Mingo.Life

Two years ago this week, I met an old man named Colin. The following few hours would change the direction of my life.

A routine dental surgery turned into a disability. A life lived on medication, threatened by severe migraines around every corner, and filled with future uncertainty.

At least… I think Colin was his name.

I never actually asked him but, “Hello, Elderly Gentleman Opposite Me in the Maxillofacial Waiting Room” just didn’t work as a title, so the legendary Colin he forever became.

If you’re a bit behind on the Mingo.Life story, on Friday, 12th July 2024 I was in hospital to have four wisdom teeth surgically removed under general anaesthetic. Colin had already been through the ordeal and was happily chatting away, wearing a hospital gown with his dignity majestically hanging on by a thread, bless him.

For an hour or so we talked, and we solved precisely none of the world’s problems.

Then the nurse called my name.

I thanked Colin, shuffled off to theatre, counted backwards from ten and disappeared into a land of anaesthetic-induced nonsense (which some would argue I never fully left). I remember rambling about Spanish beaches and German tourists and that was it. Gone.

At first, I genuinely thought I’d be fully back to my ass-kicking normal self within a week or two.

I even wrote a blog series about it.

As life lessons go, that one aged about as well as a pint of milk left out in a July heatwave.

If someone had told me, as I had drifted off to medically induced sleep, that this ordinary Friday would become one of the defining moments of my life, I’d probably have laughed. Or asked for a little less anaesthetic.

The strange thing about life is that it doesn’t put warning labels on the important days.

There’s no pop-up saying, “Careful now… you’ll still be talking about today in two years’ time.”

Life just cracks on regardless.

Looking back over the last two years, it’s difficult to believe quite how much has happened.

There have been more hospital appointments than I could ever count. More medications than I knew existed. More acronyms than the police could invent. Some have helped. Some haven’t, and some have come with side effects that almost deserve their own novels.

For those not in the know about my condition, my article “Living With Pain: The Trigeminal Problem” seems to explain things well enough, and has proven quite popular on platforms like Reddit and certain Facebook support groups with fellow sufferers.

At one point I was told quite bluntly that there is Nothing We Can Do To Fix This. Words that burned into my mind like a hot iron, yet somehow deep inside motivated me to seize this as an opportunity to change something.

I’ve learnt, over these past two years, more about the human nervous system than I ever intended to.

I’ve also discovered that if you tell enough specialists you’ve got pain in your face, eventually someone will ask whether you’ve considered mindfulness.

On the brighter side, life hasn’t stood still.

Emma and I somehow decided that embarking on a major wheelchair-accessible home extension whilst navigating everything else would be a sensible idea.

Depending on the day, I’m still undecided whether that was admirable optimism or temporary insanity.

The house is currently in varying stages of organised destruction.

Walls have disappeared.

Roofs have come off.

Steel beams have appeared where fresh air used to be.

I’ve developed an unhealthy interest in insulation “U-values” and can now hold an embarrassingly long conversation about plasterboard. I appreciate that’s not everyone’s idea of entertainment, but here we are, much to the eye rolls of Emma and the familiar sight of her falling asleep mid-conversation.

I really need to work on my chat up lines.

The extension, though, has never really been about bricks and wood.

It’s all about Poppy, my 6 year old superstar daughter.

Everything we’re building is to make life easier for our incredible little girl and to give her the home she deserves, despite the adversity she has faced since birth.

Meanwhile, our second daughter Evie has gone from being the tiny baby who occasionally appeared in our photos, to a fearless toddler who approaches life with the confidence of someone who’s never once had to pay a mortgage or organise Building Control.

And she is weirdly obsessed with ducks.

Quack.

Work has changed too.

My career has taken a path I never expected, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions about what the future holds. That uncertainty has been one of the hardest parts of this journey, but I’ve learnt that sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t charging through a door headfirst.

Sometimes it’s simply accepting that, for a while, healing is your full-time job.

One thing I didn’t expect was what this little blog would become.

When I hit “Publish” on that first post, I assumed a handful of friends might read it before politely moving on with their lives.

Instead, it’s grown into a diary of our family and then kept on growing, with readership and daily views beyond what I expected.

It’s become a record of home renovations, parenting, living with disability, travel around the world, victories, frustrations, and occasionally me getting far too excited about a skip arriving on time.

All delivered with a sprinkling of dark yet optimistic humorous wit.

More importantly, this blog has connected me with people I would never otherwise have met.

Many of you have written to me to share your own stories. Some are facing chronic pain. Some are carers. Some simply enjoy following the chaos of whatever project I’ve enthusiastically started to hyper-focus on this week.

Every message has meant more than you all probably realise.

So today… Well it isn’t really about looking backwards with sadness.

It’s about recognising just how unpredictable life can be.

An ordinary Friday.

An ordinary conversation.

An ordinary blog post.

And somehow, without me realising it at the time, the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

I often wonder how Colin is getting on.

I hope he’s still chatting to complete strangers and making nervous people forget, just for a few minutes, why they’re there.

And if, by some extraordinary twist of fate, he ever finds himself reading this…

Thank you.

You almost certainly don’t remember me.

But I remember you.

And, perhaps without either of us knowing it, you were there at the very beginning of a story that’s still being written.