On Wednesday, I went to see my GP. Even making the appointment to help with my anxiety made me nervous. When I walked in, I realised the doctor was the same one I consulted when I contracted cystitis and a terrible sore throat after having sex with my last boyfriend. I had quizzed the German, asking when he’d last had sex, and he had replied over nine months before. He asked me when I had last had sex, and I replied that I think there was snow on the ground. So we hadn’t used any protection or caution.
I hadn’t factored in that he might be lying, which of course he was.
On my previous surgery visit I had told this very same GP that I was worried I had contracted an oral STI. She very kindly didn’t even raise an eyebrow. I was then rushed to hospital, where my tonsils were drained of pus while I was still conscious. I had my laptop, held next to my bed by Nic, and was also filing copy for that Saturday’s newspaper while the poison was drained.
In 40 years there has never been a moment when I have not been available to file. I crawled under desks inside Ian Fleming’s villa in Jamaica to find a phone socket to dial up the internet. I filed the afternoon my mum died. When my then husband revealed he had cheated yet again, we were on a remote African island. My first thought wasn’t, ‘What a waste of my 26 grand’ but, ‘This will make a great two-parter.’
I read a lovely piece this week about the blue plaque being erected outside the former London home of novelist Barbara Pym. ‘In life,’ historian Lucy Worsley said before unveiling the plaque, ‘she often sabotaged her own best interests in favour of strange relationships that would end up as good copy.’ My insane work ethic is what gets me into trouble.
The GP asked me what seems to be the trouble. I told her I am finding it hard to breathe due to stress, I wake at 3am every night, which really disturbs Mini, who is on top of me, and I cannot eat.
I have no friends where I live (my one friend here, the woman I moved to North Yorkshire to be close to, no longer speaks to me due to my column, and hasn’t even been to visit my new house in over a year). My left hearing aid is broken, no longer under guarantee, so it’s like listening to an early Beatles single: everything is in mono.
She asked what’s causing the anxiety, and I told her I have complex PTSD, which means I’m ultra vulnerable to stress, knowing the worst can indeed happen. That I am constantly trolled online. One female reader contacted me to hope my Gracie is ‘rotting in the earth’. Another reader, a man, tried to get my dogs taken off me.
I told her I was prescribed citalopram when losing my house, but was too afraid to take it, thinking it might change my writing. I can’t stand confident, arrogant writers who never try, who never push boundaries, who always think they’re right, who hold back the juiciest or most shameful aspects of their lives for fear of not being liked. And that I have tried every therapy under the sun, from neurofeedback to eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) to hypnotherapy.
The GP said the only recourse is to prescribe the drug again, but that I really must take it this time. She told me I need to take a break from my computer, go for long walks. ‘Your house backs on to a river, there’s the Pennine Way, Raby Castle, you need to get out more. Appreciate the countryside, nature, birdsong.’
I have always pooh-poohed this sort of advice (I once reviewed The Natural Health Service by Isabel Hardman, which is all about nature as a mental-health cure-all, writing I was enraged when the book told me to drive to a national park: ‘I can’t afford the diesel or the parking fee, and inevitably an angry note will be placed on my windscreen – “Keep your dog on a lead. Nesting birds!” – and the precipitous Buttertubs Pass scares the hell out of me’), but on Thursday Nic persuaded me to take Teddy along the Swale, inside a National Trust wood carpeted with wild garlic and bluebells.
Ted wore a muzzle, three leads and a tabard that reads, ‘Give me space.’ I wore a tabard that says, ‘Deaf rider, please pass slowly’, a fluoro relic from when I was brave enough to ride my horse. Teddy was very good, not reacting to other dogs. (He’s been having weekly training sessions; the trainer’s parents bring out dogs from her house to walk past him. It’s like a Miss World contest.)
We took him down to the river where, instead of swimming and diving to catch a ball, he just stood in the water up to his tummy. As he was in a Romanian kill shelter before I got him, he has no concept of fun: just like his mummy. I have a fear of drowning. On that ill-fated African scuba-diving holiday, I was the only person to be tethered to the boat by a rope. The instructor agreed I was too nervous not to panic beneath the surface.
And so I swallow the tiny tablet. If next week I start to write about how I load my dishwasher, you’ll know the effects are kicking in.
