Episode 8: The vicious cycle of health
In which our protagonist’s body reminds her of her duties
How are you, dear reader? No seriously, how ARE you? The world feels evermore fraught, and that glimmer of hope on the horizon feels like it might not arrive before we all just lose it and succumb to plague-induced madness. It’s tempting to keep our heads down and ignore what’s going on out there, focus on the immediate here and now, but that has its downsides.
I’m forever burying my head in the sand, and this week it taught me a lesson.
Allow me to explain: The #plaguelife hasn’t hugely impacted my day-to-day, truth be told. I was already working from home, barely leaving the house. I could go an entire week without setting foot outside my front door. This whole thing is nothing new to me; I’m a seasoned expert. Yes, I’m over it, but I’m used to it. So when I received a letter from the NHS telling me I was among the 1.7 million people now added to the shielding list, I took it in my stride. OK, so I stay at home even more, no biggie. It’s not like I could go anywhere anyway, and I gave a big old meh to my physical health as usual.
Last Sunday night, though, not long after I hit send on episode seven of this here newsletter, my body decided to send a signal that I need to wake up. That 15 years of sending signals by way of various diagnoses had clearly not been enough to make me take action, and that I needed a big kicker.
Reader, last week I had my first major hyperglycaemic attack. My head pounded; my vision blurred; my fatigue was unignorable. I had no option but to lie down, my body would let me do nothing else. It was horrible, and it took about two days of drinking huge amounts of water and eating strictly and taking naps to get back to feeling semi-normal.
Think that was the end of it? Not in my world. I don’t do things by half.
Being added to the “extreme high-risk” list meant I quickly got invited to have my first round of the Covid-19 vaccine. Off I toddled to the local church hall and got the big jab in the arm and all was done. And then the side-effects started. Oooh boy, reader, if that was what the vaccine did to me, I’m so grateful I didn’t get the full-blown plague. Crikey, that was some 72 hours. I won’t go into it here because I don’t want to risk putting anyone off taking the vaccine - they are essential, they save lives, and I will not enter into any debate on this point - but suffice it to say my body has been through the ringer this week.
And this time I need to listen carefully and follow its instructions. I need to be self(ish) in a different way: I need to work hard for the good of my health, to ensure I’m around to continue making my mark and experiencing the wonders of this thing called life, this thing I’m now seeing through new eyes.
Allow me to re-introduce myself
So, hi. My name is Lauren, and I have in the past been super unhealthy. I’m working on improving that, for reals this time, for sure.
I’ve been a bigger girl for as long as I can remember and, as I was never really into playing sport or physical exertion (preferring to have my nose in a book or eyes on a screen), that got worse as I got older. But, y’know, the young can get away with a lot. It wasn’t until I moved to London and tried to register with a GP surgery that I started to discover the real-world impact of my apathy.
Back in those days (and I’m sure, still), any new surgery required various tests to figure out what they were taking on with this patient. I was newly settled in Newington Green, up the top of Essex Rd, and wandered off to Homerton Hospital to get the red stuff extracted as well as a few other tests. That was when I discovered two things: first, I had hypertension at the age of 27 and had to go on blood pressure meds. Secondly, various results indicated I had this thing called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or PCOS. As the lovely young doctor walked me through this condition I’d never heard of, a lot of things suddenly clicked into place, a reason for everything from weight to mental health to acne to my sleep issues. It was manageable, if I did the right things.
Did I do the right things? Well, I tried. I walked a lot. I ate better. I got fitter and healthier and was doing really well… and then my self-sabotage kicked in. It wanted to cut me down to size. Enter: my first proper breakdown, just as I hit 30. Mental health became the focus again. And lo and behold, ten years later I found myself with a diabetes diagnosis and the knowledge I was considered by clinicians as “morbidly obese”. Think I did anything about that, besides take my medicine? You think too well of me, dear reader. Lockdown saw my blood sugar levels jump more than 20 points - which makes my hyperglycemic attack less surprising, doesn’t it?
Treat the whole system
In Playing Big, Tara Mohr talks about the “hiding strategies” we deploy to keep ourselves small, and strategy #1 is “this before that”. It’s a personal favourite. I tell myself I need to work on the mental health so I have the energy and motivation to deal with the physical health, but the physical health is so bad it fuels the depression and anxiety, and so the cycle continues.
It’s great that society is paying a lot more attention to mental wellness, especially in these last 12 months, but putting that spotlight on mental health only serves to reinforce the idea that the mental and the physical are separate beings and don’t interact - which is far from the truth. As an example, our gut is referred to as our second brain, and gut health can impact our mental wellness in so many ways. Likewise, one of the first things a new depression patient is advised is to get exercising to release feel-good endorphins.
The physical and the mental are not separate things to be viewed in isolation. One little tweak here can have a knock-on effect in parts of the system you wouldn’t expect. We are but atoms dancing as one; if a beat is missed somewhere, it ricochets throughout.
My body, my poor broken body, has let off its distress signal to demand my attention in a very big way. I can get so focused on the “this” of my mental health that I forget the “then that” of my physical health, but there is no either/or. This is a system-wide problem, and the ship is going down if I don’t give it my full attention. (Drama, much?)
So that’s the plan. No this then that. There is only all of me. And you’ll never know how much I appreciate your support as I continue this journey.
A final note: please, please seek the advice of a medical professional if you notice anything unusual happening anywhere in your system, mental, physical or in-between. Use me as your cautionary tale if it helps, just look after yourself, ok?
The week ahead 🗓
Well, much of last week’s plans went out the window (thanks, body). Still, the luxury of being on extended sabbatical is enjoying flexibility to roll with the punches, and roll-over the to-do list. Here’s how my week is panning out.
Courses: Continuing with Comparison-Free Me with Lucy Sheridan; this week we’re onto developing self-confidence. I’m dipping my toes back in witchy world, too, as Toil & Trouble has a live class this week.
Writing: The London Library Emerging Writers Programme closes applications this week, so I’ve put that off long enough: there’s my writing efforts for the coming days. I’d like to apply (again; I was unsuccessful last year) and spend time immersed in the same building that helped Stoker to write Dracula.
Work: I launched a landing page for the (not so) secret new project today, so I really need to create a survey to inform its services.
Home: The plan to tackle a single room in this mess of a house also went awry with the vaccine. Today marks seven years since we moved in here, though, and it’s the last full moon of winter so… seize the day?
Social: I’ll be part of the Sunday Salon over on Clubhouse today (Sunday) at 6pm GMT. We’re discussing identity in a digital world, among other things. Alas, Clubhouse is only on iPhone at the moment, but if you have one of those, want to tune in but don’t yet have an invite to the app, reply to this email. You never know who’s lurking in the shadows with a spare invite. In other social/writing news, this week at the London Writers Salon I’ll host calls for the Myth & Paranormal group and the Content Helpline (patrons only, sorry!).
Routine: And of course, I aim to continue my daily practice: morning pages, 15 minutes of meditation, 10 minutes of stretches, and something that passes as exercise. That also all went out the window this week 😩
Finally, join me and hundreds of others at the LWS Writers’ Hour every week day: 8am GMT, EST, PST and AEDT.
On the stereo 🎧
I was spending a lot of time in bed this week, time when I physically couldn’t even open my eyes yet I couldn’t sleep either. Podcasts helped to occupy me (which, if you know me, is highly unusual - I can’t focus my tinnitus or my foggy brain enough to listen to podcasts usually). Recent episodes of Sarah Werner’s Write Now podcast, in particular, hit me where I needed it - especially episode 112 on writer’s guilt, episode 111 on “from surviving to thriving”, and episode 106 on self-sabotage.
Off the shelf 📚
Side-effects to de-plaguing slowed my reading train this week, so I present to you here the fiction of the week rather than a feel-good self-help style thing. My feeds have been abuzz with this novel since it was released in the summer, and its elevation to finalist in “superior achievement in a novel” (alongside Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic) at this year’s Stoker Awards had me finally reach for it. Immersive, evocative, fascinating; if I can get a hint of this emotional punch into my own creepy works then I’ll be a happy bunny indeed.
(Cautionary note: do not read if you are triggered by animal harm.)
Visual confirmation 📷
Proof it got done, even if it knocked me out for several days. Alas, I must still shield until I get the second jab in about 12 weeks’ time.
Hope you are feeling better, Lauren! xx