What 3 months in hospital taught me about isolation (by a former-Royal Marine and ocean rower)
Prologue
I’m no stranger to time on my own. In late 2017, I spent ten weeks rowing across the Atlantic Ocean with four other men aboard an eight-metre-long carbon fibre single-hulled boat. Having no personal space for weeks on end, was gruelling and – paradoxically - I craved my own space yet felt isolated.
I’ve long suspected that ‘risk appetite’ has been a little different to other peoples’. In my early twenties, I joined the Army and specialised in close protection (the branch of the Military Police that looks after high-profile ambassadors and senior generals). After a few years and itchy feet, I felt that the Royal Marines could satisfy my wanderlust. The BBC High Risk and News Safety team followed shortly after but even that wasn’t sating it.
So, I started travelling to more active conflict zones – such as Iraq or Afghanistan - to be close to ‘the pulse of life’. In doing so, I met sports teams with uncommon amounts of drive and ambition which spurred me on to start helping build their positive communities.
But late last year, I had a big fall whilst trying to climb the Matterhorn mountain – tumbling fifty metres which put me in coma for eight days and hospital for almost three months. After spending a week in a coma, I woke up with a traumatic brain injury. The Italian doctors had found three lesions (damage in the brain) which affected my short-term memory, speech and vision in one eye. At first I didn’t recognise my girlfriend, family or close friends whom had all flown to be with me throughout the coma. But as time went on, I started to become more like the person I was before – but some perspectives had changed.
It was undoubtedly the hardest period of my life, but these basic principles helped me to endure it and come out stronger.
1.Make a work routine so you’re not just consuming junk-media and feeling sorry for yourself.
Isolation isn’t a holiday or an excuse for you to stop working – you just have to alter the way you work. I strongly believe achieving small goals gives you a little bit more self-esteem, so when you find your life takes an unexpected pivot and stop ploughing your effort into something meaningful – you can slowly lose happiness.
My hospital recovery started with watching movies all day – which was like a holiday at first but quickly felt like my energy was going down a drain. I needed to feel that I was controlling the injury and now the other way around.
So I started to build a routine around meal and visiting times
2. Be careful who you regularly interact with.
Oprah Winfrey socialised the idea of people being radiators and drains.
A radiator is someone who gives out energy, inspires and picks people up and is fun to be around. A drain is someone with the ability to bring everyone to the task in hand and help people focus.
We need both kinds of people in life however this situation will mean we need more of one kind of person: decide which that is and limit your interaction with the other kind.
3. Celebrate the small wins.
We can sometimes feel overtaken by events outside of our control – so it’s important to stabilise the ship and keep things in perspective.
Some analysis suggests this way of life may last for many more months – so we must treat it like a marathon and not a sprint. When you go to sleep each night, write even just a few lines in a journal so you can look back on this time as one which you endured. I first undertook this when deployed on a Royal Navy ship in the Mediterranean during the ‘Arab spring’ when the world was also uncertain. Writing regularly helps you anchor your current mindset to one you’ve had in the past.
4. Have a plan for the inevitable ‘low days’ that will come.
And they will come. I experienced some of the lowest days of my life in the aftermath of my fifth operation to remove 6 centimetres of infected shin bone fragments. I didn’t leave my bed for 14 days and had magnolia walls and iPhone pictures of the outside world to keep me sane.
5. Don’t always start a conversation with ‘how are you?’!
You force someone into a difficult process of contextualising their feelings into an accessible bundle of words. Sometimes they won’t know, won’t be honest. A great deal of insight can be gained from seeing their non-verbal language.
Instead, send them a funny meme or tell them an amusing story and use that as a bridge to see how they’re getting on.
6. Be careful of how often you’re using social media.
Social media can be a great tool for connecting us to similar and disparate communities yet can also put some disingenuous people in front of our eyeballs. Use it with the understanding that it doesn’t always reflect reality.
7. Find ways to weave physical fitness into your new routine.
Physical movement has been proven to increase mood. Understand that it won’t be the height of your achievement – however accept it will be doing you good. When I could finally leave my bed, I was strong enough to get to the bathroom eight metres away only twice a day. Each one felt like a marathon getting there but the elation was palpable. Over the weeks, progress on the crutches was measured using windows to gauge how far I’d travelled.
Epilogue
Whilst I’ve certainly built up some skills of persevering through hardship; living with a very different lifestyle for so long has changed my perception of the world. For now, I’m far less interested in (and incapable of) finding where my physical limits are, but exploring where my academic boundaries . The Doctors that put me back together did so with an incredible amount of poise and energy and inspired me to revisit an interest in medicine.
Coming from a creative background however, this is meaning I have to really understand how to bring biology and chemistry to life – textbooks don’t engage me in the same way anymore.
And this has affected my approach to risk. I know ask ‘Is the juice worth the squeeze?’ (is the outcome worth the risk?)
Should I potentially put my family through the same dark times when it looked like I’d probably die whilst in a coma? Or find new ways to add value to the world instead of satisfying a now muted wanderlust.
