This was actually written on Saturday night, but due to Wifi connections and forgotten passwords, I’m posting now, 2 days later. An update is that we had a great Sunday morning training with Wasps and meeting a Scottish International, and everything is back to normal (or as normal as our lives ever get!). Maybe that’s part of the problem, in a bizarre way, that everything is completely fine until it’s not. If CAMHS (or whoever) finds us on a good day, then there’s nothing to see. Anyway, the post…..

I am writing this from our hotel room in Coventry with our son while everyone else on the rugby tour is at the pub eating dinner. Right now, I don’t know whether to cry, shout or hide in the bathroom, so I decided it was much more productive and cathartic to write.

We’ve had a fab day, and he’s done really well. He went to the rugby club to pick up his tour hoody & get pre-tour photos. We stopped en route to meet up with everyone else, and then he played the match,  had post match food & went on a mini-tour of the Wasps training facility. We came back to the hotel and he was ok. We were due to have an hour of down time after training, but things ran over so it was a quick change and out of the door.

We walked to the restaurant, and he seemed fine, but quiet. We got inside the restaurant and found our table and he crumbled. His face dropped, he was fighting back tears and the stress headache appeared. I offered eating outside, going for a walk or sitting somewhere else, and that was all too little too late. The silent meltdown had begun, and he needed to get out of there.

So now I’m in a stuffy hotel room with Ant and Dec on TV and no wifi. He’s calmer, and is zoning out. The headache as decreased and he’s ok. Disaster averted.

However, following on from my last post, this isn’t good enough. This isn’t just anxieties. This has made my mind up. He might need the counselling/therapy that CAMHS has offered, but we also need a diagnosis. We need people to listen. We need an acknowledgement of what he goes through every single day. So, our journey to a second opinion starts now.