Looking Back Upon A Story Of Love.

‘Your hand touching mine, this is how galaxies collide.’

Sanober Khan.

I intially wrote about what happened within my life that set about the scene of how I discovered the true meaning of love, last month, here on medium.

Ilana Lydia on medium was one of the so many good readers & writers here that very kindly read, clapped, and took time to respond to what I had written with lovely comments. Ilana suggested that I could write an alternate article relating to what I had put together and, I thought to myself that, when I wrote about ‘the meaning of true love,’ there was an intrinsic area that I had not touched upon in that earlier article:

When, How & Where did we both really get together in the first place? So settle down with a hot cup of coffee & some popcorn, on your sofa, and I will tell you😊…

I have added my initial story (below) which can be handy to read afterwards:

The beginning.

August 1998.

It started out as a personal hardship for the both of us, each within our separate lives even before we had even met…

Earlier, probably around the middle of July, it had been the height of summer in Scarbourough, a beautifully picturesque seaside town on the English North sea coast, the largest holiday resort in the North Yorks.

One evening walking the dog through the local park area within the town, an unknown young woman had taken notice of my dog (a golden-colored greyhound) or was it that my nosey dog had decided she wanted to find out who she was, I have no idea and my dog never told me🤣.

Still nothing further came of that brief park encounter, I enjoyed the tranquility of the evening walk after a 12-hour nursing shift, and my dog enjoyed the whole sniffing session on the walk, needless-to-say!

My life at that point was going through an emotionless one-sided relationship with someone, and need I say more, I was getting more affection from my damn dog at this stage…

Anyhow, to cut a longer, more boring, account pretty short, I ended up isolated & lonely and living on my own, shortly after this evening had past. I awoke one morning after receiving the ‘silent treatment’ from the person had been together with the past few years, who had uprooted and just walked out of my life; although as I had earlier discovered that she had previously been having an affair with someone behind my back, I have to say, I really don’t believe that there was much love lost…

Still, depression set in pretty insidiously after a six-year relationship, and alongside ongoing work stress in my life at that time, it wasn’t too long before I ended up reaching out for support from the medical services, after I had suffered a mental breakdown, and attempted suicide.

Surprisingly, and quite disturbing to myself at that point, as it was abundantly clear that, I was desperately needing help to support me through this dark period in my life. So during my hospital admission, at the time when my discharge back to home was being discussed, I requested that I was not to be sent home but, to be transferred to the local mental health in-patient hospital within the town.

My God did I have a fight on my hands to get this further help…

The ward consultant (in fact two of them on separate visits to me) were heavy on the stigmatizing:

Each consultant was more than willing to hear & understand what I was saying about further help from psychiatric services, until they picked up on a little bit of what I did as my full-time career (yep, a mental health nurse.)

This was the typical response from them both.

‘Erm, I don’t reckon you need this sort of help, you have a lot of knowledge to help yourself through this don’t you?’

‘You really don’t need to stay in one of those places, they are full of trauma victims, drug dependents, and violent patients!’

For the love of God, you are the bloody doctors… break down your damned stigma won’t you!

Suffice to say, I won the battle of the stigma doctors, and was transferred, when medically fit, just a few days later. The article below explains more about this sort of thing.

I cannot be entirely certain as to any of the timeline involved in the whole psychiatric in-patient experience but, despite the staff there who were just as bad as the doctors, when it came to their negative views and stigmatizing attitudes toward any of the patients there, something began to fall into place, which lead to the start of something I never before imagined was at all possible.

Yes. DIY Love & Care.

Aside from the regular daily medication rounds, the structured meal times, and the weekly visits from the hospital consultants, there was pretty much nothing else happening on the ward throughout my stay there. I won’t even talk about the ‘nurse-patient’ 1–1 sessions as they were rather non-existent there…

But it was there that I met a young woman who was very much in a worse state of affairs and subject to a slowly sinking boat than I ever was.

Were any of the staff there, of help & support as they were trained and employed to do?

Pretty honestly… NO👎.

Getting psychological support was like passengers on the doomed Titanic trying to keep alive and dry until help arrived…

I can recall a time when I was bored with making a hot chocolate and sipping it on my own whilst watching television. So, I thought it high time to start saying ‘hello’ to some of the other patients, and that was the start of much more than just a simple lonely hot chocolate…

Although when I first attempted to saying hello to this rather short and bedraggled, quiet young woman, what did I really get:

‘Better than ever now go away and leave me alone!

Well at that response to my first attempt at striking up a conversation on the ward, all I could muster was:

‘Oh, okay, well I’ll come back a little later with a hot drink then…’

And that was just what I did too.

Five to ten minutes later, I returned to this person with, yes (you pretty much guessed it) a sweet mug of hot chocolate:

There must be some unsung ability for a mug of hot chocolate to bring out the sun in even the worst of people, because I was faced by a smile and a giggle!

Wow, a positive reaction, I’m going to just dig a little bit further now I’m here… after all, the NHS are paying for the drinks🤣.

I’m really not entirely sure what carried on from that first encounter but, suffice to say, I reckon both of us together had made a decision to heal ourselves through our own programmes of therapy whilst there, together.

We started talking more and eating together in the dining area on the ward, spending a growing amount of time during the day, spending time with each other, and getting to know just a little more about one another.

Neither of us could truthfully say that the NHS meals were restaurant standard, in fact, they were rather bland and non-descript. And as this young woman did not have any appetite for food and drink due to her illness, I though upon the idea that perhaps we could get a small bite outside of the hospital within Scarborough itself. So that was just what we did.

We took it upon ourselves to have some daily fresh air walks, and to be brutally honest, we both got more benefit from engaging with each other, than the ward staff ever got anywhere near doing.

Time continued to pass on the ward and eventually just a few months down the line, we were beginning to both slowly heal with no help from the staff on the psychiatric ward, but from genuinely helping one another. The moment was approaching when that word ‘discharge’ was looming.

To cut this short, we were at our requests, discharged back to my empty private flat that I had been renting in Scarborough together. We spent many a time together continuing to discover more about each other and what we had been through that had made us so ill that hospital care had been needed, and began to build our lives up together there.

The following summer of 1999 we both happily got married to one another, and to this day in 2022, at the time of writing this, we are still very much in love and planning to ‘renew our vows’ together later this year.

It’s fair to say that we have had our difficult & challenging periods through our lives together, just like everybody else within the world, and both coped with surviving through physical illness together too.

The hospital that we both met in back in 1998 has long since been bull-dozed by the local council to (yes, wait for it) a car park, with a new mental health in-patient unit built elsewhere in the area of Scarborough since then.

Sadly the building where our lives began together has long been ‘raised to the ground,’ however,

… though the physical building has long gone, our memories will forever remain with both of us here in our hearts, for as long as we shall live…

So you see, the traditional ‘we met in a pub,’ or ‘we met at a dance’ or even, ‘we met back in our school years,’ is not and will never be our discussion point.

‘We met in hospital together,’

… well how’s that for starting off a conversation about how two people met, fell in love, and married then?

My forever love & thanks to Carol, who has put up with me since that day back in 1998, and my acknowledgement and thaks to her for agreeing to let me share this story of real love, and how it all truly began, with you all here on medium.

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I love writing articles & fictional stories. They give me scope to express myself and free my mind. After working as a mental health nurse for 30 -years, writing allows an effective emotional release, one which I hope you will join me on.

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