Tom Armstrong woke to the muffled sound of his newborn baby crying. It was his turn to do the night feed. He tossed the bed covers off and made his way over to the crib, glancing over at the clock through the cracks between his eyelids. It was 3am.
He fed and gently rocked his son until he fell back to sleep. Suddenly, that feeling hit him. Without thinking, Tom walked downstairs towards the kitchen. With his baby in one arm, he opened the fridge and reached for a can of beer.
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“I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing?’,” he told the Manchester Evening News . “It was almost like an automatic response to go to the fridge because I was tired.
“I knew my main priority – my son – was in my hand and I needed to go back to sleep and start afresh tomorrow. From then on, I started to taper off everything.”
Tom had struggled with alcohol and amphetamine addiction for around nine months. What started out as a couple of glasses of wine a night turned into a bottle every day.
The more he drank, the more he used his prescribed ADHD medication to be able to function. But it wasn’t always this way – Tom can pinpoint exact the moment his life began to fall apart.
The 33-year-old, who lived in Whitefield but recently relocated to Lytham, Lancs, was introduced to rugby from a very young age. He began playing as a child and progressed to academy level before turning professional.
But his career in the sport was cut short when he was 28-years-old. Tom had been experiencing pain due to having a genetically irregular-shaped femoral head – the highest part of his thigh bone.
As time went on, it became more inflamed, meaning he was unable to play rugby. To get him back on the pitch, Tom was encouraged to have an operation.
Sadly, the operation did not go to plan, leaving him with bone wedged inside his joint capsule. Just nine months later, Tom was officially retired from competitive rugby. The worst part of it all, he claims, is that the injury could have been fixed with physiotherapy.
But things only got worse from there. Shortly after the birth of his son Atlas, now aged four, his wife Danielle was visiting hospital for a routine scan when doctors discovered abnormal cells. After taking a sample, they realised it was cancer.
Tom was running a gym at the time. Months later, his relationship with his business partner broke down and he lost his half of the firm.
“They saw she had a tumour,” Tom said. “They took it out and she’s never had any issues since. But we had a newborn baby, I lost my rugby career and my business.
“I was sat in the oncology unit holding Atlas and I thought, ‘Oh God, my life is ending’. I think that was the trigger; that’s where nine months of self-harm started.”
Tom found himself at rock bottom. He began drinking and abusing his prescribed ADHD medication and medicine left over from his hip operation, taking up to three pills a day.
“No one knew I was ill all the time because I looked normal,” he added. “No one really knew I had a problem.”
As dad-of-one Tom’s addiction spiralled out of control, his mental health worsened, taking him to a “dark place”. Doctors told him he was suffering from anxiety and depression – but Tom thought something else was going on.
He paid for private blood tests which revealed he had Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, also known as mould illness, an illness that often occurs after exposure to a water-damaged building. Tom believes he contracted the condition while living in his former home.
Common cognitive complaints by patients with CIRS include memory loss, mood disorders, brain fog, loss of executive function and fatigue.
In 2019, a team in the University of Birmingham investigated the link between mental fog and inflammation, which is the body’s response to illness. A study published in scientific journal Neuroimage showed inflammation appears to have a particular negative impact on the brain’s readiness to reach and maintain an alert state – something Tom was experiencing during his mental health and addiction crisis.
“I also started getting gut issues and IBS symptoms and loads of other things,” Tom continued. “When I was out of the house, within a matter of two weeks I started to feel happier again. The brain fog cleared within a matter of weeks.”
Following that sobering moment with his son in the kitchen, Tom vowed to turn his life around for good. He slowly came off the pills and stopped drinking. He also began meditating, a form of self-care that became a huge part of his recovery.
He then went on to launch his own business – True Athletic Fitness – to help others suffering with their own health and fitness. The service offers red light therapy, blood and gut testing and fitness plans to help others fully understand their bodies.
“After finding out my own problems, I brought all those things together in a package where people can find out for themselves what is going on in their body so they can rule things out,” Tom added.
“I built this method to understand yourself so you have an informed choice where you can see there is a problem. I want to make sure people don’t suffer like I did.”
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