Getting Wet

I hate getting in the pool. I drag my feet all the way to the change room. I have to jam my eyes shut and take a deep breath to avoid a panic attack before I begin stripping clothes away, swallowing embarrassment, biting down pain of sore joints protesting as I stretch to remove t-shirt, shoes, skirt, leggings and bra. I have done this a hundred times before and it never gets easier, the loss of ability to hide as I shed my clothes and yank my way into my black lycra swimming suit.

Bare foot on tiled floors, pimpled puckered skin frigid with cold… and then the quick walk out towards the water, chin down, avoiding eye contact with the other occupants of the pool. I am ashamed of myself, an irrational thought I know, since everyone in the pool is in various states of undress and bodily disarray.

This is not your usual pool, it’s not the loud raucous splashing space where people swim repetitive laps, fixed upon an end point, as the waves lap merrily up against the edges. This is not the pool where children shriek happily and laugh and do black-flips, young bodies twisting easily in turbulent waters. This is a pool filled with broken bodies.

This is the hydrotherapy pool on the second floor of the public sporting centre, tucked away out of sight. If you’re in the pool, you’re here because you’re sick, ill, injured, ageing or dying. Actually, everyone is dying. It’s just that some of us talk and think about it more than others. The hydrotherapy pool on the second floor is a great big dose of a wake up call that mostly you just want to ignore.

The longest part of the walk is down the ramp into the pool. The ramp twists around twice — I can’t walk any faster because I can’t take the resistance of the water on my calves and thighs. I am exposed save for my bathers clinging to unusually soft, doughy skin, forced to slow my stride down into the water.

I don’t want to be sick, I don’t want to be in pain, I am barely middle aged. I don’t want to slip into this pool of elderly bodies, dying bodies, sick bodies. No one chooses this.

I don’t know how to change my fate. All I can do is try to do my best, the doctors say. But there are the days I don’t want to try. I want to lie down in the gutter and howl for myself, for all the dreams I’ve lost, the unfinished projects and unrequited love.

I don’t look beautiful in sickness: I am not your illness pinup. There’s no #HospitalGlam here, no sunken-faced prettiness, no thin-bodied sickness inhabiting my flesh unit. There’s no waif-like beauty to my indignity. I am thick at the waist, wide-thighed, arms like a boxer, flat-footed. My face is childishly soft, with chin folds, blonde eyebrows and epicantal eye folds, an oddness that makes people look away. My metabolism is wrecked. There’s no attractiveness in my illness, only pain, inflammation, infection, degeneration and loneliness. My illness is ugly.

Nobody promises me a cure. They can’t. There’s no cure for what I’ve got: the connective tissue that glues my body together is malfunctioning. My joints sublux and dislocate. My skin breaks and blisters into wounds. I am unravelling. But so is everyone else, when you really think about it. I’m just doing it faster than the rest of the general population, it seems.

I am not your disability inspiration porn. I’m not some happy little trooper, self-confident in my disability, empowered into some workplace, painfree and successful. I don’t have money to waste on new clothes for my oddly-shaped torso, consumerism to celebrate a body that has betrayed me. Make-up makes my skin fall apart. The only pair of shoes that don’t rip the heels of my feet are a pair of cheap children’s runners. My hair frizzes and breaks: the collagen in my gut lining leaks nutrients, leading to vitamin loss that invariably affects the quality of my hair, nail and skin.

There is so much out of my control, so many things that no amount of trying harder will change.

But at 10am I catch the Number 96 tram to the sports centre, take the lift to the second floor and swipe my way through the glass doors into the sunlit hydrotherapy pool room and sink into the pool. For forty minutes I work my way through an exercise routine designed by an over-priced physiotherapist to help me develop muscles to compensate for the loss of ligaments and tendons and maybe help hold my joints in place.

I don’t strike up conversations. I politely nod at the elderly patients who try to talk to me and fumble my way through the end of my routine when palliative care patients are lowered into the pool, not ready to face my own mortality yet.

I focus on each set movement: lifting my knees gently up and down, stroking the water with my hands. I follow the movement of each muscle carefully, checking to ensure I am not cheating myself out of the benefit by failing to completing the movement correctly. I do squats, I use weights underwater, I count my step-ups and hip swivels. I tread water.

Once my exercise set is done I haul my lumbering mass out of the pool, plodding briskly to the showers, washing it off under tepid showers, dressing quickly and drying my hair under the hand dryer.

There’s no promise that the pain will stop. None at all. But I get in the pool anyway.