A Depression Battle
Down and up again at 0^o24'37.7"N 33^o11'31.7E 1140m

From the age of 18, I am depression prone. This, experts told me, has little to do with a sad youth or a pattern of behaviour that risks to cause serious drawbacks and frustrations. It is a biochemical defect of my brain system. Before I reached my forties I had at least eleven depressions. They tended to get deeper and last longer (up to more than a year) as I got older. Then, ten years ago, I was advised to try  Efexor, an anti-depression drug. The depression I had that moment vanished in a few weeks, and none ever returned. All this without any side effects. At the moment when the monkeys of the Mwanza Immigration Office embellished my passport with an immediate ban from Tanzania see surfboard: Immigration), I was in my 10th year without depression. No wonder that on my quickly improvised leave from Tanzania, I did dig for my cigars in my almost finished dhow, but not for the drug. After new drugs, quickly ordered from The Netherlands on arrival in Uganda, arrived, I decided to extend the drugless experiment and see how my brain, after all that time, would behave (Head Quarters Jinja.html#stopped with pills).

No problems for three months. But then it started. The first symptoms, I know them very well, are feelings of fear (unfounded of course), and indecisiveness. Just deciding whether to watch the football match until the end or go home suddenly seems to be a big problem. Immediately I started taking the pills again. Unfortunately, it takes some weeks before they start having a noticeable effect. Last time I started the pills, that was two weeks.
In those first two weeks things quickly got worse.

Photo: first days on the way down, still time for jokes

The next phase is that you will start to think negatively about yourself, something like a failed, yes, if you come to think about it seriously, completely failed person. Meanwhile your unfounded feelings of unrest, vague fear, dissatisfaction start to desperately look for reasons: Africa was wrong idea, boat was wrong idea, why had I not ...etc. I am a seasoned depressionist, so I take none of those serious thoughts seriously, especially not when it comes, in the next phase, to feeling that life is an unbearable misery and surely should be ended on short notice. In the same process downwards, the brain simply starts malfunctioning generally: reading, remembering, operating a computer, everything starts to get clogged with "server timeouts" and other critical failures. You can not listen to music. Music arouses emotions, and yours should be kept down, since they are indigestible. Just switch on radio speech. The latest crap updates and lies about the war in Lebanon are very suitable ("on the background you hear the artillery", "the news is that we have no verification yet about..."). Keep your mind busy listening to it, so you do not have to listen to your mind for a while, like all happy people do. Keep your mind too busy too haunt you. Go to the dentist for some thorough repairs without anesthesia. Real fear is a good means to crowd out the fake fear caused by depression. I remember this from paragliding under depression. Doesn't cure but alleviates for a while (permit me a digression, Rabelais about the use of fear: the King of England, haunted with defecation clogs, had the full-fletched attacking French army painted on his toilet walls, which, the King told, was a great assistance in relieving himself). Deep down in depression, muscles tend to assume tension, you feel stiff all over, especially in shoulders, neck and jaws. You will start to walk around unsteadily with short steps if you do not concentrate on making a normal impression on the general public. Generally, you get a bit clumsy operating whatever tool. A day will become very long. Waking up is the worst moment of all: a wave of unfounded fear, muscle stiffness, clumsy motoric, all fought by a dive in the lake, crocs, hippo's or not, a lot of strong coffee with a good breakfast. Fortunately, my variant of depression does not interfere with appetite, nor with sleeping in in the evening.
The great art becomes to survive every day. This is done by putting extra energy in concentration on whatever. Just set yourself to do something. It is no cure, it is a palliation only, a way to pass time with less pain, to give the medicine the required weeks to start working.  You efforts to go through your day are only meant to suppress the suffering. The way to survive the day is spend a lot of energy in keeping doing to things an finding them important. Keep it simple. Thus I absolutely forced myself to teach Doi English twice a day, I fixed the tubes of the dhow's electricity wires. Then, a proper reading light for the captain's couch (symbolizing the confidence that his brain will some day turn in the basic shape to remember, at the end of reading a sentence, how it began). Then, I built a toilet for a) passengers reluctant to shit straight overboard or in a bucket, and b) other European guests.

Photo: toilet seat (baptized "The Throne", by friends), 1m high, out of the way by profiting from the dhow's V shape. Bolted support frame connected with skewed joints. All parts improvised together roaming through town with unsure, short steps, looking on a paper every minute to remember what I was looking for. I did not even believe the thing would work, but it does.

Regularly I played golf on the Jinja golf course. First of all, you are with company. Second, once you force yourself to find a proper hit the most important thing in the world, your motoric capabilities often show up and you won't even do worse than in healthy times.

Photo: down under: eyes barely connected to extremely malfunctioning brains

After two weeks my obvious thought was: "now things can turn every day". I was using the very pills that had kept me out of depression for 10 years. From the first sign of improvement to getting back to normal used to last two or three days. But no such signs, not even in the next two weeks.
Unusual. And it is known that sometimes a medication like mine is ineffective if applied to a patient the second time. This, of course, was the worst moment of all. If you permit me one more joke: I happened to be slightly insensitive to hope at the time.
Fortunately my doctor and others told me that there were a lot of cases in which quite an acceptable brain redress had taken 6, or even 8 weeks. Hold on, was the advise.

The first improvement came in week 5. I was better, but still bad.

Photo: awakenings

Days became bearable in week eight, next to normal in week 11. Of course the worst thing of depression is that the things you think (like that you are a failed person and there is no reason to live, etc.) are true. That is why you should not think them. In order for your mood to go up, the quality of your thoughts should go down. In week 11, I clearly restarted to enjoy the common and widespread hypocrisy of posing to myself as smart, shrewd, intelligent and in easy circumstances. Almost three months of misery, much worse than lying in an African hospital with some bullet holes, broken bones, malaria and atrium fibrillation, was the price of my heroic journey to the truth and back.

Photo: Happy end, hypocrite again (courtesy Efexor, Wyeth^� Pharmaceuticals)

Never again! I want to roam Lake Victoria for many years to come in happy self deceit, faithfully take these pills every day, until the end of my life, and advise the next of kin to bury me at a safe distance from sources of drinking water, preferably on a chemical waste dump with all required permits and certificates. Somehow I've always thought myself the person to get buried on such a place anyway.

One week later: new pills lost in mail.

Pill stocks would be depleted end of the month. New ones were ordered from the Netherlands four weeks before. It used to take two weeks for the pills to arrive, they thus far never got lost but this time delay mounted until I felt forced to ask a friend to mail me an emergency packet by DHL.
On Monday afternoon, DHL collected the packet. On internet, you can follow your packet's trip.

Friday morning, 11:30: pills in Kampala DHL office. I was told they would arrive in Jinja only the next day. This was backed by a vague story of health problems of DHL personnel.

Saturday morning 10:00: pills still in Kampala. Again a vague story of health problems of DHL personnel. No ultimate arrival time specified. I told them I gave them another 2 hours to bring, that is until 12:00 hrs and 0 seconds. Back home no answer on DHL service telephone. I posted some messages to DHL over their website.
11:00 DHL service phone back in operation. Pills will arrive "between 15:00 hrs and 1600 this afternoon".

14:15 Phone from DHL Jinja: pills arrived. I head for Jinja. 5 minutes before arrival at DHL office, a male from the office phone me: they close now because they urgently have to go to Kampala.
All of you??? (Three males and three female sit all day in that office behind 3 to 5 arrived mail packets, doing nothing).
Yes, all of us.

I am at your office in 4 minutes. If it is closed I will file a complaint and make sure you get fired, whatever I have to pay for that!!!
Hooting from the beginning of the street my father (visiting me from The Netherlands) and me race to the DHL office. I storm out of the car, ordering my father to keep the claxon pressed in, sprint in the office, jump over the counter and shout: WHERE ARE MY PILLS!!!!!!!!

The three male negroes fly out of the office, where a crowd quickly gathers.
The females laugh and give me my packet.
The three male negroes return, concentrating on being inconspicuous. I welcome them, giving each of them a cordial hand, full of warm sympathy.

Passport displayed, signature put, and I ask: have you you kept you office open especially for me?
Yes they had.
What a service! I deeply respect your company!
I put USh 10 000 on the table, � 4.50, or 4 (!) average Ugandan day wages.

At home we quickly make a picture for my friend Jan Hein in Tilburg, who sent me the pills.

In this incident, I had to swallow 4 pills on 36 hrs instead of 24 hrs interval, subsequently I had to wait for two days for the pills to arrive. Finally there was one extra full day waiting for DHL Kampala to wake up and deliver. All this had no effect on my recovery from depression. If anything, the slight progress from nearly perfect in the direction of perfect continued. Just a bit dizzy.
However, when my father and I thought about how to answer if reproached for my jumping over de counter at the DHL office and causing a flight of the male personnel to the street and a street congestion, we thought it wise in that case to show the judge the pills, proving beyond reasonable doubt that I am a psychiatric patient, and simply explain His Honorable that DHL Uganda had withheld me my pills, thus triggering a manifestation of my medical problem. The Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Even in Africa.