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Hello everyone, how are you all? Are you doing okay? So I want to be up front and say that I've had a lot going on personally that I want to keep personal at the moment, but my life has gone through quite a big transition and I feel like I need to honour boundaries and respect parts of my personal life that I can and don't really want to get into and share. But I want to say, you know, it's not been a smooth transition at points, but I feel like things are definitely in an okay place. Life is just so fucking hard, don't you think? Life is just so fucking difficult sometimes. I say sometimes all the time. And I actually thought, you know what? I really wanted to share this episode and mentioned it in another episode about glee. And I think that feels like a very apt time for me to tell you about a time where life was just really hard and I got through it. I know that on the podcast I've talked about fun, silly things, which has been lovely, and my thoughts on pop psychology and my thoughts on dating apps and who I am and everything and health anxiety, but this is actually a situation where my health was so bad and it was not health anxiety. So when I was obviously at high school and I was on my ambitious career of maybe being a politician one day, I at the time was um really feeling quite poorly in about standard grades or hires. And I think it might have been the tail end of standard grades going into my hires, it might have been the beginning of my two-year hires. It it's very hard to pinpoint the exact timing, but I was really sick for a long time. And I was having episodes of chest infections that just weren't really explained and I wasn't responding to treatment and stuff. And at the time I remember having this horrible cough that just wouldn't go away, and it was like I was hacking constantly, and my throat was really painful, and you know when you just don't feel right. So I would go back and forth to my CF team and then it was just the whole thing is such a blur because I was so sick. Like it was literally a blur for me what actually happened. And this would have been around about 2009-2010 that this happened and I remember having been in school really stressed from exams, and it was either exams or it was prelums, and I was getting really overwhelmed and struggling and I was in Lawrence Studies because after I got hospitalized, my friends did me this beautiful Starbucks coffee cup card, which was so lovely of them that my teacher said we're gonna make Jordan uh get Wilson cards, and it was so wholesome because the school had been notified I'd been so poorly, and I jumped ahead to the positive part because I thought, you know, I need to let you know why monasties was relevant and how I talked about in the last episode, but also about the fact that you know in the moment of difficulty there was kindness and joy and that really meant a lot. So I ended up one day just not feeling right and I was really spaced out and what was so funny was my sats were just solo, and if you don't know what sats are, it's like your oxygen levels. So I think most people's oxygen levels should be between 98 to 100, and you know, now in cystic fibrosis my sats are actually at 97, sometimes 98, which is a miracle because in the past mines would be 92 and 95 on a good day when you know I was getting chest infections constantly. But this occasion my sats were so bad and they were actually down at like 84. I had lost so much weight and we didn't understand why it was just dropping off me. It was like a really, really difficult time, and they admitted me, and I was in and out of consciousness, I was lying in bed, sleeping constantly, wasn't eating. At the time I had a peg feed tube in my stomach, feeding tube, and that was the only thing maintaining calories for me. So when obviously this all occurred and it happened in like the blink of an eye, it was so scary and traumatizing. The CF team were panicking and starting to talk about lung transplant when I was only like fucking 14 or 15, and my mum was like, What is going on? and all this stuff. Things were just not good. So I was in hospital, in and out my whole life in hospital, and there were a lot of infections that I struggled with, and I had missed a lot of primary school, and high school was genuinely a better time for me where I managed to make more high school, and you know, I will always be forever grateful to my mum for learning how to do home IV antibiotics so I could have a life because some parents didn't have capacity to do that with work commitments, confidence, you know, you're giving someone IV medication, it's a really serious procedure that could have detrimental consequences if you don't do it properly, there's infection risk, so really I was always grateful to her for being able to do that. But with this situation, there was no choice. I had to be in the hospital, there was something seriously wrong with me. And eventually, and it's I I've I'll probably get emotional talking about this. I need to keep myself grounded as possible. But there was this wonderful man who sadly is no longer with us, who died this year called Andy Fall, who used to work in the Edinburgh Pediatrics team, and he was the most incredible registrar for CF that I've ever met in my entire life, and he had taken such a shine into me at the beginning of him joining the pediatric team. And when I was in hospital, he was pulling out every fucking stop you can imagine, every solution under his belt. You know, he was thinking outside the box constantly. You know, I remember the team were like, Is it aspergillis? Is it sepacia? Is it um like what what could be causing this? Is it a really bad pseudo-moise infection? Just that it's resistant to those antibiotics. And obviously they had me on IV antibiotics, but I was just not responding, it was so scary. So he sent away lab cultures to like a different lab, it's at the hospital, they were just taking sputum for me 24-7, and he was just saying to them, try and go in if you can. And he was coming out of the room, the head of the pediatrics team was speaking to my mum, having difficult chats with her. The CF nurse was really, really struggling. They were all worried about me. I'd never seen my team actually that worried about me in my entire life, and I'd lost all the colour in my face, it was gone. And then one day that wonderful human being Andy came in and said, I know what's going on, and it had taken about two to three weeks, and I'd been in hospital for a long time, three weeks, and there was no sign of me getting out. And bearing in mind, like I say, I'm missing school, the school getting informed how sick I am, people in my class are making me fucking get well soon cards. And they said, You have grown this non-tuberculosis bug that is like TB, and we need to act fast because it's so harsh and serious and causing you a lot of problems. And they said to me, and the eradication plan for this is not pleasant. And you know how I mentioned in another episode that I shit myself in school, the Sex in the City episode. Well, it was that antibiotic that actually caused me to shit myself in school because that antibiotic, Ravampacin, was the most harsh antibiotic that I was getting bloody diarrhea constantly for like nine months, and there was no alternative because it was the only thing, like one of three drugs that were only sensitive to that bug. So I really didn't have a choice. My choice was get really ill and face consequences or shit myself in school, and obviously no one wants to as a teenager to do that, but when you hear that harsh consequence out of such a funny story, you think, ah right. So anyway, I go on these antibiotics, this combination of antibiotics I've never been put on before, and thankfully, I do start to get better, but it does not happen overnight. They've still got me on an IV antibiotic to treat pseudomonas because it's like when you cough up blood, when you've got cystic fibrosis, all these bugs in your chest can flare up, can feed off the blood. Very weird, but it's true. So they were making sure they were treating everything I had, but they also had to introduce these antibiotics, and I was just so ill. And then I finally in my body, and I can remember this like somatic and from a somatic point of view, I can feel it in my body now. I can feel the tension and the sort of draining of my energy, and that sort of I'm hunched over right now. You can't obviously see me, but you can hear me, but I'm hunched over like I was when I couldn't breathe back then. It was it's quite scary how the body does this. And at that point, I finally started to feel like I was coming back to myself. I was texting my friends, you know. My friends kept texting me, and I was giving them really basic, brief answers, but I was texting them, I was you know, feeling really positive. And my friend at the time had told me there was this TV show that I would love called Glee that she'd been watching online illegally, naughty Kelly. Kelly, if you ever listen to this, you know, you really got me I'll cry. You really got me through such a hard time when that happened. And I want you to know that because you phoned me, you text me, and it meant the world. I'm keeping it together, but I'm crying. So she was wonderful, and she had said to me, like, you need to watch this show, you'll love it, and I was like, Oh, I don't know if I'd love it. And uh this was ages prior, and then I'm the free uh TV had free view in the hospital, so I was in my own room because people with CF have to have their own cubicles for cross infection and had my own room in TV and the free view was you know available with channels, and E4 was like, oh no, a channel for sorry, was like oh, and now we're gonna show this show called Glee at nine o'clock. And I was like, Oh, that's that show Kelly told me about. So I watched it, and of course, I loved it, I found it hysterical, but Jane Lynch was just brilliant at Sue Sylvester, so on PC, but in the best way, I found the music was so gorgeous to watch, and I can remember just lying there and the nurses made me tea and toast, I think, to cheer me up, and then they gave me that nighttime antibiotic and I was like fucking hate my life, and they were like gonna come do my IVs in a few hours, and I was watching this glee, and I never forget the moment that they did Don't Stop Believing at the end in unison, and I never for I honestly I I could really well up a half, but I lay there in bed and I'm watching that moment and thinking this is what it's about like this is what we need to have hope to not stop believing, you know. That can mean to not stop believing in love, you know, your career, your your ability to do things, your health improving. There is always the negative side and downside of life, but for me it's true we have to keep believing because what else do we have? It's it's a fundamental foundation for me, and if people can't believe because they are struggling, that is why we give them support and help. And for me, I remember watching an episode and I lay in bed and I was like 14, 15, I say, and I was like, I'm gonna get out of here and I'm gonna fucking go back to school and I'm gonna smash it and I'm not gonna let it show in my life. And thankfully that is what happened, and it was such a beautiful story, and you know, obviously a lot of people listening to this might be like, Oh, I thought you're gonna like dissect Rachel Berry and Glee and all that jazz, but no, this was actually what Glee did for me. Most people all have their own story of how a TV show literally saved their life, but for me it was more like Glee in that episode saved my mental health that time because it gave me the empowerment to carry on. So I hope you enjoyed this because it feels like a very sad episode for various reasons, and talking about quite dark stuff that happened, but you know, I did my eradication plan and I got rid of the NTM and managed to go back to school and then aced my hires. I did have to drop modest eyes because it wasn't for me low, and I managed to you know achieve the goals I set for myself and battle other health issues that happened after. But that was a real moment that I will never forget in my mum and family will never forget in my friends, and I just needed to share that story with you to show you just how one TV show in one moment and it can really change someone's life. So, yes, I hope you've enjoyed. Leave me lots of lovely reviews. I'm sure you all got weld up, and I totally um weld up with you, and take good care of yourself. You know, this has been quite heavy, so go do something nice for yourself, you know, take your mind off that. Uh, I highly recommend these free from gluten-free angel slices from Morrisons, they're absolutely delish. They don't taste like real cake, but they're still nice. I'm calling gluten-free. I should do an episode on that. But until next time, take good care of yourself. Like I said, you can follow me at Jordan S. Daniel Fishel on social media, and remember that it's okay to moan about Glee.