Catastrophising

As you'll already know if you've been reading from the beginning, my Dad had chest pains when he was at the hospital with me when I was having William. The same thing happened again when he was at the hospital when I had my tumour removed. After various tests, the doctors confirmed he had had a heart attack.

He had to go into the hospital for an angiogram to determine whether there were any blockages in his heart and to see if they could be treated with stents or a heart bypass.  Two blockages were found, one being over 90%.  Thankfully they could be treated with stents.

To say I took this news about my Dad badly would be an understatement. In the weeks leading up to his procedure I manage to convince myself that he was going to die.  I felt hugely responsible and that the stress I had put him under whilst I was in hospital having William and also during my neck surgery has caused the heart attack.  I also knew I would not survive if I lost someone else. I couldn't live without my Dad.

I would burst into tears at the mention of his name and began a countdown to his surgery....

"One week left with my Dad"

"Six days left with my Dad"

"Five days left with my Dad"

and so on.


This continued to the moment he was wheeled into surgery and as I looked at him on the trolley I thought "That is the last time I will see my Dad alive".

I spoke to my counsellor about this and rather than thinking I had completely lost the plot, she said these morbid fears were actually quite normal when you have recently gone through a traumatic experience. She called it "catastrophising" and gave me a little sheet which explained that we:

"Overestimate the danger we are in and underestimate our ability to deal with the situation. This is usually orientated towards the future in which the person is at liberty to populate it with terrifying scenarios"

Apparently, I had lost the ability to think rationally about the likely outcome of my Dad's surgery and instead was imagining the worst possible scenario which could happen. For me, having already lost William, it was the prospect that the Grim Reaper was also hankering after my Dad.

I'm not sure this explanation particularly helped me much because, as I said, when he was wheeled into surgery I was still utterly convinced that I would never see him alive again, but I felt slightly less nuts knowing that this was in fact a documented condition.