Work is meaningless, and it almost killed my husband

My husband’s name is Richard. He is the love of my life. At the time of writing we have been married for 13 and a half years. Richard works as Head of Internal IT at a digital agency. In 2023, he received the Employee of the Year award. This will be important, later.

20th August 2024

On 20th August 2024, I found Richard asleep in front of his work laptop on the sofa at 4:30pm. It was slightly concerning, but I knew he’d been working a lot lately. He was just tired. That evening, we went out for pizza with some friends. I noticed something “off” about Richard. The walk home felt like talking with a stranger after a mediocre date. That week, he started to fall asleep more and more often: at his desk, whilst dinner was cooking, or whilst playing video games.

24th August 2024

The following weekend, Richard had developed a “bit of a cold”. But it felt like more than a cold. He was slurring his speech; he was moving slower. I noticed it was becoming more difficult for him to play with our six year old son. The things he was trying to do and say didn’t make sense. Normal conversation would be interspersed with moments of strange nonsense. It got worse in the evenings when he was more tired. His movements became slower and weirder. At times he would fall asleep mid-sentence.

“There’s a problem with your brain,” I said. “You should go to the doctor.” I cancelled a speaking gig in Denmark to look after him and our son, who was still enjoying the summer holidays. Time is a blur at this point. Richard blamed all of the above on his “cold” and shrugged it off. He didn't contact the doctor.

27th August 2024

On Tuesday 27th August, Richard was in a state of near-constant delirium. I called the NHS non-emergency service, 111, and explained his symptoms. They sent an ambulance straight away, and he was taken to hospital. I spent the evening with my son, we had Japanese take out and watched a film. I felt much less anxious knowing Richard was in the hospital and could get the treatment he needed. I went to bed.

At around 11pm that night, Richard returned home. He told me that everything was fine, and that he just had some sort of virus that would clear up on its own. After being admitted to hospital twice in the last year for having seizures as a result of iron deficiency anaemia (even after numerous tests throughout the year, they still hadn’t found the cause), he vowed he would never go back again.

Given that he turns 40 this year, Richard decided it was time for a lifestyle change. It was time for him to start exercising regularly, eating better, and taking care of his health. He started wearing his Apple Watch again. That week he purchased new running shoes, and whilst he was still showing symptoms of this “weird virus”, he went out for several runs in the local park. His watch reported an average walking heart rate of over 140bpm; jogging was close to 180bpm. Richard is a 39 year old male. Those numbers weren’t good. I asked him once again to go to the doctor; he wouldn’t.

3rd September 2024

On September 3rd, our son returned to school, and Richard and I spent the day together. We went for a walk, we ate home made soup for lunch, but Richard was struggling to do some basic tasks. That night, he coughed up blood in his sleep. He didn’t wake up when it happened.

4th September 2024

That morning, I found Richard at 4am and cleaned him up. I decided it was time to force him to see a doctor. I asked him to make an appointment via the online GP service whilst I was getting ready to leave for the school run. By this point, Richard couldn’t use his phone. He couldn’t type on a keyboard. Every time he tried to do it, he typed random strings of nonsense. I typed out a detailed message for him myself, submitted the form, and left to take our son to school.

When I returned home, Richard told me that he got a call from the doctor to arrange an appointment, and he had no idea why. He was so confused as to why the doctor was ringing him, that he became convinced it was our son that was unwell, and made an appointment under his name instead. An hour later, I took Richard to the GP surgery.

After a short assessment and a telephone call to the hospital, the GP informed us that during his hospital admission the week prior, it was discovered that Richard was critically anaemic again (as in, he will die pretty soon without new red blood cells and iron). But Richard had returned home that night and told me he was fine.

It became clear that Richard had discharged himself from the hospital that night whilst waiting for his blood test results. I blamed myself for this for a short while; I should have gone with him to the hospital. But I know it’s not my fault. Richard didn’t think anything was wrong with him. He didn’t want to believe anything was wrong with him. He wanted to get back to work. Employee of the Year 2023 didn’t want to let anyone down.

I took Richard to A&E (the ER) that day, with an urgent letter from the GP. I organised my mother in law to help with childcare so I could stay with him for as long as possible so he wouldn’t escape again. At the hospital, they took him into triage straight away, admitted him, and hooked him up to all the machines.

I thought I was watching my husband die.

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14 days

Richard was in the hospital for 14 days. He was treated for a very bad chest infection, anaemia, and encephalitis: an uncommon but serious condition in which the brain becomes inflamed. According to the NHS article on encephalitis, “Some people eventually make a full recovery from encephalitis, although this can be a long and frustrating process. Many people never make a full recovery and are left with long-term problems caused by damage to their brain.”

Whilst being treated for the anaemia and chest infection, Richard was subject to a lot of tests on his brain. All of the easily discoverable bad things were ruled out; he hadn’t had a stroke, there was no bleeding, there was no sign of cancer: his brain was physically normal. Yet my Richard still wasn’t “normal”.

I visited Richard for eight hours every day. I took him his favourite foods, clean clothes, helped him shower, and listened to him talk a lot of nonsense. Throughout all this, I fully prepared myself to be his full-time carer and a single parent when he was “well enough” to return home. He started to experience a complete and utter devastating depression. He felt like he’d let everyone down. I stayed with him, reassured him, and promised to love him, no matter what happened.

13th September 2024

On Richard’s 10th day in hospital, it was my 39th birthday. I prepared myself to be in a similar situation on my 40th birthday.

16th September 2024

On day 13, I went to visit Richard at 11am as usual. I said hello, asked how he was feeling, and placed a bag of clean clothes on the floor. And when he spoke to me, his voice was his own. His words were no longer slurred, his movements were his own: sharper and more refined. He was my Richard. He was back. His brain was better.

We’re still waiting for the results of some tests; but the doctors still don’t know what happened to Richard’s brain, or why he made such a sudden overnight recovery. We don’t know if the anaemia and brain swelling are linked, or whether it was just a huge coincidence. We’re not entirely sure whether the antibiotics used to treat the chest infection helped treat whatever was happening in his brain. We still don’t know the cause of the anaemia but I’m sure in time we will — and he is undergoing more tests.

Our jobs are meaningless

We may not know the cause of Richard’s anaemia, or what happened with his brain, but what we do know after all of this, is that our jobs in tech are largely meaningless, and they’re definitely not worth almost dying for.

You see, it’s not the work itself that put Richard in hospital, it’s that he dedicated so much of his waking time and brain space toward work that he neglected to consider his own declining health. He knew he was feeling more tired than usual, but he pushed through. He knew he found it difficult to climb stairs, but he thought he was just getting old. He knew his heart rate was too high, but he shrugged it off as high metabolism (it’s actually a symptom of anaemia). He was extremely pale. But that’s how he always looked, right? He knew his voice and his behaviour and his coordination had changed, but he ignored it and hoped it would get better on its own.

Richard didn’t want to be off work sick. He didn’t want to “let anyone down”. He wanted to be Employee of the Year and better.

Over the past couple of years, Richard has worked too much. He stayed up all night on numerous occasions to make non-emergency internal infrastructure changes on flaky legacy systems. No users would notice the changes, but it earned him employee points. He would agree to outlandish time-intensive requests from senior members of the business that had nothing to do with his scope of work. He would check for Teams messages at the dinner table in case something broken needed fixing out of hours. He decided to take on double the work rather than scale back operations when his team of three was a team of two for a few months. He missed school events for arbitrary useless meetings.

Richard’s self-imposed approach to work — trying to be “as good as possible at all costs” — isolated him from his family and his own sense of self, and it took him almost dying in front of me in A&E to realise that none of this is worth dying for, actually. And plus, “as good as possible” does not actually mean “do as much as you actually possibly can and maybe, like, four times more, despite not getting the support you need from your employer and never sleeping properly for weeks at a time because you take on random non-essential assignments and eventually accidentally distance yourself from your family because you are only a single human being and there are only so many hours in the day and oh wait I completely forgot to check on this life-threatening mineral deficiency that might kill me because I didn’t want to let anyone down”. I could go on.

He still needs a lot of rest. And I'm making sure he's getting it.

Work is an exchange of time for money

I won’t speak any more for Richard, but I will offer you my thoughts on this.

Work is an exchange of time for money. Most work is meaningless, and is centred on finding solutions to manufactured problems that exist only in capitalism. And whilst that sounds extremely depressing, the upside is that it leaves you free to find your own meaning in life.

And I do hope you will find meaning — and much love — in those humans who you choose to call your family. And most importantly, please look after your own health.

No work is worth dying for.