Reader Submissions: Ralph Sinisi

In this edition of Reader Submissions, Ralph Sinisi details his struggles with mental health and the impact it has had on himself and his family.

We would like to thank Ralph for candidly providing his story, and wish him all the best for his recovery. Ralph’s submission is also available in video format via YouTube.

Living through the pandemic

When the pandemic hit, I was living on 11th floor with my family. I didn’t want to keep taking elevator because they were very crowded.

So I started taking the stairs, and I was really over-exerting myself running up and down all those flights with a lot of heavy stuff.

Then we moved out of the apartment. On the last day I was moving out, I just felt like something happened to me – like I pulled a muscle or something.

Then I had the worst pain, probably the worst physical pain I ever had in my life. It was at the start of the pandemic, I knew I wasn’t dying so I didn’t go to the hospital or the doctor.

I started feeling better and felt I was healing up. But then I started acting stressed out and started not sleeping. I was always very easy going, but things started to bother me.

Nothing had ever bothered me in my life before, I had a high threshold for stress, where things wouldn’t bother me.

Mental illness

But all of a sudden, my threshold started to go down. Basic things like traffic would bother me.

I was worried about different things, but I didn’t understand that I was thinking with really severe anxiety.

I didn’t know it until my wife left. She told me I wasn’t acting correctly, but I believed I was because my brain thought it was.

I didn’t know anything was wrong with me, I’d never dealt with any illness, physical or mental, in my life. This was something which I didn’t know what was happening to me.

When I went to the doctor, I was trying to show my wife that there was nothing wrong with me. I was expecting to get a clean bill of physical health.

After the blood test came back, my haemoglobin was only 10 when it is supposed to be 16.

I had internal bleeding from my intestine tearing from overdoing it, straining myself, carrying everything up and down the stairs.

The doctor said I had iron deficiency anaemia and I started looking into it. I saw the symptoms are anxiety, depression. I was suffering from both.

A family torn apart

I was sure that once my wife heard that I did have an illness that she would reconcile my family.

I didn’t know a physical injury could even affect your mental health until this happened to me.

So she said that I was using it as an excuse for how I was acting. She didn’t understand that it was caused by my illness.

I had really bad migraines at the time, I wasn’t sleeping, you start getting sleep deprivation from the anxiety keeping you up. But at the time you think you’re fine, because you’re dealing with stuff – especially during the pandemic.

Once I realised I had this illness, I realised I was acting irrationally stressed because my body wasn’t functioning correctly.

My wife has never spoken to me again, she truly believes that I’m a bad person for what happened.

Improvement in symptoms

I was able to cure the iron deficiency anaemia once I was diagnosed and knew what was happening.

It took about four months, but my haemoglobin rose back up. I’ve continued going to doctors for blood tests.

I’ve never had any issues after curing it, but my wife does not believe the illness, so she truly believes I am a bad person.

She believes that other things were at play, that I had a head injury, or I was mentally ill before this. When none of these things are true. It was caused by one horrible injury.

We had a great marriage, we were together almost 20 years, we never even argued. I am a very easy-going person, but the anxiety really makes you not easy going.

You’re worried about things, you think of the worst possible scenario for everything. You want to protect your family from this worst possible scenario. But this worst possible scenario is not bound to happen.

When you have anxiety, you believe the glass is half empty rather than half full.

Looking to the future

My wife is acting with misconceptions. Now that I have researched what happens, it is very common with mental health that once people act wrongly that they are not treated humanely and normally because there is a misunderstanding.

I’m not mad at my wife because she went through so much with this. But the misunderstanding is severely hurting our daughter. My daughter is the best kid.

My wife – She doesn’t understand the illness I have is cured, and my daughter wants to have me in my life, it’s severely hurting her, and my wife is focused only on proving I’m someone that I’m not, and justify what’s happening to break our family apart.

It’s a very difficult situation. the pain and mental illness and the people it affects is so significant, it’s almost indescribable.

I’m doing all I can to have understanding and realisation of what’s happening with the illness.

Summary

Ralph has spoken about his mental health struggles above. He has also described the link between iron deficiency and mental health problems – which we have discussed before.

You can also watch Ralph talk about this on YouTube. If you have been affected by any of the content of this article, you can see our crisis resources at this link.