and not even anywhere else in Europe but as good as on my doorstep within half a mile, give or take a few yards. Incredibly I was waiting to move even closer, where I eventually did move. I currently still reside here, only around 800 yards from the newest tragic family who lost their wonderful child to this Type-2 Gauchers (that remember, supposedly only effect’s ninety children worldwide.) Even more incredible my son’s mother grew up in the same area as the latest family tragedy. And - from 11 years old, I grew up with the first father. That is, three children in Gateshead, victims to Gauchers!
The shock of all these incredible coincidences has profoundly affected me. And also the newest family is almost too close for comfort you might say.
Sometimes fact is stranger than any obsessive thought’s.
©Paul Davidson 2008