Blog 2020 Week 5: Symptoms
I managed to transition fairly well back into the humdrum and hubbub of school after my Swiss sojourn. The first train I caught took me across the border: it was immaculate, warm and full of tanned blonde sixtysomethings. The second train, which I took back to Verbania, was empty, and so cold that I could see my breath rise in front of me. And the guard got annoyed at me because I didn’t have an e-ticket, just a bog-standard paper one. At least, I think he was annoyed, because instead of ripping it slightly, as they often do, he ripped it in half.
I got back with three hours to spare until I began the six consecutive hours of teaching which make my Mondays such a joy. I even had some time to squeeze in some Italian, but as I sat at the table with the morning sunshine blinding me, I began to feel a strange aching sensation in my right elbow, as if I had some kind of localized pins and needles. I also felt a little unwell, perhaps as a result. As soon as I noticed something was amiss I found it almost impossible to concentrate on my avro’s and avrai’s, and had to pack it in. For the next few minutes I paced around the apartment, twisting and examining my arm, checking if there were any numb areas, any movements which made it worse, convincing myself that one of them looked a slightly different colour to the other.
“Health Worries” seemed to enter my life very suddenly, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I’m so bad at compartmentalizing them. I’d had very few health issues in the 21 years leading up to an arthritis diagnosis, and then within the space of a few months, a bout of troublesome stomach issues seemed to kick-start a trauma-reaction which has spiralled off into all sorts of painful directions. The individual pains themselves are not so bad: the issue is that they are so varied. Aches, twinges, stinging, crawling; sometimes for an instant, sometimes for months; sometimes helped by exercise, sometimes compounded by it. It’s a nightmare, and it seems a condition tailor-made to turn someone into a hypochondriac. And I’m worried that it what I’m becoming.
This week, it’s been Multiple Sclerosis and Leukaemia. MS in particular has been a recurring theme for me for a few years now: it doesn’t help that it shares a fair few of its initial symptoms with arthritis. But the blatant truth, the one that I still need to remind myself of on a weekly basis, is that of the numerous list of MS symptoms, I can barely cross off one or two symptoms. And I expect most of us could. Felt fatigued recently? MS. Lost weight? Cardiovascular disease. Got a cold? Coronavirus. The internet can be a wonderful thing.
Of course, it’s actually disrespectful of me to lump myself together with the people who genuinely suffer from debilitating diseases. If I was genuinely losing the ability to function, I’d be pretty pissed at the idea of a fully-functional boy going into crisis mode over a funny elbow. But it’s a reaction that I can’t control. The only thing I can work on is the reaction to the reaction.
So my arms have been weird these past few days. Feeling weak, feeling strained, cold. It helps to have been busy. You can’t go into crisis mode midway through teaching a class of thirty teenagers, a truth which has helped me embarassingly often over these past few months. And so it’s always an option to just focus on the next thing, the next thing and the thing after that.
And then, as my third lesson rolled into my fourth yesterday morning, I felt an almighty headache descending. Every time I walked around the room to see how my kids were getting along designing some prom outfits, I felt odd chills, as if all of my clothes had suddenly become scratchy. By the time I was in the car on the way home it hurt to move my head. I had a rushing in my ears, my nose started running, and yet I felt better.
Because this was something clear, something obvious. I had a virus of some sort, and these were the ordinary symptoms which accompany that kind of thing. Of course I considered it could be the coronavirus, but even my catastrophizing self couldn’t work out a way I’d fraternized with someone from Wuhan. Instead of panicking more as these new symptoms popped up, I felt myself relax and knew, instinctively, that I’d have an easier time getting to sleep that night than I have for most of the past week. And I did — I was out for the count by 11.
I suppose it’s the nervous anticipation of illness, the teetering on the edge, the insecurity of not knowing what’s wrong, or even of not knowing if something could be wrong, that worms its way into my psyche and turns me into a low-key nervous wreck. My arms still feel strange, even as I type this. Maybe it’s something, maybe it’s nothing. But even if it is nothing, and it eventually sorts itself out, there will be something else. Sooner rather than later. There’s some sort of toxic dependence here — a naturally anxious mind needing something to dwell on, needing some problem to fixate upon. Not to psychoanalyse myself too deeply, but I think this is the same fixation which led to some of my worst bouts of social anxiety in the past — a naturally worrisome mind which simply didn’t have anything to worry about. So it invented things to worry about, out of the relationships I had with my closest friends and family.
Perhaps now the anxiety has simply manifested itself in a different form. I suppose it might not be a coincidence that I’ve struggled much less with mental illness since physical illness came along.
