I Nearly Died and Everyone Just Stepped Over Me

Illness in your forties doesn’t seem as straightforward as it did in the younger years. In my twenties I could have been felled with the worse case of flu ever, a temperature of forty-one degrees for eight days straight, severe dehydration to the point where my eyelids were sticking to my eyeballs like velcro, but at no point would I ever have wondered whether I was nearing death. It simply wasn’t on the cards. I was invincible.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and I only need an eyelid to twitch unexpectedly to send me down the dark path of irrational health anxiety, searching “head vein eruptions” on the internet and wondering whether my brain is about to suddenly malfunction or explode.

These days if I develop an ailment, or any degree of malaise whatsoever, there’s no way I’d simply brush it off as an annoying, slightly inconvenient interruption to my normal routine. Everything out of the ordinary requires interrogation and overthought, now that I am in my forties. Unless it’s a runny nose, because there’s just never anything sinister linked to a runny nose. (Is there? Don’t tell me if there is, I am happy being blissfully unaware.)

Headache? Almost definitely something bad. Or else it’s eye strain from staring at screens all day. Possibly hormonal, but then again, have you thought about food allergies?

Extreme fatigue? Crikey. Could be any number of chronic diseases. Or vitamin deficiencies. Could be - and God, everyone loves banging on about this one whenever you have any symptom whatsoever ranging from dizziness to a sore toenail to a rash on your inner thigh - THE PERI-MENOPAUSE!

Extreme fatigue could, of course, also be from writing and publicising a book whilst holding down a bill-paying job whilst also having a seven and a nine-year-old and a penchant for starting time-consuming building and house renovation projects. Who knew that would be tiring?

Anyway, the point of this post was not to demonstrate that I have a mild case of health paranoia, because I don’t think that I do have that. I don’t invent symptoms, or exaggerate the severity of them. Never. No, this post is about how, when you’re a mum and you’re literally dying, nobody else will even notice. You could die, probably, and everyone would just step straight over you.