So my new reality began in a guest suite on the top floor of Neil Hellman’s house in Sandhurst — the same house I’d broken my ankle falling off a few months earlier.
I can’t remember exactly how long I stayed there, but it was long enough to have the kids over for a couple of weekends. I remember making up ghost stories for them. There was a room at the end of the passage that looked genuinely spooky, so I told them it was haunted and we had a lot of fun around that. We laughed a lot. I was doing everything I could to soften the impact of what must have felt like constant upheaval to them.
By then Mikey was at De La Salle Holy Cross, a Catholic school close to where Terry lived. Angie and Ollie were still younger — Angie at St Teresa’s Convent and Ollie at a nursery school called Flemings, also nearby. At least that part of their lives had some stability.
Weekdays were awkward. Neil would give me a lift to work. Sitting next to the supreme MD of the company in awkward silence — or worse, listening to one of his diatribes every morning — wasn’t ideal, but I really had no choice.
At some point, the external fixation was removed from my ankle. The doctor literally took a spanner and unceremoniously unscrewed the bolts from my leg. Fresh blood welled up out of the holes. A dressing and a bandage. Done. To this day I still have some metal in my ankle, but it’s never bothered me — he did a fantastic job.
Eventually I took transfer of my tiny flat in Lyndhurst — second floor, forty-five square metres, three bedrooms in theory, though “bedroom” was doing a lot of work. Still, it was mine.
I furnished it as best I could. I wanted it to feel clean, safe, and inviting — somewhere the kids could look forward to visiting. Angie’s room was all pink: a lava lamp, Cinderella sheets. The boys had bunk beds with The Incredible Hulk sheets. When they stayed with me, I threw everything I had into making it fun.
But underneath that, I was sinking.
Not just depressed — dangerously depressed.
I started having suicidal thoughts. I’m not proud of that, but when your own mind begins telling you that the world would be better off without you, that’s not something to brush aside. I knew I was in serious trouble.
Years earlier I’d read a book by a South African author, Mike Lipkin, called Lost and Found. In it, he described how electroconvulsive therapy — ECT — had been the only thing that stopped his descent into suicidal despair.
I reread it.
The clinic he’d gone to no longer existed, but I found another private psychiatric hospital in Pretoria called Denmar. I phoned them, made an appointment, and went out to see a psychiatrist. I told him what medication I was on from my GP — basically an SSRI and a benzo — that I’d seen psychologists, and that nothing was working.
He didn’t hesitate. He prescribed six ECT sessions spread over two weeks.
Amazingly, my medical aid agreed to cover it.
The process was structured: check in on a Sunday evening, treatments on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then home for the weekend. John Cartwright took my car and chauffeured me to and from. The clinic itself was nothing like the nightmare stereotypes — calm, kind, deeply humane. The male nurse in my ward was one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met.
The treatments were done under full general anaesthetic. This wasn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You went to sleep; you woke up.
After the second treatment, something dramatic happened.
I went high. Properly high.
Not in a drugged sense — more like my brain had suddenly been uncorked. I was buzzing with ideas, plans, confidence. I tracked down a guy in the UK I’d once licensed a natural products range from and got him to send me all the recipes. I hatched an elaborate new business plan involving John Cartwright, who — aside from being technically brilliant — was also a trained surfactant chemist before he ever got into web design. I could see the whole thing in my head, perfectly formed.
In hindsight, it was classic hypomania. On the days between treatments I played a lot of chess with a patient called Andy. He told me there was nothing wrong with him — he’d faked psychological issues after his meth lab was busted and somehow ended up in a much nicer environment than jail.
That weekend between treatments, John picked me up and I insisted we go to Teasers — a strip club. I ended up spending the night with a prostitute, and instead of doing what I imagine you’re supposed to do, I spilled my entire life story to her like she was a therapist. Poor girl — she really earned her fee.
I spent the rest of the weekend at John’s windowless, one-room basement apartment in Lanseria. It was strange. Dislocated. Not healthy.
Then the second week of treatment happened, and I went home to my little apartment.
And then… nothing.
I lost the week after the therapy completely. Not memories from my life — but the days immediately following. Retrograde amnesia. Gone.
The first sign something was off was an SMS: Hi, I was really hoping to hear from you.
I had no idea who it was from.
My first thought was that it might be the woman from Teasers. I replied cautiously. The response made it clear it wasn’t.
So I started gently — very gently — questioning the kids, because I knew I’d had them that weekend.
Eventually it emerged that I’d been set up on a blind lunch date by Margie Langschmidt, a friend of Sue’s — Sue being Neil’s girlfriend. The woman’s name was Tish.
Not only that — I’d taken all three kids with me on the date, which was lucky, otherwise I would never have made the connection.
By all accounts, the lunch had gone perfectly normally. Normal enough that Tish had contacted me afterwards because I’d never made good on my promised second date.
I had absolutely no recollection of her at all.
We arranged to go to a movie. I couldn’t very well tell her I had no idea what she looked like, so I made sure I picked her up. When she opened the door, I remember feeling a surge of relief — she was pretty, warm, easy to talk to.
The evening was completely normal. Pleasant, even.
We started dating.
Months later, I told her the truth — that I had no memory of our first meeting. She took it remarkably well. It turned out she’d also had issues with mental health and was undergoing long-term therapy, was on SSRIs, and took a nightly sleeping pill. This will come into sharp focus later in this narrative.
The important thing is this: the suicidal despair had been interrupted.
Not cured. Interrupted.
The ECT had done something drastic and crude but effective — like rebooting a system that had completely frozen. The thoughts of killing myself receded. I could function again. I could work.
When I went back to work, Neil — ever tactful and sympathetic — called me into his office one day and said, “I hope you haven’t completely fried your brains with that ECT crap.”
He didn’t understand. He couldn’t have.
ECT isn’t something I’d recommend lightly, or to anyone with mild depression. The memory loss alone is frightening. But when your mind starts rehearsing ways to die, you stop worrying about elegance.
It gave me a chance to keep going.
And at that point, that was enough.