Why can I never rest when I'm ill?
The constant need to prove myself through my output is wearing thin
Twelve years ago, I was on a cross-trainer in the gym, half-heartedly moving up and down on a machine I loathed, when I noticed I was short of breath. I wasn’t exactly exerting myself but I thought maybe I’m coming down with something – a minor bug, a petite virus. I kept going for another ten minutes, the whole time trying to gulp down as much air as possible but it felt like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much I tried, something, somewhere was being siphoned off.
I wouldn’t know how true this analogy would be until a few days later, at my father’s insistence, I went to A&E. After a brief chat about my family’s medical history, the doctors shared a look when I said my mother had a hole in the heart. But, I said boastfully, I’ve always been healthy while she’d been a sickly child.
They made me have an EKG ‘just to be sure’, and then an echocardiogram ‘just to check’ and then, with my parents sitting either side of me, I was told, at the age of 31, that I had a hole in the heart, that I had always had it, and that it was an inch across. It hadn’t been detected because somehow my heart had managed to compensate until it couldn’t any longer.
Until I had the surgery six weeks later, I was told that I would remain symptomatic. My breath would be short, I would be tired, sometimes dizzy, and I shouldn’t do anything to exert myself. Immediately, my world shrank and there was a daily inventory of Things I Had Taken For Granted. Running for a bus. Having a glass of wine. Going on the sodding cross-trainer. Laughing too hard.
This was a defining moment for me. The waiting, the surgery, the aftermath. Because for the first time in my life, I was aware that my body was fallible, that it did not run on an endless battery. As someone who worked in an industry that championed over-work, thought calling in sick was for wimps, that demanded you work while unwell, I realised that rest wasn’t in fact voluntary. My body was on strike.
A year later, fully recovered, I started a new job as Executive Editor for HuffPost. One of the areas I managed was health and wellbeing, and because Arianna Huffington – who was then Chairman and Editor In Chief – was personally passionate about it, a key focus of that was looking at stress and burnout. This was a time, remember, when mental health wasn’t really a thing, and talking to people about the importance of maintaining it was tantamount to a form of social leprosy.
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