mental illness

“We got it!” say the two neuroscientists sitting across from me. ‘We know what it is!’ I look at them. Blink twice Until I listen to it later, when I have a clear moment. The doctors are talking about encephalitis in the psychiatric ward where I am now.”

A life lesson

It is now four years ago. Sander walks between the tall trees at the Holy Triangle in Oosterhout, a neighboring area with three adjacent monastery buildings. “Do you feel the gentle peace that hangs here?” he asks. Surrounding it are gardens, vineyards and memorable farms. “The silence was healing and gave me the peace I so desperately needed. I spent hours here, walking with our dog Soof.” He is full of energy, the road he had to walk was difficult.

“There was a picture of me here,” he says midway through. The photo was taken just before the lights went out. He collaborated on a photo project with the theme ‘Of Time and Eternity’. He was asked for the local project because he was the show director for the biggest live shows in the Netherlands. AVROROS, Snollebollekes, MindF*ck. Sander was the one who sat in the middle of the field and controlled everything with his headset behind several screens. Lights on: now. The presenter on stage: now.

His performances ran to a close second like a Swiss watch. Five seconds to him is like a minute to anyone else. “I can make countless decisions in five seconds.” An eighty-hour work week was no exception. He was always busy, busy, busy. Always on. He received an oeuvre award for the ball most essential crew in the Netherlands. The world’s most expensive dinner show, a three-day mega-event on the world’s largest ship, cars that came down from the roof: it names the biggest shows like going through a shopping list.

Then suddenly he loses a word. Wait a minute, he says, I’ll get back to him in a minute. “This makes me whole. What were we talking about again?” Oh yes, that picture. Done just before things went wrong. In this picture you can see the stress in my eyes. From my busy work, my life at home. The children.” He has a daughter and a son, teenagers.

His mind was busy during that time. And then, on September 12, 2020, the lights went out. “We sat on the bed, my wife at the time, children and me. I was a bit naive, but it was the beginning of the corona pandemic, I thought I had corona.” That afternoon he had a seizure and was taken away in an ambulance. It turned out that he had lost his memory. He had to learn to walk and ride again. He was lucky: he returned remember slowly.

Hundreds of apps

Later at home he had a panic attack. He started shaking and it was completely wrong. The ambulance took him to the hospital again, but because of the corona peak he could not stay there. Doctors couldn’t find anything, so they sent him home. Once they were home, things didn’t get any better. He didn’t feel well, but he couldn’t explain why. To rest, he went to his mother in Limburg. He made a video in the bed where he slept as a boy. “When I see those pictures again, I’m amazed. I spoke utter gibberish. So serious, who is this man?”

Sander behaved ‘crazier and crazier’. Friends and colleagues received hundreds of messages within an hour. His head was full of ideas and they needed to be shared immediately. For Sander they were not delusions or hallucinations. He says his creative brain went crazy. Sometimes he realized that things weren’t going well, other times he didn’t, because in his mind it was ‘just normal’.

That evening he was picked up again in an ambulance. But the next morning he woke up not in a hospital, but in a mental institution. A doctor didn’t know what to do with him. “Everyone around me thought I had gone mad, but it didn’t feel like that to me.” He has a problem with the word patient and the unstable white environment in hospitals. “The word patient means that other people talk about you in meetings and at your bedside without being there, but I was just there! I wasn’t just heard, I didn’t see. I was I’m there as a person, not as a patient.”

‘Music Connects’

Looking back on that time, he says that it was there in the psychiatric department that he had the best conversations. He sat there for weeks and got to know and respect his fellow gang members. Once he took a walk in the forest with a woman who did not speak. Suddenly she raised a finger and pointed to a certain sound in the distance. “That’s where I understood for the first time what ‘living in the moment’ meant.”

But Sander remained a director there as well. He wanted to make a Christmas show. He hung Christmas baubles in the plants, turned off the harsh fluorescent lights in the break room and lit candles. He also put on music. Other people who were not suffering started talking and singing that evening. “Music and experience connect, it takes you back to the time you know and recognize. It has a healing effect.”

But then, on one of the days he spent playing table tennis and talking, it was time with his medical doctors. It turned out that he had encephalitis twice, the first time it was herpes encephalitis, inflammation of the brain caused by a virus. Which, if discovered too late, can be fatal. The second time was the autoimmune disease Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis. This involves your body attacking your own brain, causing it to become inflamed. This is often accompanied by unexplained seizures or behavioral changes. “Your brain is literally on fire.”

It is a rare condition that was only discovered in 2010. “It is difficult to tell what happens in your body. An American journalist experienced the same thing. Her book about her experiences became is a bestseller.The story can now be seen as a Netflix movie. trailer so strange and so wonderful, when people ask what it was like for me, I’ll show them.”

Control lost

The autoimmune disease is very difficult to recognize. Sander was lucky to be given an epidural during his last hospital visit. “Finally the fluid from my spinal cord ended at Erasmus MC and they did the diagnosis there after a few weeks.” The solution was simple: he was given IV after IV of drugs that suppressed his immune system. “The people around me said that I was slowly coming back, becoming myself. I felt differently myself, because I never thought that I was gone .”

Recovery was a long and difficult process. Not only him, his wife and children who used to sit by his bed every day were also going through hell. Furthermore, the world around him continued to move on over the past four years, but he was no longer the same person. He finally had to say goodbye to the work he did with so much love. “That job was pretty much my life. I had lost my identity, I didn’t know who I was without this job.”

Mourning alive

Because he sometimes can’t think of a word, working as a show director is no longer an option. It can no longer keep up with the pace of the ‘calling show’ world. His brain batteries were dying too quickly for this. The nature by which he lived his life. He compares it to grief while still alive. “For years I worked in the world of fast trains, but now I thought: what was I really doing there? What I want to do and what I still want to contribute the world?”

During these visits that last for hours in the Holy Triangle, he tries to find out who he is now. “Because when you have experienced that you are almost dead, you get a different sense of life,” he said. He wants to organize his life in a different way, to live more in the ‘now’, and use his knowledge, talent and creativity for valuable projects. This is how he is now developing with it a new company concepts for, among others, the Princess Maxima Center for children with cancer. He is also committed to the foundation A SMEwhich draws attention to meningitis.

That director’s chair is a thing of the past, but in his new role as creative director he has completely found his way. “It feels like I’ve stepped out of a hurricane and am living life to the fullest again. Sometimes life challenges you to something you wouldn’t choose, but life always gives you a new opportunity, and that’s called tomorrow. That’s it. I’m on it. learn now.”

Sunday interview

Every Sunday we publish an interview in text and pictures of someone who has or has experienced something special. That can be a big event that the person deals with admirably. The Sunday interviews seem to have had a profound effect on the interviewee’s life.

Are you or do you know someone who would be suitable for an interview on Sunday? Contact us through this email address: zondaginterview@rtl.nl

A lesson here the earlier Sunday interviews.