Aged just 16, having once been a very promising and talented championship athlete, my life became a slow decline into worsening health, anxiety and depression. In my 20’s I endured 4 years of Counselling, which I’d sought to help support me in living with M.E/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia after contracting Glandula Fever (from the Epstein-Barr virus). I even studied and qualified in it, before I began to realise that for me it was akin to placing a sticking plaster over the wounds albeit comforting and enlightening to discover why I was feeling the way that I was. During that time, unconsciously very little improvement actually occurred and nothing had progressed particularly in my health, as the symptoms and emotional issues regarding everything in my life felt relatively unchanged. Eventually, the last Counsellor I ever saw ended my 2 years of therapy with her, telling me there was little else she could help me with and that our time together had come to an end. I was told this having just turned 30 years of age with my health having reached its worst point in the summer of 2004. I had only recently been hospitalised and bed-bound for a month partially paralysed down the left hand side of my body with Reiter’s Syndrome and Iritis in my eyes along with other distressing Auto-Immune Disease symptoms. A few months after, I descended into chronic suicidal depression as a result which was deeper than ever before. To this day, I am still eternally grateful I miraculously survived a very conscious decision to end my life.
