![]() ![]() Every night, I crept into my daughter’s bed. The first week after his death is a blur. I went on a walk I returned to find my husband dead. The phrase “I have lost my husband” could not be more accurate – it feels like carelessness to me, like he slipped through my fingers while I looked the other way. As his wife and as a doctor, I am appalled that I let him go this way. To say I feel overwhelmed by guilt and shame is an understatement. I am still in a state of disbelief much of the time. Richard and Kate Harding in Wellington, New Zealand, 2017. Somehow, I had overlooked this, as well as his impulsiveness and his impatience – character traits that had further heightened his risk of succumbing to his illness. Richard lost patience with the process and took matters into his own hands. The psychologist suggested a psychiatrist. Week after week, we waited for the drugs to start working. “I don’t think I will ever be the same person again,” was a recurring phrase of his, in relation to the GMC complaint. ![]() Privately, however, he worried a lot more about his clinical decisions. Insomnia was a central feature, worsened by the frequency of his night-time call-outs, although he enjoyed his job and continued to perform well at work. This time, the medication didn’t work in fact, it may have made things worse. Then, in July last year, his depression recurred. In rapid succession, he acquired a boat, fishing rods, a fishing kayak, three types of roof rack and an unspeakably tight-fitting open-water swimming wetsuit, accessorised with a dapper hood. He threw himself into his new coastal life and regained his energy and verve. He did well on antidepressants and made a positive impression on his new colleagues. He had had an episode in his early 20s, which had lasted for months, but there had been no recurrence. We boarded our flight to Auckland, vowing never to work in the NHS again.īut once we had made the move to Northland, the stress of the previous few months caught up with Richard and he entered a period of depression. Finally, the all-clear was given and the paperwork completed. He was unable to work abroad until the GMC could issue him a “certificate of good standing”, so we had to claw back the jobs from which we had resigned and tell our children they were returning to the schools they thought they had left. The strain this put him under was immense. Although the complaint was thrown out in due course, as we expected it to be, it took five months. His illness was triggered last year by a complaint about him to the General Medical Council (the first he had received), just as we packed the last of our possessions into a shipping container bound for New Zealand and signed away our house. Richard had been living with depression and was three days away from his first appointment with a psychiatrist for a medication review. To be shutting the door on them, late at night, and for a moment teetering between my former life and the one to come, a darker version of the stroke of midnight separating the old year from the new. To be helping the children to do the same, before he was taken away by the ambulance. To be putting a duvet over him and a pillow under his head and to be kissing him goodbye. To be discussing adrenaline with the paramedics. To be applying shock paddles once the community defibrillator had arrived. Nevertheless, it seemed perfectly normal to be attempting to resuscitate my husband – at one point with my foot – as I talked to the emergency operator. As a hospice doctor, I am far more comfortable with death in its more expected, gentle forms. I can report that a state of calm really does descend in such extreme circumstances, even in someone who fears emergencies as much as I do. As a consultant anaesthetist and intensivist (a specialist in the care of critically ill patients), Richard knew exactly what to do. Richard killed himself at home while I was walking the dog with my daughter, while my son was lying metres away in his bedroom. It seems surreal to be writing that sentence and yet it is true. ![]()
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