I woke this morning with a toothache, and that seemed to be enough to tip me over the edge. As I start this piece, I have cried enough to the point where I now have a headache that almost completely masks the pain of toothache. My entire face just hurts.
My brain has done it again, it seems – betrayed me. And now, it is the second time in as many months that I have gone home from work due to the ol’ noggin misbehaving. The first instance was from work stress, and today it’s just personal stress. I just couldn’t keep it together this morning. I got up and got to work fine, aside from the toothache, and knew the day would be kinda rough from the get-go. Ten minutes into my shift, a colleague greeted me, and our brief conversation resulted in her offering me help for house stuff. I almost cried then. Five minutes later, one of the managers greeted me, and I couldn’t say that I was fine. I said I was good enough but, once she left my room, I then started crying. Twenty minutes later and I couldn’t see my first patient of the day. I couldn’t pull myself back together enough to do my job. So, I left. There was enough people in today that I could have come out and done something else instead of facing patients, but I didn’t want face anybody. I knew that if anyone spoke to me again I’d cry. It’s one of those days again, I’m afraid. That very thing happened last night when my mum rang, and a WhatsApp message from grandma was enough to do it two nights before that.
I am pathetic. That is the best way to describe myself at the moment. I’m not sure how much more stress I can take, to be honest. Things seem to keep going wrong and, now that it seems to be getting slowly harder to hide, colleagues have started asking if I have tried talking to a doctor about it. But what the fuck are they gonna do? Shove me on another waiting list? I’ve already been stuck on one for the better part of eight months for something else. Give me antidepressants? Already on some for a non-mood related issue. I don’t know if they can give me another one on top, but I’m not stopping my current ones. I don’t know if you can take TCAs and SSRIs together. I don’t think they’ll be able to up the dose of the current either since, when I last got them reviewed, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to get them upped again until I had some tests done at the hospital. And, again, I’ve been waiting almost eight months for those – I got referred on 03/04/2025! It’s actually because I’m still stuck on that waiting list that I can’t even get income protection for a mortgage and house that I might not even get anymore.
Last month, I won a house at modern auction, and I have spent the last month and half bleeding money, doing a shit ton of legal paperwork in my spare time, and constantly being in contact with numerous other people. I didn’t expect to win the house, I could only afford the starting bid, but I had been house hunting since January and I couldn’t have been happier at the time. It was more rooms than I was expecting to get with what I can afford (with buying on my own, as a first time buyer, and earning £27.3k a year) and it’s in a decent part of the city and still pretty close to where I work now. The location is perfect for me. It looked clean and stable and didn’t really look like it needed too much doing to it. Most of the legal paperwork is done and out of the way, with a little bit of anti-money laundering stuff left to process, and my mortgage advisor got the valuation report back last week…but I didn’t get an offer. The mortgage had been accepted subject to valuation, but the results of the valuation weren’t great. They flagged up a potential roof issue and damp issue, which I was kind of expecting since I suspected there was a leak in the roof upon viewing the property, and they also flagged some evidence of structural shift…which I wasn’t expecting. I had two criteria for buying a house – dry and structurally stable. I seem to have failed on both fronts. If there is something seriously wrong structurally, then it could run into the tens of thousands. If it’s something smaller, that costs a couple of grand, then I absorb the cost with the funds I have. If it’s more, then I can’t. And that’s not even considering the timeframe I have – with modern auction you have 56 days, from receiving the first draft of the contract, until you have to complete the purchase, otherwise you will lose the property. For me, this deadline is 29/12/2025. My mortgage lender wants three additional reports done, causing me to pull more than a thousand pounds out of my arse, and want any remedial repairs done (if needed) before giving me my mortgage offer. The deadline is still more than a month away, but if there is something seriously wrong I don’t know how I’m going to do this…if I can even afford it in the first place. If I can’t, I lose the house and the more than nine grand that I would have already sunk into buying the property. I guess I would have to pay my solicitor as well, costing me a few more grand still. The structural engineer is going in today and the damp and timber specialist is going in next Tuesday, but I can’t seem to find someone to do a roof report. I have contacted almost a dozen different contractors, and they either don’t do surveys, don’t do surveys in this kind of weather, or refuse to conduct a survey without direct supervision which neither myself nor my estate agent can provide. My colleague offered for her partner to take a look, as he is a tradesperson, but if he can’t do the report then my last options are to try contacting another colleague’s ex-husband or seeing if my mortgage advisor can find anyone. She is already trying to get an extension for my completion deadline from the auction house. We’ll see how that goes, I suppose.
I really want this property, but it is causing me a horrific amount of stress at the moment. I have told my mum about the valuation, since she asked to be kept in the loop about it’s results, and she told my grandma about the not so great news. That was when I got the WhatsApp message from my grandma saying that, if the repairs were something that I couldn’t afford, I would have access to some over her savings to cover the cost since it would be my inheritance anyway. I can’t do that to her. I can’t accept that offer. That’s not fair. I had no idea how to respond to that. I felt so guilty. So, I didn’t respond. Two days later and I still hadn’t brought myself to respond, so my mum called me. Both her and my grandma were worried because of my two day silence. I felt even more guilty. They shouldn’t be worrying about me. None of this should be their problem. At my mum’s urging, and to ease some of my own gnawing guilt, I replied – thanking her for her support and hoping that it didn’t come to that. My dad knows nothing about the valuation, and I intend to keep him out of the loop until the issue is resolved. He doesn’t need to know. He’s excited for me to own property and I don’t want to take that away from him just yet. I know that he is anticipating his own financial issues, not that he has said anything, and I don’t want him worrying about me or my finances when he’s worried about his own. I don’t want to ask him for help – I can’t do that to him. I don’t want ask my mum for any help either since she finally, for the first time in her working life, has disposable income and isn’t having to support anybody else. I don’t want to take that away. I don’t want to take anymore from my grandma either – she has already done so much to help me with this. I can’t take anymore. I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do?
If this all collapses, then I’m stuck exactly where I am for who knows how much longer. I want to start the career that I want to have, but I can’t do that while I’m stuck. I had two goals this current job – to get to the two year mark for the CV and to own property. I reached two years at the end of June this year. This is, officially, the longest I’ve ever been at any job. After three redundancies, and a firing while in the middle of a severe downward spiral, I have finally managed to stay in one job for two years or more. I will, finally, have the opportunity to leave a job willingly. It took until job number five to have that. To have the opportunity to write and hand in that notice, to have something else that I want to do lined up and ready to go, and to not have to worry about having no income for months while frantically job hunting for anything that will take me. It shouldn’t have taken five jobs to get to this hypothetical point. And if I have to pull out, and I lose the house that I’m trying so hard to get, then I can’t move on with my life. I can’t get another job. I can’t try to go down the career path that I want. I have to stay where I am because who knows when the property rolls around? If I lose this one, then it could be weeks, months, or even years before I try and go after another. Until then, I’m stuck in healthcare on the lowest rung of the proverbial ladder and taking on extra roles and responsibilities that I should not have. I would get paid the same either way. ‘Multiskilling’ is what they like to call it, but it just adds even more stress to my day. I have two main additional roles – one of which I took on as a compromise to not get put forward for doing something else, and the other I took on to prevent another redundancy once I smelt them in the air (about a month before they actually announced them). I’ve had enough of them myself to know what they smell like, at this point. There is no point in progression at this job either, as any qualification you get, outside of management, is non-transferrable. It’s useless. They aren’t recognised qualifications outside of the company. Anywhere you go you’ll have to start right at the bottom again and take a pay cut. There’s no point. It doesn’t help that the only one of these opportunities available at the moment is scrub technician – a role that I, realistically, wouldn’t be physically unable to do.
I suppose that leads me back to my referral, doesn’t it? A referral to neurology for pain that has been getting steadily worse, year on year, for almost as long as I can remember. I believe I first realised that something wasn’t quite normal at the age of 11, so I’ve been feeling it get slowly worse for the last 15 years. I’ve tried getting help for this a couple of times before – at 16 they gave me orthotics that didn’t help, and at 20 twenty I was dismissed. As you have probably gathered by this point, I am very bad at asking for help, which means I’m also very bad at seeking medical attention. But, in March of this year, I finally tried going to the doctors for it again as things were getting noticeably worse. While the main issue is burning pain (among other things) in my feet, my hands have also been affected to a lesser degree for the past few years. What prompted me to try seeking medical help again was more pain and discomfort in my hands (to the point where it was uncomfortable and prickly just to hold my phone on a normal day) and more episodes of numbness/loss of sensation in my feet (while this usually happens from driving 20+ minutes, it had started sporadically happening just from standing or walking). I had some blood tests done to start with, and when they all came back normal I was sent for x-rays, referred to neurology, and given amitriptyline in the meantime (to see if it helped at all since nothing over the counter did). At first, the amitriptyline did nothing. I then got it reviewed and the dose was upped…and it actually made a difference. It didn’t take everything away, far from it, but it did give me a big quality of life boost. My hands were almost normal again, and on the bad days I was now able to shower and make myself food because standing was a bit less painful. That was nice. I got them reviewed again, explaining that things had improved but my feet were still a big problem, and the dose wasn’t changed. He, pretty reasonably, didn’t want to change the dose again until we had more answers – until I had seen neurology. It was, however, put on a repeat prescription and I have been taking it religiously ever since. Even though things are still bad, they are, undeniably, better. I dread to think what it would be like going without them now. I have now, as of writing this, been waiting 236 days for that one appointment. For that one set of test that might not even show anything. I am so tired of waiting. I know that I am very low down on the list triage-wise – I am an otherwise relatively healthy 26 year old. It’s not an issue with my brain, it’s nothing particularly acute, and isn’t something that affects motor function/mobility. It’s slowly worsening pain, and that is not a priority. But, at the same time, I am 26 years old and I’m at the point where I am considering giving up driving. I find it so hard to do. It usually takes around 5-15 minutes to start getting painful, to feel like my feet are being pushed against a scalding hot radiator, and takes 20-25 minutes for parts of my feet to start going numb. I hate it. I don’t always feel safe doing it. But, for the moment, I can’t survive without it. I have to get to work somehow. For a 26 year old, a 15 minute drive shouldn’t be a challenge. For a 26 year old, a 30 minute drive shouldn’t fill you dread, shouldn’t seem impossible! If, by some miracle, the house all goes okay and I am able to get the job that I want I won’t really need the car anymore. Hopefully, I can get to the point in my life where getting rid of my car is seen as a money saving measure instead of a stupid, but necessary, decision. I just want the pain to stop, but that doesn’t seem like it will happen anytime soon.
As I come to the end of this piece, eyes dry and lids swollen, I find myself wondering whether this is the right thing to do. Normally, when writing in low moments like this, I write my thoughts down in a book or an email draft where no one will see. But today, for some strange reason, I decided to share it with the world. Perhaps it’s because I know that, even if it’s out there, no one will read it. Or, if they do, I won’t know them personally. I may decide to delete this in the coming days, or weeks, or months. Hell, I may even delete this in the first few minutes after posting – instantly regretting my publicising of usually private thoughts. I don’t know. But what I do know is that writing my thoughts down like this helps me to process things without having to bother anyone else. I don’t want to be anyone else’s problem just because my brain malfunctioned a bit. And while writing down and re-reading some of these things was very difficult for me to do, even tear-inducing at times, I’m still glad that I did it. While I feel utterly exhausted, I have finally managed, for the most part, to calm down and stop crying. In the end, that’s all I really wanted out of this – to confide in my audience of none and to stop crying. Perhaps, at later date, I’ll read this again and reflect a bit on my state of mind or try not to actively relive it. I don’t know.
Anyway, I somehow just wrote 2.9k words in the space of 5 hours while having a bit of a breakdown. I’m tired. I should probably eat something.
Natalie's notebook 