Last night, I booked a holiday to Tenerife. Solo. Twenty-four hours later, I’m typing this as we prepare to land. I’ll do almost anything to escape this health crash. The waste of time and money is one thing, but constantly letting down family, friends and colleagues is what really stings.
What I have – dysautonomia – is a strange beast. A dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. In short, the part of your body that is supposed to work on autopilot – like regulating blood pressure – forgets how to do its job.
Sound becomes overwhelming, like the volume is stuck on max. Harmless signals trigger automatic panic. My eyes fill with tears, not from sadness or joy, just a pointless overflow, like a broken tap.
The strangest part is that it constantly reminds me I have a body. Not in some joyful, seize-the-day way, but in an irritating, hyperaware way.
Two moments from today stand out.
First: the black hole.
After lunch, all the blood abandoned my brain and rushed to my stomach. For the first time in my life – and I really mean this – my mind went completely blank. No thoughts. No inner monologue. No ideas darting around. Just void. A black hole behind my eyes. Maybe this is how an amoeba experiences life. Present, but thoughtless. I couldn’t speak.
It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t painful. But it was utterly alien. It felt less like rest, more like erasure. As if the “me” behind the eyes had quietly left the room.
Second: the wheelchair.
A few days ago, I walked up a hill. Not Snowdon, just a small hill. But still, a hill. Today I needed a wheelchair to get through the airport and onto the plane.
That’s the unbelievable thing about dysautonomia. It doesn’t decline in a straight line. It’s chaotic. One day I’m upright, the next I’m horizontal. It’s like bodily schizophrenia. Unpredictable. Erratic. Impossible to plan around. Even I don’t know what it will do next. If I hadn’t experienced it, I’d be dubious of anyone who claimed to flit between such extremes.
Now we’re about to land. Late, but no complaints. Churchill went to Tenerife to recover. So did Agatha Christie. Let’s see if it works for me.
