I am writing this while pissing Samurai swords. When not pissing swords I’m managing to piss shards of broken mirror, whole arrows complete with tips and ends, crumbled chunks of pebbledash and the occasional streak of razor wire. When not doing that I’m taking as many cranberry tablets as I can fit in my mouth and drinking pints of nettle tea, dandelion tea or cold water with bicarbonate of soda mixed in.
I have cystitis, obviously. Very common, very discomfiting. It occurs, or threatens to, whenever I’m dehydrated. The last serious attack before now was at the end of 2012 when I had a glass of coarse red wine in a restaurant and went to bed without needing the bathroom. By the next morning my bladder had filled with crunched glass. The worst is when travelling by air, when I can’t drink as much as I need to or inconvenience other plane passengers to visit the bathroom. And then there are matters carnal. We all know that cystitis is God’s punishment for having sex.
My 2012 cystitis attack and the health issues that followed made me think about the connection between external events and internal manifestations, mental pain causing physical pain, the mirroring of psychology and physiology. It also shone a light on some GPs’ apparent ignorance of this connection. I had never got cystitis just from one glass of wine and a missed bathroom visit before, but certain events I survived in 2009 had weakened me, worsening my susceptibility to illness, the frequency of illness and the severity of illness. They left behind a trace of vulnerabilityoperating at a very deep level.
I went to the GP to get some antibiotics for the cystitis. She gave me a five day course of something so strong that it gave me thrush. I’d never had thrush before and assumed that the antibiotics hadn’t worked and that my cystitis had worsened. I went back to the clinic and was assigned a (very nice) man I’d never seen before.
“I was wondering if it might be thrush?” I said in passing.
“Do you have any discharge ‘down there’?” he asked, looking embarrassed.
“No.” There was just an extreme discomfort, tenderness, soreness and swelling and a sense of tingling, weeping, sizzling allergy, as though the skin had suddenly become live.
“Then you don’t,” he said with immediate relief.
He gave me a further three day course of cystitis antibiotics despite there being “no blood, no proteins,” in my urine.
Secret hint to gentleman GPs: if you’re calling it “down there” while exuding very strong aversion vibes to actually looking “down there”, you may be in the wrong profession. The antibiotics sent the thrush over the edge and led to extreme discomfort and feverishness for six weeks. It was so bad that in the middle of a voiceover recording a colleague said to me in concern, “I can tell that something’s not right.”
Like so many women facing dismissal of our instincts, derision for our opinions, contempt for our knowledge and aversion for our bodies, I got the correct advice from other women. Discharge doesn’t always happen with thrush, which has a range of symptoms. A colleague who’d been hospitalised for long stretches was told privately by her nurse that antibiotics often cause thrush through their brutal destruction of the good bacteria in the gut along with the bad. She recommended taking probiotics and probiotic yoghurt. Various online women’s health forums suggested topical and natural remedies – natural yoghurt again, a heavily diluted tea tree oil solution, garlic or swallowed garlic capsules – all of which worked to ease symptoms. Then there’s the anti-thrush diet which many women said had permanently cured them. My simplified version is this: zero sugar, zero carbs, no booze, no caffeine. Booze and caffeine to be reintroduced in small amounts a few months later.
I tried it. It stopped the thrush dead within three hours.
How can GPs not know about these simple, natural solutions? I’m not talking about fairyland flower remedies, homeopathic pills, exotic herb concoctions or casting spells at the full moon, just basic changes to diet and the topical application of ingredients with known antifungal and antibacterial properties. How can GPs not know the full range of symptoms of something as common as thrush? How can they be so cavalier about prescribing antiobitics which have such a strong effect?
The next time I went to the doctors was for a routine smear test and met lovely Dr Norland.
“They really need to redesign these things,” I commented dryly, in so many ways, when it was all going on with the duck (my term for a speculum).
“And it’ll be a woman that does it, I’ll tell you that,” she said.
Love a flash of feminism in a medical professional. I told her about the thrush and instead of throwing pills at me she told me not to take antibiotics as it would just make me resistant and instead to drink as much water as possible to flush it out.
Although she did make a little racial error when recommending a follow-up health check to my mother. My mother was about to go to India and suggested that Dr Norland give her a letter to take to a doctor there.
“It does need to be someone who speaks English,” said Dr Norland.
Dr Norland, some tiny tips. India’s doctors all speak fluent English and usually one or two other languages besides; India’s medical expertise is so great that Indian doctors and surgeons are employed globally and are indeed famous for their skill; and India’s best hospitals and specialist research units are world class. You seem to be under the impression that we are about to go to a village health station under a palm thatch in the middle of nowhere to talk to a shaman holding a feather and a rusty shaving blade. We are not.
Incidentally the worst/best place I was ever recognised was in the middle of a smear test, by yet another doctor at my local health centre where morale is obviously so low that they change their entire workforce about twice a week.
“Haven’t I seen you on TV?” said the woman. She was down at the business end.
*Insert duck.*
“Oh!” I said.
*Open duck*
“Yup,” I stiffly conceded.
Anyway, I sorted out the thrush. But in the long run I’ve found it disturbing that my usually equine constitution has become so sensitised. The thrush flared up again last Christmas after a few mince pies too many. This was exceptional: I don’t usually eat sugar or carbs at all, but certainly never worried when faced with the odd plate of pasta, a dessert or a cup of coffee. Now I have to avoid them completely.
I am struck by the years of crumbling physical damage caused by a non physical attack: the thinning hair, a saga in itself which I wrote about here; the nagging stress acne which never quite goes; the terrible triggering when I see the perpetrator's image or hear his name; the way a simple cold now becomes five days of bed-ridden temperature; the loss of muscle mass. I am literally weaker than I was before, unable to run as far, lift as much, build as much bulk or work out as intensely as I used to. And then, a few months ago, I discovered my first white hairs, despite coming from a family in which nobody over gets grey strand until their late 60s or beyond. I knew it was not from genetics or my diet, which is immaculate, but from the stress of what happened.
Until the events of 2009 happened I had never understood people who claimed that non-physical issues like unemployment, over-work, being in the wrong job or experiencing a family dispute had ‘destroyed their health’. I hated the word ‘stress’. I thought the whole attitude was spoilt, Western-privileged and narcissistic; people worldwide who survive natural disasters, famine, pandemics and wars do not go on about being stressed. They don’t have the luxury.
Having survived the last five years, I have a tiny bit more sympathy. Instead of going along with GPs’ focus on treating symptoms rather than causes, we must embrace an idea of total health, which does not make a stark distinction between the soul and the body and accepts that one affects and reflects the other. Emotional pain becomes physical pain while emotional strength boosts physical strength. Happiness, caused by social factors, supports numerous health factors.
I didn’t make the connection until I went to get a verruca sorted out at the chiropodist.
“I got it from a shared hotel bathroom in New York. You see. Never travel cheap,” I said. I nodded down at my toe. “There’s loads of them. It’s like a mushroom forest.”
“It’s to do with your immune,” said the woman.
That explained it in a flash. The colds, the hives, the zits, the thrush, the fatigue, the constant interstitial cystitis lasting for weeks, the muscle turning to flab, the feeling of being dogged by weakness and ill health. My immune was low, because I was low. The actions of a well-practiced abuser defiled the very fibres of my being with bacteria, infection, disease and germs; the feeling of being tainted, being attacked and destroyed, was literally true at a cellular level.
When I think about the events of 2009 one image comes to mind: that of being struck at the core, straight through with one strike, of a column being broken into pieces. It is sad that the rebuilding process is not just professional, not just emotional, not just social but must also be physical and carried out in the most gratingly basic ways. I have had to teach myself how to work out again, lifting the lightest weights and layering up my strength from scratch. It bothers me that a perpetrator is able to do this to other human beings and thrive in success, wealth and high social regard while his victims are demolished publicly, privately, psychologically and physically.
Further reading (in order):
- Emotional violence and social power
- From despair to hair: the hidden link between emotional abuse and home haircare remedies
- Triggered: on trauma, survival and perpetrator impunity