Last Day of June ... err, i mean July!

My monthly update ... hopefully the first of many!

Health-wise i've improved steadily, but still experiencing symptoms of the anxiety disorder. Hopefully it will just take time. The most important thing is being able to manage stress and anxiety, as it is impossible to avoid it totally. Work has been pretty hectic and is about to get more stressful. I've managed so far ... fingers crossed.

Family news ... My nephew Tim celebrated his 18th birthday! Hope it was a good one mate. My brother Neville also notched up another year. Kerri's father underwent some pretty serious surgery, however he looked pretty fit when we saw him over the weekend, and i reckon it won't be long until he's back riding insane kilometres on the bike and enjoying his tennis. Finally, as i mentioned in earlier posts, my sister Cheryl is in Helsinki preparing for the World Championships. Her race is less than a week away! Cheryl, enjoy your final week of preparation. We are all looking forward to the race!

On the personal sport scene, i've been avoiding competitive sport, as it doesn't help with the anxiety, however i still manage a couple of social soccer games a week during lunchtimes at work. I find a regular run relieves stress and tension that might be building up. I found out my mate Scott was heading out onto the tennis court this weekend, so Kerri and i also went out for a hit today up at Redhead. Since i might be heading down to Melbourne soon, i better have my game in order! Oh, and the Panthers finished with a good win after falling out of contention for the semi's.

Music-wise, since we went to the Finn Brothers concert a couple of weeks back their album has made it back on my play-list. Sensational album. I made a pretty good purchase with the Foo Fighters "In Your Honor", however i must find time to listen to the louder of the two disc's, as the Kerri-friendly songs have dominated the airwaves. Retro-wise i've been listening to The Sharp's "Sonic Tripod". I still can't understand why this album flopped, i reckon it's far superior to their first release.

As i mentioned, work is going to be pretty busy in the coming month, and i might be finding myself in Melbourne quite a bit. It might be time to invest in some gloves!

Hope the month of July was a good one for you.

Across the land and over the sea

A couple of weeks ago i gave in to all the hype and downloaded Google Earth. Now not many things blow me away these days, but WOW! The program allows you to take a bird eye's view of the world, or should i say a moon's eye? You can navigate to anywhere you like and it will display a recent (last 2 years) overhead picture. Often this will be a fairly low resolution, however if you're lucky you may see a high resolution image. When i zoomed in on our office building in Alexandria, i was amazed when i was able to distinguish the cars parked on the roof of our office building! On Saturday i spent half an hour with Cheryl and Kerri, trying to locate the Athletics Stadium in Helsinki. Cheryl was able to recognise the course for her World Championship Walk event.

The most impressive thing about the program is the look and feel of it. If you enter a city into the search field, the view will slowly pan across the earth, zooming out then in as it goes. You can drag the view around to see the surrounding area's, zoom in to a suburban block, or zoom out to see the entire planet, all the while doing it very smoothly with realtime streaming. It can even show terrain - if you take yourself into the mountains, you can shift your view to see a ground-eye's view. Once they update the database with more high resolution images (Sydney CBD is very low res), you will wonder how you ever lived without this tool. No more maps split between pages - just move the location to the middle of the screen and press print.

I wonder how far this will go? If we get to the point where we can see a real-time image, we will run into privacy issues. Anyhow, if you have broadband and a fast PC, you really must give Google Earth a try.

Everything Gets Turned Around

I found the following post on the Panthers forum. Those that are critical of the structure of the recent cuts in the Australian Tax system should read this!

Suppose that every day, ten people go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

- The first four (the poorest) would pay nothing.
- The fifth would pay $1.
- The sixth would pay $3.
- The seventh $7.
- The eighth $12.
- The ninth $18.
- The tenth (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do. They ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a problem. "Since you are all such good customers," the owner said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20". So, now dinner for the ten only cost $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So, the first four were unaffected, they would still eat for free. What about the other six, the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get their fair share? The six paying customers realised that $20 divided by six is $3.33. If they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth and the sixth would each end up being 'PAID' to eat their meal. So, the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each persons bill by roughly the same amount, and proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:
- The fifth, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
- The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
- The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
- The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
- The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
- The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. The first four continued to eat for free. Once outside the restaurant, they began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth, pointing to the tenth diner "but they got $10!". "Yeah, that’s right," exclaimed the fifth. "I only saved a dollar, too. Its unfair that they got ten times more than me!" "That’s true!!" shouted the seventh. "Why should they get $10 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!". "Wait a minute," yelled the first four in unison. "We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!". The nine surrounded and beat up the tenth diner.

The next night the tenth diner didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without number ten. When it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

That, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table any more.

Miles above the mountains and plains?

Last week we helped Kerri's Grandmother move into a retirement village. It got me thinking what it must be like to move out of the home you've lived in for most of your life. Hopefully the move will be good for her. I'm a believer that you cease to live if you stop looking forward, and this move is an opportunity for her to do that.

Recently i've been given the opportunity to work with new technology at my workplace. I have rediscovered the passion for learning! The hardest part was battling the initial frustration which one experiences at the beginning of the learning curve. Since any small amount of frustration may trigger an anxiety attack, i had to try to hold back and not put pressure on myself to learn quickly. Thankfully i've improved to the point that i can work very solidly all day, although i soon learned that my post last Sunday was probably written too early! I've still got a long way to go before i can say i'm truly over this illness.

My good mate Scott, now living in Melbourne, is also looking at something new. When our German friends Holger and Nina decided to return back home, i thought we had lost our only opportunity to have a private flight service. However Scott has just declared that he too has caught the flying bug! If he sticks with it then perhaps i will need to persuade him to move back to Sydney :-)

Dreaming of Glory

My little sister flew out of Sydney today bound for Helsinki, Finland, for the World Athletics Championships, which begin in two weeks time. Cheryl will compete in the Womens 20km walk on Sunday, 7th August (11:35am Helsinki time). Before she left i managed to pursuade her to start up her own blog. Best of luck Cheryl - we will be cheering you on!

Disembodied Voices

So what's with all this blogging business? Well to be honest i'm not really sure! I can't say i've spent much time surfing the blogosphere, however i starting thinking this could be a very useful tool. I'm the first to admit i'm pretty lousy at keeping contact with friends and family, so why not use this new medium to keep us closer together? It's still no excuse for not calling home (sorry mum!), but i believe it will help close the distance that can easily divide us. Maybe i could even persuade others to do likewise! A way of keeping tabs on each other, in a non-intrusive, virtual way. No matter where we are, we hear each others voices, we could be anywhere ...

Six Months in a Leaky Boat?

As my family and friends would know, i've been going through a very tough time of late. Although i've spoken to most of you recently, i thought i'd publish an account of my recent illness, in the hope that it will help people understand what i have been through. I have been amazed at the number of people who have come to me with stories of friends or relatives who have been overcome with similar problems as i.

The story begins on Boxing Day last year, where Kerri and i were visiting her parents at Redhead. We were taking a leisurely stroll along the beach, when i was suddenly overcome by extreme dizziness. It wasn't the first time this had ever happened, so after a bit of a rest i shrugged it off and we continued on our way. Later that evening i had another episode during dinner, which obviously concerned me, but it wasn't until the following night that it really hit me. I was in a deep sleep, when surprised with, what i now call, a head surge. Physically, it felt a bit like the tingly feeling associated with a cold shiver that propagates up ones spine, however it was more a burning sensation, similar to pins and needles, and far more intense. This feeling was happening inside my head - inside my brain to be precise. It went off with a sudden burst, a buzz lasting only a second or two, but it was accompanied by an emotional feeling, a feeling that i was dying. It was the most frightening experience of my life. From a deep sleep, i jumped into a startled sitting position in a microsecond. I think i then went into shock, trembling with what had just transpired. It took a while but, with some comfort from Kerri, i eventually allowed myself to fall asleep, and all was well. About 3 or 4 days later, i had a second episode. Again, it happened while i was sleeping, and again i felt like i was dying. It was terribly frightening.

Over the next couple of weeks i had a few more episodes, mostly at night, and I started to recognise a pattern. My thoughts, even while sleeping, were being abruptly interrupted, and instantly jumping to something completely unrelated. I found it analogous to a computer program crash, where my brain would be executing some thought code, but suddenly jumped to the wrong instruction, executing code from another program. At the same time i would experience a "head surge" - that extremely unpleasant physical feeling inside my head, and a feeling of death. What was happening to me? Was i going crazy? I believed my brain was malfunctioning but didn't understand why, and this made me very, very worried.

Many doctors' visits later, undergoing numerous tests including brain x-rays, blood tests, 24 hour heart monitors, stress tests, and ultra-sound examinations of the heart, the doctors concluded that my episodes were due to Acute Anxiety Disorder. I wasn't completely convinced but it seemed to make sense. I continued to have dizzy spells and these head surges, but not too bad, so went straight back to work and continued my busy life. I seemed to improve for a while, however after about 3-4 weeks i suddenly got worse. And i mean much, much worse. I got to the point that i could not do anything. The attacks were triggered by everything, and often nothing. I could not read, listen to music, watch tv or have a shower without having an attack. I spent night after night on little or no sleep, trying to stay awake, as it was when i was sleeping that they were most frightening.

I was in a very bad state but i was seeking help. The doctors explained that the malfunction was due to a depletion of the chemical messengers in the brain (serotonin and noradrenaline), and so i was placed on anti-depressants, which help boost these chemical levels. It took a further 4 weeks of suffering before they started to work, however they did begin to work. And what really helped was understanding what was happening to me, as my worrying was in itself causing me to become even more ill. It took me a while to work it out, but i believe i now understand the attacks i was experiencing ...

When the episodes occur, my brain is triggered into a state of panic, and it does this by releasing a chemical, causing the instinctual part of my brain to take over. This has the effect of increasing my heart rate, improving my reactions, and making me jump through the roof! The most negative effect however, is that during these panic attacks, i am made to feel like i am dying. This is a perfectly natural way to feel when panicking, if one is panicking for a good reason! Unfortunately I had no control over my thoughts or emotions when these surprise attacks struck.

Why was my brain malfunctioning in this way? Well looking back there had been symptoms of anxiety during the preceding 12 months, but as i had experienced these before, i shrugged them off. In the final months of last year i was doing way too much. I was stressed at work, was playing two competitive sports per week, had far too many visits to the dentist, was learning to drive a manual transmission for the first time (in city traffic), my brother had a life threatening illness, i had been playing the most frightening computer game ever (Doom3), and i had just moved house. I had too much anxiety and i had no relief. Looking back, i can now see it was inevitable that i would crash.

The good news - i am now much better! I rarely have an attack now, and when it does happen, it's very mild. I have progressed so far that i felt comfortable in writing about my attacks in the past tense. I will continue on medication for a while longer, but if i take care of myself i do not foresee the illness returning. I have learned to listen to my body, to realise when i'm pushing it too far. I've learned the value of relaxation time, but most of all i've learned not to worry so much. Life is way too short and it doesn't do you any good anyway!

I would like to conclude with a message for Kerri. It must have been so frustrating for you, but i am very grateful for your patience and understanding. You really helped get me through this terrible part of my life, especially during the times when i doubted that i would get better. Thank you so very, very much.

Four Seasons ...

Last night we had the pleasure of seeing the Finn Brothers perform in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. It was great to hear a live performance in a venue made for music. The Finn's were their usual brilliant selves, playing classics from their Enz years, some old favourites from Crowded House, and featuring many tracks from their most recent collaborative album, Everyone is Here. Highlights for the evening was personal favourite, Distant Sun, and Tim "going off" during a superb Shark Attack!

Earlier in the evening Neil got the crowd involved for an unaccompanied Four Seasons in One Day, in honour of the late Paul Hester. His larrikin on-stage persona and wonderful drumming abilities are being sorely missed by many. Goodbye Paul ...