Читать книгу Conversation with God - David C. Wilson - Страница 9

A long and complicated buying ‘chain’ delayed the move to the new house, and it wasn’t until the late autumn that we moved in. We had moved to the foothills, some four hundred feet above the town, and we soon discovered why towns are built in sheltered valleys as we experienced the first of two of the hardest winters we have ever known. Although the house sat in the lee of one end of a hilly ridge which protected it from the prevailing westerly winds, it was thoroughly exposed to the many easterlies which blew during those winters. Exposure to weather is, of itself, not a great problem, but when the blizzards came from the east they found ready access into the house because of its history and construction. The house had belonged in the past to a silk mill owner, and was essentially a Victorian extension of a pair of older cottages. Unlike the solid floors of the earlier cottages, suspended wooden flooring was used in the extension, and the floorboards used, although three inches thick (8cm.), were unrebated, that is, were simply laid side by side. Subsequently, modern air-bricks had been fitted to the east-facing walls of the extended part of the house below floor level, presumably in an attempt to remove the smell of dampness, with the result that an easterly wind could blow directly up into the house. The net effect was surreal, for we would often find ourselves sat in the lounge clad in overcoats, watching the carpet rise and fall in the centre of the room, as if by levitation. It was an experience we will never forget.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Mortgage multiples are not theoretical calculations done by building society managers in their spare time, rather, they are designed to prevent financial hardship, and we found we simply couldn’t afford that house. At least, we couldn’t afford to renovate it at that stage in the growth of our business, and we were obliged to do major building work ourselves on a DIY basis, which should more properly have been undertaken professionally. This work would be conducted at the weekends because the weekdays were occupied with the business. In my own case the business required the making of house calls for the selling of financial products in the evenings, thus lengthening the working day, but in Chris’s case the situation was far more complex. Although I had failed to notice, Chris was now wearing a number of hats including those of secretary, receptionist, typist, bookkeeper, and debugger of our newly installed and very expensive computer system. In addition to this unfair distribution of work, the business was reaching a critical size, for an experienced business friend had told us, that when a venture of any kind exceeds three hundred clients, it becomes difficult for two people to manage it alone. Chris clearly needed extra time to complete her many tasks and decided to do the bookkeeping at home, after the office had closed, and while I was elsewhere seeing clients.

Unfortunately, this proved not to be a solution, since the bookkeeping simply became another hat for Chris to wear in a different arena. Whilst I was elsewhere, the domestic front involved Chris in numerous activities, including those of mother, cook, and of course housekeeper in a house four times larger than the previous one. To complicate matters still further, we had at about this time, become involved with the local Sea Cadet Unit. Both our teenage sons had joined the organisation, which was a small one run largely with the voluntary help of the parents of the children. Sadly, however, one of the individuals involved in leadership had an unerring talent for alienating many of these helpers, and as is so often the case in such circumstances, the workload begins to fall on fewer and fewer shoulders. We soon found ourselves amongst the few and whilst I became a committee member, Chris picked up two more hats becoming both the secretary and an officer in charge of the girls section. The competition for Chris’s time was now severe both during the week when the Unit met twice in the evening, and most weekends when either parades or outward-bound type activities filled the time. In such a pressured situation it was inevitable that something would suffer, and as any self-employed businessman will confirm, it is frequently the bookkeeping and accountancy side of a business which bears the brunt of such pressure. Both of us, but Chris especially, now found ourselves on a seven-days-a-week carousel from which neither could alight, and subject now, to the background stresses of neglected bookkeeping and the fast encroaching and pervasive regulation of our business. Time was borrowed from everywhere and even our sleep was not sacrosanct, as our frenetic social life frequently found us locked inside public houses until two or three in the morning.

Post-Viral Syndrome—“Yuppy Flu”

When we did get time at home, the refurbishment work on the house would progress to a pattern, wherein a room would be ‘gutted,’ and this would often be followed by structural alterations, before finally being redecorated. As a consequence, the house was continually filled with house dust, cement dust, mites, horsehair (in the old plasterwork), mould, condensation, and paint. Moreover, the first job had been the application of a kerosene based pesticide to all exposed timbers as a woodworm preventative, causing one family member to remark that Chris was ‘never the same from that time onwards.’ Additionally, throughout this whole period, the oil-fired Rayburn cooker was burning continuously, and would blow back fumes into the house under certain weather conditions. This, we later discovered, was due to another peculiarity in the construction of the house, in particular the construction of the chimneys, which were all built below the level of the roof apex. The net effect of this was that negative pressure across the chimney pot under certain wind conditions caused blowback. In summary, almost every conceivable allergen was present in large quantity at Springmount at this time, along with toxic fumes and chemicals, all of which were present together in a cold and damp environment. It is my belief that Chris was sensitized by these substances during those early years, and that this permitted the later development of food allergies and food intolerance.

In hindsight, the picture of this period which comes to mind, is one of a stage performer trying to keep a dozen plates all spinning on canes at the same time. Clearly, the plates represent all the various activities undertaken, and there is a quite definite and practical limit to how many of these can be attempted at one time. Chris, however, had become the motivator of the totality of our lives, the initiator of new ventures and would admit of no such limit. When the first virus struck her during the Easter of 1988, Chris was obliged to drop everything, if only because it had settled on her chest, activating her asthma and leaving her completely breathless. It was of course merely the flu, and should respond eventually to the cocktail of steroids and antibiotics the doctor had prescribed, provided Chris rested and allowed herself to recuperate. Rest she did and for almost two weeks she was a captive of the lounge sofa, scarcely able to move, and taking little, if anything, in the way of food.

After two weeks the courses of medication came to an end, and although the asthma emergency was over, the flu symptoms failed to clear up and Chris was left with persistent temperature fluctuations, fatigue, tiredness, joint pain, and myalgia. More worrying, however, was another strange and menacing condition that affected her senses of taste and smell. In particular, her sense of smell had become so heightened in intensity, that food became nauseous to her and slowly, yet remorselessly, she reduced her food intake. A little over twelve months later Chris weighed six and a half stone. Looking back, it seems clear that Chris had been suffering from what was then uncomprehendingly called “Yuppy Flu,” and was more properly known as Post-Viral Syndrome or M.E., but this was never medically diagnosed as such at the time. Nowadays the disease is known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS or CFIDS in the USA), having been referred to by early researchers as ‘the disease of a thousand names,’ and popularly called “Yuppy Flu” because of its association with the young, city ‘workaholics’ of the eighties Thatcher scene. During this period the popular press would often carry stories of how the mysterious “Yuppy Flu” was afflicting the wealthy young foreign-exchange dealers in the city of London. Unfortunately, the media spotlight failed to pick out the many thousands of other (largely) professional people, whose lives were being destroyed by this debilitating illness. doctors, nurses, and teachers were among the many professionals so afflicted.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a multifactorial disease, and it can present with both physical and psychiatric symptoms, and hospital-based studies have shown that over 50% of CFS patients meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression. Unfortunately, in such circumstances it has often been the case that in the absence of a definable physical cause, many patients were diagnosed as clinically depressed. Non-specialist General Practitioners were being asked to differentiate between CFS and depression, and in a situation where little was known about the former, it was common to label the physical symptoms as the psychosomatic outworkings of major clinical depression. It was precisely this situation which Chris encountered subsequent to that first viral attack, as she visited the doctor ever more frequently to complain of ‘pains and fatigue.’ The visits to the doctor were of course complicated in Chris’s case by the additional ‘weird’ symptoms of heightened senses of smell and taste, which might have suggested an enhanced sensitivity to allergens, and this, together with repeated viral attacks, should have indicated that all was not well with her immune system. To be fair, sufferers usually insist that the symptoms they experience have an exclusively physical cause, and are often so convinced of this, that their doctors are persuaded to arrange extensive physical examinations, that can even include endoscopic searches. This latter kind of examination usually produces little in the way of a result, leaving the medical consultant exasperated, and the G.P. ‘out-of-his-depth’ and embarrassed about having made a seemingly pointless referral. The truth is that CFS is holistic in nature, and is unexplained by primary physical or psychiatric causes.

Consequences

The physiological symptoms of CFS are not life threatening, nor are they of indefinite duration, for sufferers do recover, albeit often five, ten, or fifteen years on from inception. Unfortunately, long term illnesses of this nature, together with the associated, entrenched psychiatric problems, have far-reaching effects on sufferers’ lives and (to use that dreadful word!) ‘lifestyles.’ Afflicted professionals, such as doctors or teachers are initially able to use up extensive paid sick leave, but find ultimately that they are compelled to give up their careers. It tends to be axiomatic that the busiest, most effective, professional people fall prey to CFS. The busy life in laboratory, surgery, or classroom becomes inexorably reduced in scope, until finally, in the worst cases, the sufferer is scarcely able to cross a room without the most excessive effort and pain. Usually, alongside and inextricably bound up with this remorseless advance into incapacity, comes a complete upheaval in the individual’s personal values. Additionally, the individual’s perception of role and status within both the family unit and wider society, undergo an enforced and painful realignment. Andrew Ferguson quotes the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, who identifies the problem precisely when he remarks: “If health is taken as a supreme value, it may lead to the suppression of illness and that ‘the sick are pushed out of the life of society.’ An individual who becomes seriously ill may lose his or her sense of their own worth.”

Financially, the sufferer’s household is obliged to endure trauma of unprecedented proportions, as two often substantial salaries, become—in the more fortunate cases—one small, early, retirement pension, plus various disability benefits. Such financial strictures bring with them an enforced humility, which may prove to be a difficult psychological burden to bear. The value of the sufferer’s whole family unit may be seen to plummet in the ‘eyes of society,’ as two ‘involved’ professionals (perceived as net contributors) become ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ respectively (both perceived as net beneficiaries). Children, teenagers especially, are without doubt traumatized by the complete reversal of fortunes, as houses, schools, and friends change in the kaleidoscope of stress-filled days passing before them. Adversity can, of itself, bring about aberrant behavior in the young.

At the outset of the illness, sufferers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome usually become aware of physical symptoms such as muscle and joint pain, fatigue, sleep disturbance, abdominal discomfort, and body temperature fluctuations, but there is a second set of symptoms which are of potentially greater significance. This group comprises sheer mental incapacity of a completely debilitating order, invariably including impairment of memory, a persistent lack of concentration, and often difficulty in comprehending the spoken word. Keyboard performance, that is, the use of a typewriter or word processor displays these problems in microcosm, where the work produced frequently contains omissions and repetitions, and where work sessions are severely curtailed, perhaps restricted to only thirty minutes duration. Most professionals and business people struggle ‘manfully’ on in the face of physical pain and discomfort, given that their work is often sedentary and of a cerebral nature, but they are simply unable to function in the face of such mental incapacity. It is arguably this latter group of symptoms which terminate so many professional careers, and was certainly responsible for Chris’s long, slow slide into firstly anorexia, and secondly depression.

We were later to discover that anorexia—as a symptom of CFS— is encountered by up to forty percent of sufferers albeit as a minor one. Indeed there are two so-called minor symptoms of CFS—nausea and anorexia—which have been suggested as strengthening the CDC (United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) case definition of CFS. In actual fact the anorexia exhibited by CFS sufferers is true anorexia (from the Greek meaning no appetite), and for Chris this was manifested as an absence of appetite due to masking by the associated CFS symptom of nausea, which itself was a function of her enhanced sense of smell. The anorexia displayed by Chris, in this first year of her illness, is to be contrasted with the ‘usual’ presentation wherein the ‘normal’ sufferer is very very hungry indeed—despite protestations to the contrary. From the initial ‘triggering’ of the illness by that first viral attack, it took fully fifteen months for Chris to reach a weight of six and a half stone. It was then that concerned family and friends suggested that a holiday—the first in six years—might be just ‘what the doctor ordered.’ In fact, it was precisely the opposite of the doctor’s advice.

Anorexia Nervosa

What the doctor now saw, correctly as it turned out, was that the anorexia associated with CFS had now in fact become anorexia nervosa, that is, the so-called slimming disease most frequently associated with young girls. There had been a seamless transition from a minor symptom of CFS to a psychiatric illness in its own right, one which has the highest mortality rate of all such illnesses. The doctor’s advice was against travelling, and the coach journey to southern France was a painful one for the six and a half stone, yet undismayed Chris. Nothing could have shown Chris’s deterioration over the past twelve months more clearly than that holiday. The sight of this thin, milk, white figure in a blue sun-hat, who spent too much time in the toilets, was completely out of place amongst the healthy, bronzed Europeans relaxing by the camp pool. Because we were holidaying with two other couples—our close friends—we had between us half a dozen kids, and this meant a great deal of time was spent eating socially as a group. Now social eating causes anorexics great problems, especially in restaurant situations, for despite careful and judicious selection from the menu, it is rarely possible to control portion size. The remedy is found in impromptu exits to the toilets in order to vomit, or if all else fails, the taking of laxatives to relieve fictitious constipation. It was quite remarkable how that holiday brought the true situation home to everyone, for it was impossible for Chris to conceal anything, with friends so close by most of the time.

Questions were on everyone’s mind: How had this condition arisen? What did this woman in her early middle years have in common with the teenagers who more commonly succumb to this illness? Indeed, the prognosis was bad, for there is even less chance of recovery for sufferers in their later years, than there is for younger ones. A clue to causation lies in Moltmann’s comment about the way in which a person’s self-worth may plummet during serious illness. Chris had been the linchpin of the family, holding together every facet of the whole enterprise, including business, home, and leisure interests. In the long aftermath of that initial virus attack, Chris had been obliged to ‘carry on’ whilst constantly feeling ill, and quite naturally her performance—her ability to get things done—had suffered as a consequence. Despite begging her to let something go, such as giving up her work with the Sea Cadets, she insisted on trying to maintain her life in all its aspects to the fullest extent, and failure to do so for a perfectionist such as Chris, can have only one outcome. Unable to function properly, Chris convinced herself that she simply wasn’t ‘up to the job,’ and in common with other anorexics she lost all sense of her own self-worth. Low self-worth is the common factor shared by all anorexics, both young and old, and the anorexic response to that (wrong-headed) realisation and false self-understanding is also a common one. Anorexics respond by controlling the only thing that they feel is still within their control—their bodies. In the case of young girls, restriction of food intake results ultimately in an arrest of menstruation, with the result that control is imposed upon the biological changes normally brought about during puberty. Effectively, control is imposed upon the (unwanted) arrival of womanhood with all its attendant life changes. In like manner, Chris imposed control upon her own body, as a substitute for the control she now felt she had lost, or was losing over her life. With our return to France had come the full, awful realisation that Chris was now living out an anorexic lifestyle, a lifestyle which had up to that point remained largely concealed.