The Absence Of Sleep

Do something for me. Hold your breath for 60 seconds. No, really do it. Back in a minute, literally (hey, used correctly for once!)….

How desperate were you to breathe after the minute? How irresistible and uncontrollable was the urge to take a huge, deep breath in?

So imagine if you tried to gasp for air and nothing happened. Imagine if you couldn’t breathe. 

That’s what a laryngospasm is like. 

So, I was approaching 30 and all was relatively OK with the world. I’d accepted the fact I was a ‘light’ sleeper; I’d started drinking alcohol for the first time after 8 years of being teetotal and was at my first teacher training placement (where the Headmaster remarked – “ You will be teaching the future thieves and murderers of insert name of town” – what a welcome to the world of education).  But then it happened for the first time – an event so important in my life that it would no doubt take up an entire chapter in my biography or, failing that, a couple of hundred words in an obscure blog!

I’d had a stinker of a cold, throat was sore but I went to bed as normal, hoping to get couple of hours of sleep. At some time around midnight, I woke up coughing and before I really knew what was going on, I couldn’t breathe. Panic. I leapt out of bed. I tried to breathe, but nothing would happen. It didn’t feel like I was choking, there was nothing to cough up. I just couldn’t breathe. All I could do is swallow, and boy, the compulsion to do so was never ending. Air flooded into my gut, but not my lungs. Finally, a tiny crack opened up and went into, what I now know is the stridor phase (love that name , wasn’t he in He-man?). Gasps of minuscule amounts of air. Then back to not being able to breathe, then stridor and so on…My heart was racing and was easily the loudest thing in the room. I felt that Death had come, with sharp pointy teeth. This was when, how and where I would die. 

I shook The Wife awake,  and we stared at each other, both helpless. What should we do? Do the Heimlich? Call 999? But then the stridor eased. I was still swallowing lots of air, but at least some of it was reaching the lungs. Everything calmed down, but there was still an irritation in the throat that meant it could come back really easily. The whole thing was over in 60 seconds. 

Every laryngospasm is like this. You don’t get used to it. Every time I feel like it’s the first time, but also it feels like it’s the last time, if you catch my drift.

I have about 5-6 full-on events per year and many slight incidents every day. It has left me with a constant fear of coughing, swallowing, hay fever, colds, sore throats, spicy food, chalk, sleeping, talking, exercising and breathing………..It is with me every second of the day and I hate it.

If I were to compile my Top 100 spasms (and seeing as I’m OCD, I most definitely have), then weirdly, my 2 ‘favourites’ both took place in theatres.

The first was at the Schaubuhne in Berlin. I can’t remember what we were seeing, but it was something of a serious nature. I began to cough mid-performance, began to panic and went into spasm. The sound of stridor filled the auditorium. The crowd, the actors everyone could hear me. Luckily ‘The Wife’ was by my side but, in this critical, high-pressure situation, she simply turned to me and went “Ssshhh”! These were possibly our last moments together and it was going to end with a ”Ssshhh”. To make matters worse, she then started giggling uncontrollably. We staggered out through the emergency exit. We’ve never gone back….

The second occurred in an operating theatre. I was having an operation to have my deviated septum fixed (more of this in a later blog). The anaesthetic was being administered, I was counting down from zehn zu eins (yes, they do it in German!), when, at about neun, it happened. I couldn’t breathe. In a panic, I tried to get up, but I was starting to go under. At least this time Death felt relaxing and welcoming (salmon mouse anyone?). The last thing I heard  was “Relax, it’ll be OK……” 

Later on, they told me they’d had trouble intubating me and from now on, I have to carry a card which lets doctors know that I am at risk when having anaesthetics.

Honestly, this week’s blog was hard to write.

Cottage cheese and wild garlic tartlets

It’s safe to say – I love pastry. The golden, buttery, flaky, moorishness of it. And it gives the added satisfaction of feeling like a genius when you bring it out of the oven – transformed from a beige ball of dough to a mouth-wateringly delicious crust.

That’s the thing though; people think pastry is too difficult and takes too long, so they don’t do it.

Well, I’m on a mission to bring home-cooking back and if I can persuade just one person to have a go, I’ll be happy. And so will you, because you’ll have a very tasty tart to eat!

The following recipe is enough for 4 x 11cm diameter tartlets, but these things can always be tweaked if you want more or less. The basic rule is: however much flour you have, use half the amount of butter. Easy!

Pastry

• 120g flour (I used a mixture of 60g wholemeal spelt flour and 60g white plain flour) + ½ tsp salt
• 60g butter

Rub the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs. Make sure it’s evenly spread out with no big lumps of butter.  

• 1tbsp finely chopped sunflower seeds

Mix the seeds into the flour/butter, then add 10 teaspoons of cold water. Use your fingers to mix it all together and you’ll see that bigger clumps start to form. You’ll probably need to add more water but do that teaspoon by teaspoon. Use your hand then to bring it all together.

If you have time, wrap it in cling-film and pop it in the fridge for a little while. The dough is meant to rest but TBH, I’ve often just rolled it straight away and never noticed any difference.

Smear a little butter all around the 4 dishes, so that the pastry doesn’t stick to it.

Divide your dough ball into 4 equal pieces and roll each out. Line the dish and just fold in any overhanging pieces. My mother taught me to slice that away, so there was a neat trim edge to the pastry but pastry is so good – I like to keep all of it. The end result is a bit rustic but we’re not on Masterchef!

Prick the bottom of the pastry a few times then pop them in the (preheated, 190⁰C) oven for 15-20 minutes.

Meanwhile…..

Filling

• 300g cottage cheese
• Handful wild garlic leaves chopped
• 2 eggs

Mix these ingredients together thoroughly, although it doesn’t have to be whisked. Add a pinch of salt.

Into this mixture, stir 1 small red onion, which had been caramelised with balsamic vinegar (fried gently in a little olive oil on a low heat for 15-20 minutes; stirred regularly to make sure it doesn’t burn and in the last 5 minutes add 2-3 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar. Make sure the liquid has either evaporated or absorbed – you don’t want it to be swimming in vinegar)

Remove pastry from oven, pour the filling in and either sprinkle on a little grated cheese or a couple of teaspoons of Brewer’s yeast flakes.

Pop it back in the oven for another 25-30 minutes.

When they’re done, leave them to cool for quarter of an hour, then tip them out of their dishes.

And how does this help with low mood? Well, despite what you might read about superfoods, there isn’t a nutrient that’s going to wipe out your anxiety in one mouthful. But…

• the actual process of being in the kitchen and baking can be both soothing and purposeful; it gives you something to do and you have a meal at the end of it
• you’re more likely to make an occasion of the meal and that could mean sitting down with friends or family and sharing that time with them

Go on, give it a go and next time, once you’ve realised how easy it is, you can experiment with different flavours and ingredients – the world is your oyster.

It’s fair to say that a reductionist approach to David would be a dead-end. His issues and problems are complicated and overlap, which means that trying to untangle the cause from the effect is still a work in progress. You have to start somewhere though, so why not the throat?

Facts – as determined by a myriad of ENT doctors, although annoyingly, there’s not much consensus between them. Is there ever?

• He has a small chin and a reduced pharynx/larynx/back of tongue area
• The epiglottis (the flap that stops food going into the windpipe) is a bit dodgy, possibly because of the compressed space and so doesn’t open and close normally

This 2^nd point is the main reason why he coughs madly whenever he starts eating. It’s almost guaranteed to happen at the start of every meal and one of the docs suggested slinging the epiglottis up with a suture. Sounds great… we passed on that.

But food going down the wrong way isn’t the worst thing that he experiences – oh no, that would be the laryngospasm.

It’s quite a scary thing to witness and yes, it is a real thing. The larynx (or voice box) which is at the top end of the windpipe, closes up tightly. Only the tiniest amount of air can pass through, which makes a horrible sound (stridor) and of course, not being able to shift air in and out of the lungs properly is excruciating. This is what you can hear when it’s in full-flow.

https://soundcloud.com/teamhancox/laryngospasm

It can be triggered by breathing in air-borne particles – my mum had a laryngospasm because of the incense being burnt during a yoga class! David even had one before surgery simply because they gave him oxygen to breathe, so now he carries a warning card for future anaesthetics.

Having a cold, is the main risk for him though, especially when it gets to that phlegmy stage. The sticky mucus seems to be the irritant that triggers the spasm – we’ve tried steam inhalation and sipping lemon and honey drinks but it’s always a high-stress time. 

Laryngospasm doesn’t last long but those 30-60 seconds feel like a lifetime. Stopping one in mid-flow is tricky: tilting the head back is meant to help and there is the Larson manoeuvre, where you press on a certain point just behind the ear, but in the moment, practical thinking goes right out of the window. So prevention became my main focus.

And then I noticed something.

We’d sat down to lunch – a feta omelette with buttered toast – and with the first mouthful, David had a massive coughing session. Presumably a few toast crumbs had gone down the wrong way, as usual. He wasn’t choking but the coughing lasted ages. I thought about how inflamed or swollen his throat must be after all that and the next day, he had a laryngospasm.

My theory: he already has a dodgy epiglottis that seems to take a while to get into action when he’s eating and struggles to open and close at the right time. The resulting coughing makes the tissue around the voice box swell up and become inflamed. This makes a spasm much more easier to trigger.

So, the experiment was: take a glug of water IMMEDIATELY BEFORE starting to eat anything. The swallowing of water may ‘wake-up’ the epiglottis and remind it to do its job by the time actual food comes along.

The result: so far, fantastic. No dramatic coughing at the start of meals. At all.

For long term success, I’m monitoring whether the reduction in cough-induced inflammation corresponds to less laryngospasms. That last one happened on the 8^th April, so we’ll see.

The other reason for dealing with this, is that it absolutely links in with his anxiety. That’ll become clear to everyone when David talks about the different times it’s happened. And the thing is, the anxiety is rational – it’s happened before and it will, in all likelihood, happen again.

Still, this is a good first step and it’d be great if he can feel less like he’s at the mercy of his body’s whims and malfunctioning and a bit more in control.

Sleep: my bete noire, my enfant terrible, my, my , (Damn it! I need one more to obey the writers’s rule of three, suggestions on a postcard to…..).

OK, scrap that introduction, let’s just start again.

I’m going to start off with an outrageous claim: I don’t think I’ve ever slept through an entire night in my life. Well, at least if I did, it happened a very long time ago. For some reason, I want to start singing the chorus of Comfortably Numb, which actually is a pretty good song to describe my existence, but I’m getting ahead of myself.… 

I actually have a very poor memory of my younger years, so I can’t say for sure, but as a teenager, I remember waking up several times a night. To be honest, I didn’t think this was weird. I never talked to anyone about it and I just thought this was how sleep was for everyone. It made sense to me that we all would need to go to the bathroom once or twice a night and that me waking up was my body’s way of telling me I needed to go.

I was definitely tired a lot of the time, I never felt I had a lot of energy, which would often be written off as general teenage laziness – even by me!  I just used to wake up a lot; no dramas, no choking (not yet).

School years progressed into student years. The tiredness continued but was now enhanced by the student lifestyle (eating badly and drinking well!). By this time I was sharing a single bed in a rented room with the soon-to-be ‘The Wife’ and of course, we slept terribly. This just seemed to confirm my idea that sleep was meant to be a series of interruptions and that we grabbed what we could in between the waking moments. I should add that this situation was not improved by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to face the soon-to-be ‘The Wife’ as she hates anyone breathing on her – I say anyone, it could just be me….. We would regularly have to swap sides of the single bed throughout the night. How I miss those days!!

At roughly the same time, the band I was in, Kerosene, got signed up. This meant often going on small tours of Britain, Europe and even the USA. I hated going on tour. I found that I could only get some sleep in my own bed. Sleeping on floors, 3 to a bed in hotel rooms, or the back of the van is just not fun. Every time we hit the road, I would scan the schedule, looking for opportunities when we could return home for a night. Plus, I was terrified that we would have a crash at some point. The idea of lying in the back of a transit van with a shed load of gear as we drove home during the night still haunts me. There is only one thing worse than hearing the left hand-side tyres going over the rumble strip. Yep, you guessed it, it’s hearing the right-hand tyres! I used to stay up the whole time and sit with the unfortunate person who had to do the next driving shift, just so I could talk to them and keep them awake.

Sleep was becoming something that was a little bit foreign to me, something to be anxious about.

The band came to an end and life carried on. I‘d been straight edge between the ages of 20 and 28, was eating relatively healthily and even enjoying the luxury of sharing a double bed with The Wife – yes, we were now married – but sleep hadn’t changed much. I still woke up several times a night, but was getting by. I would whinge about being tired – you know, like most people do, but these people have no idea!!!! 

I finally got my Maths degree and, with still no clue of what job I actually wanted to do, enrolled to be a trainee teacher. So far, so OK. But then came the night that changed my life: my first laryngospasm………to be continued.

Force majeure! But I guess it’s too late now…

OK, it’s about time I added something to the music page, but first a short history lesson.

Back in 1992, I had the extreme luck of being in a band, Kerosene, who got signed to a major label. Two years later and that all too brief opportunity to live the dream was over. We split up due to musical (in)differences: our record company didn’t like us, the music press didn’t like us and frankly, by the end, we didn’t like us that much either……

Years passed, we got jobs, families and, in my case, the chance to bully students into watching Kerosene videos on YouTube (“Mr Hancox, can we do some maths now please?”), but at the backend of 2018 we got back in touch on social media and decided to release our 2nd album “Broken” – only 25 years in the making! You can find it on Spotify, iTunes etc and it’s not too bad!! Plus, if you are feeling very charitable, you could add us to your Playlist – we get a tiny amount of money each time we get played. I say tiny, it’s the kind of figure that I would use in a significant figures/decimal numbers lesson (“But first a Kerosene video, my students….”).

Since then, we’ve started working on some new tracks. One of them is called “Social Butterfly”, which is a song about Brexit. Well, to be more accurate, it’s a song about the politicians, on both sides, that are using this moment to further their own political ambitions. In our band there are Leavers and Remainers, and if 4 grumpy old musicians can agree to compromise and work together, I don’t see why ‘paid’ politicians can’t do the same.

Anyway, here is a link to where you can download the song and, if I can make a social media leap forward, a link to our video on YouTube. Feel free to leave a comment, particularly if you say something positive about the bass playing!!! 

Who is Def Robot? Well, that’s a history lesson for another day.

https://defrobot.bandcamp.com/track/social-butterfly-brexit-song

Food is definitely not one of my experiments; it’s just a lifelong way of nourishing yourself and has the added bonus that, even if it’s making no obvious improvements, it’s certainly doing no harm.

I’m very much a simple one-pot/plate kind of cook. That means salads, stews, soups and curries but don’t be put-off by the limited list. These not only allow you to pack a mighty heap of plants on a plate, but it’s also easy to prep quick meals that you can take to work AND you’ll cut back on any food wastage. Spinach starting to look a little wilted and sorry for itself? Chuck it in a curry!

I am definitely not about the calories or macronutrients; it’s just about the food and my ethos is nothing new or radical.  I simply believe that meals should include a huge variety of plants and be home-cooked or prepared. Stick to that and you can’t go far wrong!

We’re lucky these days to have access to a wide selection of fruit and veg and we’re told again and again to make sure we have a varied diet. The trouble with having too much choice though, is that you get a bit overwhelmed, struggle to make any decisions at all, and then you revert to safe, old habits. So top tip #1 is: eat the rainbow.

When it comes to planning a meal, you can often find me stood in the supermarket muttering to myself, ‘Well, I had a lot of green for lunch, so how about something red for dinner…?’ Or, I could be making a pumpkin stew and just fancy having something in it to add contrast to all that orange; to shake it up a bit, and before you know it, I’ve bunged a purple aubergine in.

The meals I had as a child were predominately beige – meat, gravy and potatoes. Now don’t get me wrong – beige can be tasty too. I made a gorgeous cheese and onion quiche last week – and it was very golden-brown. By itself, it looked a bit boring, so I piled up some dark-green leaves alongside to give it a spark of life. And then, I added red tomatoes, pink pomegranate seeds and white spring onions. And that’s how you get variety on your plate!

This week, I’ve had a purple-ish phase, and as Spring is here, I put together salads of:

• Blueberries, cottage cheese, spinach, radishes, dry-toasted pecans, avocado, tomatoes and a pumpkin seed oil/balsamic vinegar dressing.

• Beetroot, red apple, dry-toasted macadamia nuts, spinach, tomatoes, red onions, goat’s cheese, olive oil and red wine vinegar dressing.

These are not recipes from a cookbook (although I do have a very real weakness for them!); I just tend to pick one thing and then add whatever goes with it. Beetroot, apple and toasted nuts are a classic combination and you might as well go the whole hog and throw in the goat’s cheese too. Because, why not?

What you see is just as important to enjoying food as what you smell or taste. So the next time you’re in the fruit and veg aisle, stop and stare in awe at all the beautiful colours and then start eating them!

Hello. My name is David. I live in Berlin. I suffer from depression, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, obstructive and central apnea, insomnia, laryngeal spasms, reduced mobility in my right shoulder and left knee, splayfoot and I get really bad breath if I eat Weetabix….but, hey, it’s not all fun and games!!!

I recently spent 14 weeks in a Tagesklinik here in Berlin (which is a clinic that provides different forms of psychological therapy). During this time I noticed how helpful and supportive it was to talk to people who suffer from similar conditions and to share our experiences. I was also struck by how few men attended the clinic (I was the only male out of 21 people!) And I began to consider why. With this in mind, and after a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment, I started to wonder if there was a way I could get in touch with other people to swap stories and theories.

I’m also starting this blog (and the Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts – full on social brand building or what?) to give me something to focus on. I’m hoping it helps give my day structure and (without wanting to sound too dark) give me a reason to get up in the morning. I am a total Social Media novice (OK, I’ve had a Facebook page for a while and I was once on Friend’s Reunited……), so it might take a while for the accounts to take shape and for me to find my blog ‘voice’.

Also along for the ride is my Chief Scientist AKA The Wife who, over the years, has not only put up with a whinge of a husband, but has used me as a Lab rat and you’ll find her various contributions in ‘The Wife’s Experiments’ and ‘Food for Moods’ sections of the blog. The goal being that we can also build a community for friends and loved ones, who then also have a platform to be able to speak to each other.

Finally, there is a section called music, because without it, I think I would have just given up. Music has always been central to my life (hey, I once even reached number 79 in the charts) and I still busy myself with various projects. They allow me precious moments when I forget how I tired I am. Occasionally, I will put links to some of the projects but no, you don’t have to listen!!

OK, that’s it for my first blog – I think this is the longest piece I’ve written since leaving school – and I plan to write another one next week, where I’ll start to talk about my sleep issues. Hopefully, if I can get my head around it, I will start to try and sort out a forum for the site. Until then please get in touch, e-mail, message, post either here or on the Facebook page, Twitter or Instagram.

I am the wife. We met in university, clicked straight away and got married 2 years later. And it’s been over a quarter of a century of love, laughs and adventures.

But I’m not like a normal wife. When things go wrong, I don’t make sympathetic noises, hug and soothingly stroke hair.

I try to fix it.

So over many, many years, I’ve been trying to fix him. I’m not there yet….but you know what they say: Never give up, never surrender!

This is my catalogue of experiments; the comedies of errors. From deficiencies to diet and screen time to sleep hygiene. You name it, I’ve probably tried it and I’m going to share why and how I did it and what were the results.

“Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Paul Auster

It must be clear by now that I’m not an expert telling you what to do. Just the opposite, and in fact, if there are any experts out there, any advice would be welcome. After all, I’m always up for trying it out on my very own guinea pig.