Get Well Soon

by Nick Duerden

  I am at a low ebb, evidently, because, unusually for me, I decide to vent my frustration by playing him at his own game. I email him asking why he isn’t giving me the time to come to my own informed decision about his offer, but is instead constantly badgering me. ‘Does this really work on people?’ I ask him.

  I regret the email the moment I send it, aware of the futility of it, and, besides, who am I to complain about his salesman tactics? He is simply trying to make a living. But just half an hour later, a reply comes. Not from him, but from a minion, a terribly courteous woman who apologises for the hassle, insisting that badgering is not their intent; they merely want to make me, and everybody else, aware that their product is powerful, and just possibly life-altering. As an olive branch, she sends me a link to the first CD, worth $67, for free.

  I am immediately chastened, and feel rather foolish, but grateful. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was just a little excited, too. Weeks of his boastful emails have, it seems, had the desired effect. I have apparently, despite myself, bought into his claims, because what I am feeling now is close to anticipation.

  It is a weekday afternoon, and, with the neighbours still sleeping off the previous night’s excess, the house is quiet. I download the CD onto my iPod, then go out into the garden and sit on my new reclining chair, a recent present from Elena, and every middle-aged man’s dream. Tilted back, glasses off, earbuds in, I press Play. It begins, the familiar babbling brook, the chirruping crickets, the distant wind chimes, each individual sound wonderfully resonant in the left ear, the right ear, both ears at once. To begin with, it sounds not merely similar to, but exactly like, the ‘8 Minute Wonder’ sampler. And it is. It is the same thing, albeit with better sound quality, stretched over 40 minutes.

  Nevertheless, it does sound wonderful, and its hypnotic cacophony holds me rapt. It is invigorating, and mildly hallucinogenic. But after repeated listens, I register no significant mental improvement, nor creative, nor anything else really, and so I cannot concur with, nor claim to find it as revelatory as, the people quoted on its website proclaiming just how much it has improved their lives.

  LifeFlow does not change my life, nor its flow, but it does provide some meditative calm during torturously slow afternoons. At night, it helps drown out that other cacophony bleeding through the walls of our house from the partying neighbours next door.

  And for that, inky Michael, I am grateful.

  Six

  It is at around this time that I start to keep a diary. I resist the idea at first, convinced I have little constructive to say on the subject. Besides, the idea of not just living it but recording it for posterity, on the page, seems to me depressing, almost perverse. Why catalogue such self-involved misery? But Elena says it might be a good idea; people have said as much on the forums she browses at night. And so I give it a go. They are sketchy entries and, once typed, never re-typed, never re-read, until now.

  Elena will be proved right, as she often is: each entry serves, much later, as a reminder not just of how bad things got, but also of my mindset at the time. Reading those early entries now, written 10 months after I became ill, four months since my ‘diagnosis’ sent me spiralling, I barely recognise myself. I had thought I was dealing with it all with patience and stoicism. The entries suggest otherwise.

  October 3

  I go out with the family to the park for a picnic, on the assumption that a bit of fresh air would do me good. Walked barely 10 minutes, but arrive home exhausted, the muscles in my arms and legs so heavy. I can barely move, unable to put the kids to bed. I hear them asking Elena, What’s wrong with daddy?

  October 17

  In bed by nine last night, completely wiped out. Awoke unrefreshed at 6:30, scarily exhausted everywhere, in my legs, my back, my mind. My ribs ache, even my cheekbones, though surely this isn’t possible? Too tired, I think, to work today.

  Elena can’t pick the girls up from school later, she has a meeting. I have to do it. I’m not looking forward to it.

  Two hours after school pickup: horribly shattered, deflated, completely without energy. It tires me out just to sit down, even. Bad day.

  October 20

  Another broken night’s sleep due to the neighbour. I want him dead, a car crash, overdose, an accident – nothing that can come back on me. Playground with the girls this afternoon, and another painful reminder of my situation when Evie needed the toilet. There is a public WC on the far side of the park, beyond the football pitch. Find myself measuring the distance, and immediately deciding it is too long, I can’t do it. But she needs to go. Is four years old too young to go by herself? Wracked with anxiety. In the end, Amaya takes her, and I stand and watch them, helpless, hating myself, tearful.

  October 25

  Birthday. Too preoccupied to even consider the onset of midlife crisis. A good thing? Elena takes me to a nice restaurant, by car. The walk from the car park to our table is long, and I fret. Then I fret because the toilet is on another floor, down a long corridor. Still in denial, because I think to myself: is this all really happening? How could I let something like this occur? We order champagne, just a glass each. Couldn’t afford a bottle anyway, but I still can’t tolerate the alcohol, each swallow making me nauseous.

  The only thing keeping me sane is work. Day to day, I check emails (‘Hi Nick, hope you’re well’), and am now busy editing the ghosting project, which is progressing steadily. This requires of me little more than sitting at my chair in front of my PC, and I’m good at doing that. Elsewhere, the majority of interviews I do are on the phone. One time, an eminent writer comes to my kitchen for our assignation. I offer him coffee and biscuits, then more coffee and biscuits, and am so grateful he has come to me that I can see he has difficulty in extricating himself from my clinging company two very long hours later.

  This was highly unusual. Nobody else visited my kitchen. The journalist travels, not the talent. And because telephone interviews are never particularly fulfilling, I must travel still, irrespective of the complications in doing so. Public transport is beyond me right now, and so I settle for the bespoke, door-to-door services of a taxi firm.

  I spent very little of my previous four decades taking taxis anywhere. They were the preserve of the wealthy, I thought, or the financially carefree, and I was neither. I knew of some people who claimed they had expense accounts, but expense accounts were like the Loch Ness monster: often talked about, rarely seen. I had always managed quite happily on buses and Tubes; now it’s chauffeur service. For a few minutes, I marvel at the prospect, the sheer extravagance of it, the comfort, the space, the leather upholstery. It is a sophisticated way to travel.

  Not by minicab, it isn’t.

  But if nothing else, travel by minicab is never dull, and in some respects I have more adventures in the back streets of Norbiton, East Putney and Old Street, in a dented Nissan driven by a displaced Iraqi with dissident leanings, than I ever did in Mumbai, Lima or Havana. A perpetual clock watcher, I am never, not ever, late for a job. I would always factor in potential delays, just in case, then arrive considerably early but happy to potter about until the appointed hour. I do not have such flexibility with minicabs. They have a mania for being early, perfectly understandable of course, but this means they deposit me at my destination early, which leaves me standing aimless, and restrictively tired, on a street corner waiting for the time to catch up with me. The journeys there are always complicated. The driver has little English and a lack of knowledge of his immediate surroundings. He relies a little too heavily on his satnav, which cannot help but seek out the capital’s most congested streets. We stew in traffic, which encourages conversation, and over several months I hear the fascinating and terrible stories of exiles: the man whose extended family are lost in Tikrit while his wife is ill at home in Hounslow, and whose children are unruly and talking back to him in the ‘English way’; another, from Zimbabwe, who regales me with happy tales from his Rhodesian childhood before we narrowly avoid being cru
shed by an oncoming lorry to whose driver he bunches up a fist and shouts, shrilly, his voice suddenly scaling an octave, ‘You . . . you bully!  ’ The driver from Afghanistan who grew up in Berlin and hates his native country and everyone in it; and the other who tells me that America will pay dearly for George W. Bush’s actions in the Middle East for generations to come. I am, he says, to mark his words.

  Occasionally, I am late, the traffic’s fault, not the driver’s. One time I am later than I have ever been for a job: 90 minutes. I was supposed to meet a much-loved character actor in his central London bolthole in the morning. By the time I arrive, it is afternoon. I run up the two flights of stairs and into his house, past his PR’s pained expression, and I shower him with apologies, pulling the shirt away from my neck to allow the flopsweat to pour unheeded. He takes one look at me, sits me down on his couch and opens a bottle of champagne. I don’t have the heart to tell him I currently have no tolerance for alcohol, and so I down two glasses.

  It helps. In all sorts of ways, it helps.

  November 1

  Another bad day. Waves of tiredness, repeating over and over, leaving me incapable of anything. Spent the whole day waiting for it to pass, Epsom salt bath at seven, bed by eight. Yoga nidra difficult only because it’s hard to make positive affirmations, and believe them, when you feel so catastrophically tired after so little exertion. I’m trying to understand all this until it seems explicable, reasonable. But I can’t, and it isn’t.

  November 4

  Awake by dawn, good sleep, but tired still. Mid-morning: increasingly lethargic, despondent, and really quite spectacularly shattered. It’s mental and physical now, because I’m aware I feel very low. Five months in, and instead of seeing even the slightest improvement, it’s just getting worse. Evening: absolutely awful, unspeakably tired, but I insist on putting the girls to bed. They notice nothing awry, climbing all over me before demanding I read one book, then another. I love them for it.

  November 11

  Low. The tidal wave of tiredness that comes so promptly the moment I step out of the door makes me fearful of stepping out the door. Catch-22. Was Elena right? Am I agoraphobic? I hope not. Couldn’t cope with that, the shame. Elena, I know, is having a tough time adjusting to all this, and seeing her struggle makes me realise how serious it is, along with the imperative to DO SOMETHING. Later: Despite still being dreadfully tired, we manage sex. It felt like a necessity, a reminder of before.

  I start to look into low-level exercise. ‘Relax,’ Dr Dolittle had told me. ‘Do some yoga.’ I have certainly relaxed these past five months, often to the exclusion of everything else, but I have not broached yoga. Perhaps now it’s time.

  Elena buys a DVD. It is presented by two people, one a preposterously muscled and unreasonably good-looking man whose face is a masterpiece of learned serenity, and the other a pretty woman from breakfast television. Together, on yoga mats, they work through a series of elaborate and elastic poses. The backdrop is idyllic, a Greek island in the summertime, all shimmer and haze and distant olive groves. I try to follow along, but struggle. The DVD purports to be for beginners, but the pair are clearly experts, with a penchant for showing off. After an initial introduction, they whip through pose after pose with an impatience my former self would have recognised, and approved of. ‘Quicker now,’ he says, downward dog, having previously taken a languorous 30 seconds, now over and done with in 10.

  As the DVD progresses, it is difficult not to become aware of the sexual chemistry between the instructors. It becomes so heady – to me at least, a man possibly seeking distraction – that I have to pause the DVD to google whether they are an item. My findings prove inconclusive. Either way, their frisson makes me envious, and does little to further my prana. I continually struggle to keep up. His movements are fluid and graceful; his muscles ripple. Mine do not. I cannot do anything he can do, and he is doing it too quickly, and with too much preening confidence. I keep having to reach for the Pause button, because while he sweeps a foot back to join the other, and then up again, arms now on hips, arms now arching in a sun salutation, I am huffing and groaning, and not finding any humour in my predicament at all.

  At the end of each session, I am exhausted. This is perfectly reasonable, because I am clearly unfit; it is okay to be tired after a yoga workout. And I am doing lots of it: the downward dog, the bridge, the shoulder stand, more. Blood rushes to my head, my thigh muscles stretch until they can stretch no more. I become short of breath, and have to lie for several moments on the mat beneath me in order to regain it. Is this really Yoga for Beginners, I wonder. It decimates me. It’s too much. I can’t do it.

  So I switch DVDs, and order another one online, this one especially for people like me, fatigued. My instructors are Sue and Fiona, comely, kindly women, and between them they do the very gentlest sort of yoga. It lasts for about 40 minutes, and they perform their moves alongside a couple of students among whom they share absolutely no sexual chemistry. I am grateful for it. I still struggle with the movements, but I get progressively better at them, and each day I can manage stretches I could not manage the day before, which lends it all, for me, a slightly, but nicely, competitive edge.

  It soon becomes the activity around which the rest of my day revolves. Soon I want to do it twice a day, but for what are very likely the wrong reasons: as if by proving that I’m committing myself so attentively to the practice, I shall get better quicker. That’s how it works, right? No. It is still my instinct to rush in everything, and to rush my way through this, because I don’t seem to possess the patience demanded of me by the fatigue. It isn’t funny any more. I am bored of its disruption. My sleep patterns are deeper thanks to the meditative soundtracks, which claim to release serotonin and reduce cortisol, and I am now listening to something called Delta Isochronic Tones, which purportedly offer anti-ageing support, and to something else called Delta Binaural Beats, which encourage empathy and compassion, and also a deepening of spirituality. Each night, our bedroom pulses with aural activity, weird bleeps and electronic hums that only a Radiohead aficionado could truly appreciate.

  But all of it, the yoga and the sleeping and the enforced patience, doesn’t seem to be working. I am unaware of any significant changes for the better. As far as I can gauge, and despite my silent pleadings, it isn’t having the slightest effect, any of it. I am furious.

  Elena tells me to look at it another way, to appreciate that I am lucky, that I have crashed into fatigue rather than into something more serious, like cancer, an aneurysm. She is right, of course, and while I would never wish for a more serious illness, in my more morose moments I do nevertheless crave to be in the hands of a doctor with a plan of action. If I had had cancer, I’d have had chemotherapy by now. It would have either worked or not. The lump would be out, or else metastasised, but either way, something would have happened. With this, nothing has, at all. It is all so inert. I simply wait for change, and gently (ineffectually) try to speed up the change. But I still have no real clue what I am doing, and the long-term outlook seems bleak. This is not an illness in the strictest sense; there is little progression to it, no obvious conclusion. Life is grinding slowly down to walking pace – or at least it would were I capable of walking pace, which I am not.

  Nothing is happening, no respite. I am 43 years old. I cannot possibly spend the next three decades like this. I need to do something.

  I read about the early stages of CFS, and how sufferers should tread carefully: the body is still in shock, still majorly depleted of its natural resources. Anything too strenuous can have ruinous effects. I am soon to be reminded of this.

  Winter is upon us now, and the girls come back from school with blocked noses and sore throats. I become fearful of flu, and so decide it makes sense to inoculate myself against it. One Saturday, we drive to a nearby Boots. The pharmacist questions me before the procedure, and as I answer, she frowns, and then strongly advises against it.

  ‘My sister has CFS,’ she
tells me, her hand on my arm. ‘She had a flu jab, and it wiped her out for months and months. She was awful. So you shouldn’t have this; I’m not going to give it to you. Just go home; rest.’

  November 18

  Another broken night’s sleep for all the usual reasons, The Drugs Don’t Work, performed acoustically, at 3am, and repeated several times. Today will be the last day of the so-called magic minerals. There’s only so many times I can rub damp sand into my chest without feeling the fool. Fed up, too, of taking all these pills. It doesn’t seem to make any difference, and the horse-sized ones always stick in my throat.

  My early-morning yoga interrupted by Evie, who walks into the room and sits on my chest in the middle of the bridge pose. I battle on, but her sister joins her, and soon they are both alongside me attempting to do the downward dog, or trying to while giggling and pronouncing yoga ‘silly’. Flashback to walking into the living room of my childhood once to find my mother mid-pose, and wondering what on earth she was doing, how strange she was . . .

  For the rest of the day my whole body aches in tiredness and tightness. Everything feels like it needs unwinding, loosening, a good run, swim, ten miles on the bike.

  November 20

  A humbling realisation of my new cowardice: now I really am terrified of walking, of anything that might bring on another tidal wave of fatigue. The walk from the car to the café this afternoon – a few hundred feet at most – brought about the utter conviction that it was too far, that I couldn’t handle it. By the time I was sat drinking my coffee, my body was sinking to the floor, a leaden weight. My head swam, total panic, freakout. Psychosomatic?

  Bed by 8:30, catatonic.

  November 21

  25 minutes of the yoga DVD, including pre- and post-breathing exercises. Difficult, tiring, but in a good way. The ache in my stomach muscles continued well into the evening. Because of the yoga? All this self-obsession! But I’m no longer able to take my body for granted as I once used to. Everything I do carries freighted significance.