In the weeks following my heart attack in 2016, initially everything was good. I was happy to have experienced what I considered a near miss, in the sense that things could have been so much worse. Before the illness in late September I had no idea that I was in any danger, and so I carried with on my life as I had always done. Admittedly, work wasn’t going well, since, amongst other things, I had to wrestle with an IT system that was clearly not designed to cope with the situation I faced.
One of my tasks in managing graduates and apprentices meant that I was responsible for moving the 120 students to new roles twice a year for them to gain experience. The new IT system to facilitate these moves was designed for managers who would move staff to new roles perhaps once every five years. Hence the convoluted process of moving someone to a different department may have been slow and frustrating but at least it was an infrequent occurrence for most managers. For me, with 240 departmental changes required every year, it represented a huge imposition of time. Since it was a new system, glitches were being uncovered almost every day and workaround solutions needed to be found. I believe the stress and frustration in trying to manage this put me under additional pressure which I feel may have contributed to causing the heart attack. Of course, I’ll never know, but it’s a hypothesis which explains the situation and the events that subsequently unfolded.
With hindsight, I can see that there were some indications that things perhaps were not as they ought to have been, but I ignored these signs as being of little consequence. On one occasion a year or two previously, I was on my bike climbing a steep hill with luggage when I felt a tingling in my arms. This was unusual, and I stopped to let the feeling pass (and also to catch my breath!), but my only worrying thought was “What if I fell ill out here? Who would know?” I didn’t associate the feeling with an imminent heart attack. Later, indeed just eleven days prior to my heart attack, I noticed the same feeling whilst on a cycle sportive event in Cheshire, but this time I did consider that it might have been a harbinger of doom. The feeling wasn’t painful, but when I described it to myself as ‘a tingling sensation in my upper arms’, I realised that I was describing the prognosis of heart disease. However, as soon as I finished the climb, the sensation ended, and I carried on for a further 20 hilly miles with no after-effects. I genuinely thought that if I really had any form of heart trouble, I would have been unable to continue doing the sort of exercise I was regularly undertaking. Indeed, in September 2016, whilst working full time, I’d ridden over 300 miles including over 16,000 feet of climbing.
I still don’t fully understand how I could have enjoyed such an active life one day and then be floored by a heart attack the next. My layman’s explanation for this is that my heart was fit and healthy but the pipes leading to and from it were getting blocked, so it had to work much harder to achieve the same effect. As I often say to medical staff, I’ve never, before or since, noticed any pain, breathlessness or excessive tiredness after exercise.
Anyway, back to the period after diagnosis but before the operation. I really enjoyed the first five weeks off work in October and early November since I was writing my memoir and spending all day recalling the happy times from my youth (they were almost always happy times) and just wrote everything down in a stream of consciousness. It was when things were beginning to get back to normal that my mental health began to go awry.
A couple of days after my hospitalisation, Sharon called round to remove my laptop and BlackBerry so that I couldn’t be tempted to do any work. Looking back, I would have done exactly the same to a colleague in a similar situation, but at the time I felt aggrieved. After all, I felt fine then; what harm could I do by keeping connected to the work I enjoyed? As things turned out, this latent anger and frustration was to grow and fester and become an issue in itself as time progressed.
I realised too late that work had begun to define who I was, and perhaps had boosted my ego. In my private life, I am quiet and reserved and keep myself to myself. I won’t ever ‘take the lead’, much preferring to be an active supporter of others. There is a management term ‘followership’ which is akin to leadership but describes those who support the leader and bring their ideas and suggestions to life. When I first heard that term, I recognised myself immediately. I am capable of leading if required, but usually only when someone else says to me ‘you lead on this’ or when I am appointed to a role and given the appropriate authority to carry it out. I will rarely take the authority without being specifically asked or told to do so.
Therefore when I was given the role of Early Careers Manager in the later years of my employment, I did what you’d expect from the title and managed the early careers of about 120 young adults in the first few years of their employment with BAE Systems. This was a role that I’d grown into over many years, with gradually increasing authority and autonomy. By 2016, I oversaw the Project Management early careers’ schemes, taking the routine management decisions necessary. My boss at that time was the Project Management Director, who knew little of my day-to-day activities, but he provided top level direction as his role dictated. I reported to him anything I felt he needed to know, and he left me alone to get on with it. This was delegation working as it should. Consequently, whilst I was off work recuperating, I felt that the business still needed me, and I wanted to continue to provide a service. I am aware of the phrase ‘the graveyard is full of indispensable men’, but oddly enough, I never applied that sentiment to myself.
As I became physically healthier, I agreed a date of Thursday 17th November to return to work, seven weeks after the heart attack. On my first day back in work, I saw a nurse at Occupational Health who declared that I could only work 50% of the time on a phased return. I did not receive this news well. What would I do for the other 50%? I then thought that I’d just stay at home and work from there, but my colleagues had other ideas. In the weeks I’d been off, people had rallied round and were covering the work that I once did, and no-one was willing to risk me becoming ill again by letting me continue doing the job I loved prior to my illness. In addition to being part time, I also had 12 days’ holiday to take before Christmas, which meant that I only had seven working days left that year. On the next day (Friday) I felt useless and unwanted, and I could see this continuing into the future until long after I’d had the operation, which was still potentially months away.
Left at home alone with my thoughts over the weekend, I began to consider that there was no point in me going back to work at all since I sensed that my old job had gone, and that other people were doing it. I was miserable at home, and this annoyed Geraldine who could not understand why I wasn’t thoroughly enjoying having time off work with no concerns. On Tuesday 22nd November I went on a long bike ride with depressing thoughts circling around in my head and by the time I returned home I seriously wanted to resign from work and not go back. Whatever was I thinking? That would have been a dreadful solution, but with no-one ‘on my side’ to talk to, this was the conclusion I reached.
I had a long chat to Sharon the following day and tried to explain my position. Whilst Sharon could see both sides, she explained that she had been told not to talk to me about anything to do with work for fear of stressing me! Other people at work were convinced that I might have a second heart attack at any moment, and they were afraid of pushing me towards this by raising my stress levels. The conversation with Sharon made me feel slightly better, and boosted by this, I went to see the nurse at Occupational Health to request an increase in working hours. This was rejected, and when I reported this to my boss, Gordon, he backed them up but tried to reassure me that there was still an Early Careers job to be done and he wanted me to do it when I was better. By this, of course, he meant, after I had fully recovered from the bypass operation which could still be months off.
During 2016, a new building was being constructed at Samlesbury which was clumsily named the Academy for Skills and Knowledge (ASK) and it was to become the centre for all apprentices across the BAE Systems’ Northwest sites. The official opening ceremony of the Academy was scheduled for Thursday 24th November when the great and the good from across the business were due to attend. I had received an invitation but I was probably at my lowest ebb at that time. Nevertheless, I turned up and found that everyone was delighted to see me and commented upon how well I was looking although they had no idea of the black thoughts that were in my head. That’s the trouble with mental ill-health; people who suffer look absolutely normal and healthy despite the inner turmoil in their minds.
An aside. The Academy for Skills and Knowledge was constructed to allow the closure of the remaining offices of the BAE Systems Preston site on Strand Road. In 1975, I’d attended an interview there for the position of engineering apprentice. I was subsequently offered an apprenticeship there from British Aerospace (as it was then known), but declined and accepted a similar offer from ROF Chorley on the simple grounds that it was much closer to home.
Over the next few days I thought long and hard about what people were telling me and I was gradually starting to come round to accepting my position. On Monday 28th November, I was delighted to be able to attend a reception at the House of Commons to recognise those people involved in creating the new Level 4 Apprenticeship in Project Management. (Click here for details).
I had played a significant role in developing this scheme along with colleagues from other large companies (Rolls Royce, Sellafield, BBC, TfL etc.) and I was delighted to be welcomed back there as if nothing had happened. At the same time I was also invited to join new working groups to develop Level 6 and level 7 programmes (degree and master’s levels). Clearly the people in this group still saw me as a useful resource, not a potentially vulnerable man who might not survive too many stresses. I only saw the up-side to these invitations; those who were inviting me still considered me to be useful and they were inviting me to take my place at their table doing what I saw as an important and prestigious role. I felt that things were looking up.
Back in the office in early December I arranged to attend a series of 12-week review meetings with the apprentices. This was an aspect of the role I thoroughly enjoyed and since I had performed the reviews many times, I found them easy. Also, Sharon and I had got the meetings off to a fine art and could work quickly and efficiently to meet the requirements of OFSTED for whose benefit the reviews were undertaken. (OFSTED: the Office for Standards in Education – a government body designed to ensure that organisations providing education and training do so to a high standard). The task was to interview each apprentice with his/her manager and academic tutor to ensure that things were progressing appropriately in the role with no cause for concern about their academic, vocational or pastoral care experiences.
When Gordon heard that I was planning to hold the review meetings, he told me to stop and also to drop all operational work associated with my job and let others cover it. Instead, he wanted me to develop processes to introduce a new Project Control Apprenticeship for the future. I reacted badly to this, and once I realised I was never going to win, I decided that I would work from home from then on and not sit at my desk where the temptation to get involved with operational tasks would be too great.
When I told Sharon about this decision (I may have displayed some strong emotions at the time), her reaction was to virtually order me to return to Occupational Health and ask for some counselling! I was so shocked that I did exactly what I was told and started the process to access some therapy sessions offered by the company. Sharon could appreciate what I was going through, and whilst she understood my viewpoint, she was also very conscious of the need to keep me safe by reducing my stress levels. I will be forever grateful for her foresight and the terrific support I received from the company at this time. I now understand (but clearly didn’t then) that I was raising my anxiety by getting so upset over what were, in essence, very minor issues. I barely went into work for the next two weeks up to Christmas.