Individual Cog In A Global Wheel — How To Maintain A Wellness Identity Despite Everything
There is an illness, a virus traversing the world at different speeds. After almost two years, COVID-19 still dominates the news, fixating television stations as epidemiologists vie with journalists to explain how seriously it is still affecting people, at what ages, levels of hospitalization and vaccination doses, what deaths, booster requirements, and booster availability.
The spiky protein ball has devastated populations, at its most rampant filling intensive care units with palpitating patients, gasping for air.
This global phenomenon, for me, shifted dramatically 18 months ago, from center-stage to backdrop when I fell backward, overbalancing on the bottom two stairs at home. Looking back, June 2020 seems eons away, when the world was consumed by helplessness and fear that nothing would be found to stall the spread of coronavirus.
Instead, I was flung into a microcosm of tests, scans, and X-rays, confirming that I not only had a lump in my left breast but also a tumour at the base of my pituitary gland, perilously close, it seemed to me, to my brain. Cerebral atrophy had set in, but why? The brain was too small for my age, medicos found. There were more tests. Whatever was causing this was not simple and had probably been coursing through my body for years.
A combination of persistent hypertension (go down blood pressure, go down), and type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and muscle weakness of the limbs, pointed to the relatively unknown Cushing’s disease.
The main giveaway, a bulbous face; for some reason had bypassed me, hoodwinking endocrinologists for years. Or perhaps I was fortunate, finally, to have had someone peer at me holistically and reveal my personal crisis during a world socio-economic crisis. Overnight, concern about everyone’s health had transformed to a whirlwind worry about my own health.
I had no time to wallow.
All my operations have been during coronavirus. Indeed, my longest stay in hospital resulted in serious blood clots from being immobile for too long. Indeed, the oxygen mask I needed for a day or so made me look like a COVID patient.
What I wonder now, having lived through COVID-19 restrictions including a three-month lockdown in Sydney, is why did I feel worse during the global pandemic time than on discovering and treating my illnesses?
Amid all the advice doled out to me, the crux of resilience was humility and forward planning, to accept help and know what resources I needed. I had done a course at a local university on being your best self over 50, almost two years before, but talking to doctors, informing myself, discussing things with my wife, and normalizing, not exceptionalism, the situation, were also important support.
The self-reflection training aimed to reduce perceived stress, increase positive emotions, mainly confidence in coping, and a belief that the stressors themselves e.g. COVID or my own specific illnesses can be enhancing and beneficial. We needed optimism too, and strength — physical and mental or emotional.
All the behaviours I listed for the course as of value are constant and core to my being, such as integrity, curiosity, persistence, compassion, affection. This was for my personal health and translated to trust even that non-medical administration and protocols would get me through and stay sane. I was pragmatic about my medical procedures too.
In the worst of the lockdown when we despaired of knowing what was going on, officials and politicians turned up at press conferences but relayed numbers only. Emotion was a furrowed brow but little heartfelt depth.
Sheepishly I told my wife that I missed going to the hospitals where I had had the mastectomy and then three months later, another major inner-city complex, for my pituitary surgery. We had not talked about it, but I remember their efficient buzz, purposeful and exacting. I never questioned the need to get up in the morning and live another day.
The ennui of lockdown
Lockdown, meanwhile, made me want to stay in bed all day. Yet, keeping active and following a routine was on every media commentators’ wellness list mediated by the disparity of home sizes, family circumstance, income, access to greenery, and other life elements. These were pandemic staples for explaining the shitiness of inequality at that time.
Harbour views and ocean beaches helped to shake off mental health anxieties. But what if you lived in a dour, empty street, of shuttered shops? Miraculously, people made the best of it. At least, judging by communities hunkering down together to supply food, distanced hellos and emotional daylight.
I had shelter, sustenance and the company of my wife as I searched for my mojo. It’s amazing though how working from home and overwhelming tiredness lead to extremely limited conversation and touching, any of which was spine-tingly welcome.
Comic actor Celia Pacquola, back in July, summed it up well. “You flip between days when you’re going ‘I’m healthy, I’m still able to work a bit, I’ve got a roof over my head, everything’s fine,’ and some days you’re just like, ‘Let me out! I can’t take it. I just can’t take it anymore.’
Cup half full
I am a cup half full sort of person. Being vaccinated is good for us and, I believe it is also an altruistic gesture for social wellbeing. Our world is still nervous. I fear my loss of concentration and miniscule motivation will linger after life returns to a more normal normal. Whatever that is. Working From Home, the excited talk of the town last year is now embedded.
The details change, hybridity varying from all days at home, all days in the office, and variations in between. How is productivity measured, how much trust is there between employer and employee? How many zooms can we continue to take? How much private work, how much team and collaboration?
I thrive on incidental conversation, not necessarily serendipitous but more like chatting to baristas, cleaners of train station banisters, doctor’s receptionists, those who keep us going.
At its worst, Sydney Morning Herald senior journalist Jacqueline Maley bemoaned that no horizon was “visible. .. no leader, certainly not federally, seems interested anymore in providing one. So the terms of the deal seem to rest on “who would bother planning anything now? A holiday, a festival, a party?”
It’s as if I can’t be bothered to be bothered about things I should be bothered about. No, I will not edit this cumbersome sentence because its timbre reflects how I feel, long-winded and out of puff.
Too often I have felt that I can’t be bothered to plan ahead to even think about seeing friends in Sydney never mind regional or interstate or (haha) international. In sympathy with lockdown restrictions, my back and right leg stiffened and hurt more than they had for weeks.
Bouts of acupuncture loosened them a bit, but I do want to not be petrified; a successful walk home seems like landing on a suburban moon. I’ve kept to a routine. Kettle on, cereal scooped out of the container, lite milk added, special broadcast Italian news (I love to see another culture, and Italian is still on my life back-to-normal wish list). A few weights (lighter than before the op) and Qi Gong plus touching toes and arm strengthening moves post-mastectomy are my exercises.
I do some of it outside on our doorstep catching as much sun as I can. My lunchtime walk included passing a particularly sunny spot on the driveway where a much-loved adopted cat used to sun himself (cats do know which side their bread is buttered).
My 4 pm bewitching hour, when I used to rush into Sydney city center for a walk (I buzz from exploring city streets), is now when I often recline on the couch at home for a nap from torpor, as much as anything else.
Trust at the core
Trust is central — trusting the professionals, trusting myself and appreciating people, and little actions like sitting down in a café or not freaking out if a stranger is friendly. A sturdy 40s-ish bloke, wearing a black mask, looked at me recently on the train. I judged he was not threatening. We talked about the lockdown, wearing masks, half-suffocating. I said it was the longest impromptu conversation I’d had for weeks. People are too scared to talk, he says. I agree. When will the fear end?
The words that matter to me more and more are, incremental, gradual, cumulative, like a step-by-step bank deposit, in gratitude, humility, and fear at the weight of the prognosis and understanding that it is but part of life’s twists and turns.
I long for an equilibrium of hope and promise, languor and relief
Of sleep that rests and not disturbs/ Obliterating fear of tomorrow
A half-life of doom/ Transformed to a half-life filled with hope,
Putting things to rest to find the strength to live through the next episodes in life.
