A & E staff are just amazing despite terrible conditions!

I can be an awful idiot. When the financial crash hit in 2009, freelance work just disappeared. A dogged and stubborn fool, I worked 15 hour days, seven days a week, trying to earn a living, but no papers or magazines were buying anything.

Eventually I became so exhausted that my chest felt tight and my breathing was all over the place. At that point I really should’ve gone to the doctor, but our respective families had generously paid for the Snapper and I to go to France on holiday, and I really didn’t want to miss it.

Convincing myself that all I needed was rest and relaxation, I waited until we were in the middle of nowhere, in a farmhouse somewhere in the west of France, before becoming seriously unwell and ending up on a cardio ward in a hospital near Bordeaux.

As it turned out I was fine. I’d had a massive panic attack but as I’d never known anything like it, I’d imagined I was having a heart attack.

Thankfully two good things came out of this horrible experience: we discovered that my blood pressure was up in the stratosphere, so that has been treated ever since, and after returning home I sold a feature to the Irish Times about what it’s like to have a panic attack and end up in a French hospital.

Well, you have to. If you’re going to make a living out of scribbling, you cannot turn down opportunities like that.

My lovely wife had a most miserable holiday, staying in a cheap hotel on an industrial estate so that she could visit her prat of a husband, who’d been living in denial of his poor health, so I swore to her that I’d never ignore such symptoms again.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I went out for a stroll in the warm afternoon sunshine.

The last few months have been a difficult period in our household, as the Snapper’s illness forced her to leave work last year. Thankfully she’s on the mend, but with all the ensuing changes to finances and everything else, I’d been working too hard, trying to cover too many angles all over again, and inevitably my own health had started to suffer.

To read Charlie’s column in full, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.