Bite Me

Four months ago, my boyfriend Tom and I moved to Vancouver, Canada. We live with his brother Joe and Joe's girlfriend Kat, and Kat's cat, Sooty. In the flat above live his parents, and in the backyard lives our growing vegetable patch.

When I moved to New Zealand I was 20, brimming with life and ready to do as many adrenaline rushing extreme sports as possible. I broke up with my ex, partied hard, lived in a hostel, moved into a flat, sky dived, went caving, pot holing, jumped off Auckland's Sky Tower, white water rafted, hiked, skinny dipped and generally did as much as I possibly could before I returned home. I made some wonderful friends and often look back at that time with great fondness and laughter; everything was 'Sweet as'.

When I returned home I spent a year wanting to get away again, and despite being in a wonderful relationship, I was angsty and ready to travel again. I hated my job and I felt trapped. So that's when Charli suggested I move to Australia to live with her, her parents and her young twin siblings. I leapt at the opportunity and before I knew it I was living in Mandurah on the West coast of Aus, south of Perth.

This was ultimately a very different experience. I wanted to enjoy my time in Australia, but I was also working full time as a waitress and living with my friends family, and I wanted to save for a big trip. Mandurah was beautiful, and whilst Charli and I had a lot of fun together, I was bored with the work and too anxious to be on the road again. Still, we booked our flights to Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and I was preparing for a short five weeks on Australia's East coast on my own, and then back to England for a few weeks before leaving to do Base Camp Everest and travel with Charli and Sophie to the one place I'd wanted to visit for a long, long time. I was desperate to go somewhere not Westernised.

During this preparation, I decided that I was going to have a Rabies and Cholera vaccination. Despite being very expensive, I was sure it would be worth it. All it would take would be one nip off a rabid dog and that would be that, so I thought I might as well be extra cautious, it wasn't like it would do any harm...

Two weeks after my third and final rabies injection I got Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Nearly two years ago now and I've read a lot to do with immunisations and GBS, with some people getting it after something as small as a flu jab. There is a lot of controversy within this subject, and my Neuro doctors were pretty sure that my immunisations were nothing to do with my GBS. But it leaves the question for future...should I ever get these vaccinations again should I need them? If I were to have kids, would I want them to have the MMR jab etc? Two weeks ago, I was faced with a choice.

I started a new job dog walking. Sounds great right? I get my own van and I basically go out and walk dogs off leash in the morning (six dogs off leash can be pretty crazy!) and private walks in the afternoon. Well, as I was training I had a couple of pretty nervous dogs who were reactive to new people, and one particularly nervous dog was called Baron.

Laura, the girl training me, went in to get Baron a few weeks ago, and by the end of the walk I was holding his leash, giving him treats out of my hand and he was letting me stroke him. When we got back to his apartment, I offered to take off his collar, but alas as I bent down to take it off, Baron freaked out and bit my face and wrist.

It was very sudden and I remember Laura just shouting at Baron and getting me through the door as I began to process what happened and started saying 'He bit me, he just bit me' and I felt the warm blood trickle down my wrist and my face starting to swell. Laura was amazing and had me in the emergency room within ten minutes as she comforted and assured me that my face was okay and it was all fine. I couldn't believe it, there I was back in hospital in another country and of course, I couldn't get hold of Tom or anyone.

After being told that the fee to even just see the doctor was $955 I felt a deep overwhelming sadness for the people of the world not lucky enough to have an NHS or health insurance with their job. What on earth could you do in that situation? Lucky for me I knew that I was covered as this was a work accident, and as Laura left at my insistence, I sat in a hospital waiting room feeling incredibly sorry for myself.

After an hour I was told to sit in a room and wait for a doctor, and as I looked around at all the hospital equipment I had my first panic attack in a long while. Overwhelmed and alone with all the old flashbacks pounding my mind, I started to practise my breathing exercises that I had learnt in therapy. I kept telling myself that I'd learnt to walk again, I could deal with a small dog bite for goodness sake. As I felt myself begin to calm down Tom showed up just in time for the doctor to start injecting the four deep puncture wounds in my wrist, numbing it so he could have a good root around to check nothing was stuck in them. This was incredibly painful but I kept just repeating 'Not as bad as a lumber puncture, not as bad as a lumbar puncture' and then my wrist was completely numb, bandaged up and a black eye began forming around my right cheek. Then I was of course advised I would need a tetanus shot.

I cannot describe the fear of this decision. My doctor assured me that this was not a 'live' vaccination as such, unlike something like the rabies vaccine, but obviously it had to be my choice whether of not to get it. I decided that the chances of this causing a GBS relapse was so slim that I would get the shot, and then consequently spent two weeks worrying about every tingle and every nerve sensation.

But it was fine. Evidence keeps showing me that just because I get the sniffles sometimes, or need a jab, it doesn't mean that I will relapse. This fear ebbs away as each month passes; nearly two years since I heard those words 'We're worried'.

And now I'm in Vancouver. I have blue hair. I walk dogs. I live with my wonderful boyfriend. Of course I've visited the hospital here already, would it be travelling for me if I didn't?! 

With all the fear and worry about life that constantly bears down on us, and of all the things we have to deal with each day, it can feel like death and disease is so inevitable and so constantly present. 

But in the great words of Jeff Goldblum...'Life, uh uh, finds a way'.

 

Mindfulness

I am very pleased to say that after five months of hard work, I have finished Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Obviously there are many tricky things one has to deal with after finishing such an intense course, such as not being able to rant to a hot (sorry Tom) therapist for an hour each week and no longer getting a bit of a lay in before work.

 

It’s strange when someone gets to know you more intimately than most people you’ve known your whole life, and yet you know nothing about them. I learnt, in my last session, that my therapist had got into meditation as a way to deal with severe back pain that could no longer be controlled with medication. He would meditate as a way to accept the pain he was in, and eventually worked his way into becoming a therapist (the details of which I don’t know).

 

What I learnt is that meditation is for everyone. It's not a cliche for hippies or yogi’s or people wanting to 'connect to their spiritual side'. As an atheist this was certainly not what I was looking for. Known as ‘Mindfulness Meditation’ I learnt how to be still, comfortable with breathing and just sitting down. I’m not utilising this to its fullest, and I should really be doing at least 10 minutes a day of quiet meditation, but I do find it useful in many day to day situations.

 

Say you’re at work and your boss comes over and tells you to do something completely menial in a very condescending way. This can easily get ones blood boiling. I will just pop to the loo for a bit, sit with my hands on my lap and slowly count my breath. At first you just notice how you breathe, don’t try and control it. Being patient and kind to yourself is very important, so when your mind wanders back to your boss being a wanker, just allow it to happen and bring your thoughts back to your breath.

 

Time and again you will notice that your mind wanders and it’s good to notice why your thinking about what you’re thinking about and how you can learn to bring focus back. At first I would get so frustrated, as my CBT 'homework' was to listen to a medative CD for an hour and listen to a woman with a calm voice tell me to think about my left leg 'with kindness and no judgement'. At first this was infuriating! I wanted to tell the woman to fuck off and that I'll just go back to watching Buffy in my pants. But inevitably each day I did it, I felt calmer and more patient; don't get me wrong, it was still hard, but I felt like I wasn't so angry. In a society where we are more and more connected it is important to sometimes just be.

 

There has recently been tons of stuff on mindfulness this year already, just have a search in Google to see what I mean. I read a story about a woman who suffered from extreme anxiety until she was an adult. Then she got married and had kids and life continued and she felt better; until she was in a major car accident. She could not stop thinking about what might happen and what could happen, and it wasn’t until she was too scared to get on an escalator that she knew she needed help. She hated CBT. She hated meditation, she hated being quiet. She was bored, anxious and restless. But she stuck with it and it changed her life. That's certainly the main thing I've learnt these last few years.

 

Stick with it. If I hadn’t stuck to trying to move my arms every single day, I wouldn’t have ever washed my own hair again. If I hadn’t tried to roll over in bed I would’ve been stuck on my back like a turtle. If I hadn’t tried hard every week at therapy and every day in-between, I would still feel depressed and anxious.

 

I’m doing a 10k run in March. I couldn’t run 1k a month ago, and now I’m on 3.5k. If I don’t keep trying, I won’t be able to do it. It's the most obvious, simple thing in the world that we get sick of hearing. But only because it's true.

 

Practise makes perfect.