Mental Heath Part 2
Woody the Safety Bloke… My thoughts on Mental Health continue
My Father Persisted…
How are you feeling today?
Good day everyone, Woody again, I just want to pick up from last week’s Woody’s words. I had some interesting comments and a couple of messages sent through after I posted last week’s little video, on the mental health side of getting hurt.
Now I just want to share something that happened to me after I had my accident. Now, I said last week that I was never formally offered any counseling or any sort of mental health assistance when I got hurt, I had some good people around me at the time, family and friends but one of the things that happened to me shortly after my accident was my old man, he cashed in all his long service leave, all his whole day pay and he sat at the side of my bed for, you know, sometimes 12, 14, 16 hours a day.
I can remember, about a week after I got hurt, I came back from some x-ray or tests or procedure and he said to me, he said, look James I want you to do me a favor and I looked at him I was in a bit of a foul mood. I said, well there’s not much I can do from this hospital bed is there and he said, well I want you to talk to me about how you’re feeling and how you’re coping with all of this and I looked at my old man and I told him to get stuffed, I said Dad, I don’t want to talk about how I’m feeling, you know this is something that I have to deal with and I have to cope with, anyhow my old man didn’t say anything.
The next day I had to go out of the room again, you know, on a hospital trolley and then come back in later on and my old man said the same thing, he said, well look, how you feeling today and I didn’t answer him, I was starting to get a bit cranky with him and he kept doing this.
Now I don’t know when it was but I reckon about a week later, I came back from you know some other procedure and my old man said to me how you feeling today James and I looked at him and I was ready to go right off and I said well actually, Dad I’m pretty pissed off, you know, I’m really, I’ve had a shit day and I’m feeling really angry and he said, that’s good at least you’re able to share that with me and I didn’t think anything of it at the time but then my old man kept doing the same thing, you know, every time I’d be away or you know go out of the room for some sort of medical procedure, I’d come back and my dad would say, how you feeling today and it got to the point where I could actually tell him how I was feeling, I mean some days that I’ve had good days and I’d say yeah look today wasn’t a bad day and other days would be just horrible and I’d say you know what I hated today, you know, it was really bad but I think that the point that I’m trying to make here is that by actually talking about how I was feeling, it helped me to cope with what was happening to me.
So just just take out of that little story what you will but I think, I would ask you if you or if you know anyone that does tend to keep things inside or bottle things up, if you can find someone to talk about it too, it can actually release some of those feelings and some of the negative stuff that happens to us. So anyhow just my thoughts I’m not a mental health expert but just a bit of a story to share with you, anyhow, I’m woody, stay safe Australia.
