Notebook: avoiding avoidance; MRIs and enforced time for reflection
Avoidance. Never good.
‘Don’t forget,’ says my therapist Naomi, ‘it’s like emotions. If you try to turn off the bad, you turn off the good too.’
I was chatting to Naomi over Zoom about the fact I’d been avoiding the news — I don’t imagine I have to tell you why — and it was building into one big shameful hangover.
Initially it was self-preservation: as I discussed a few weeks ago, since becoming a mum I find it very difficult to read about children, especially, in peril. But it’s also because I now associate prolonged feelings of stress with risk of MS exacerbation — and so after months spent reading foreboding opinion pieces about the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine, when it actually happened I found myself instinctively avoiding the news, because my nervous system had become like a tightly-sprung coil, ready to spring into action.
However this avoidance caused unforeseen issues.
Telling myself that action was better than rumination, I donated to the British Red Cross Ukraine appeal and bought some thermal hats among other bits to contribute to a collection. But that didn’t assuage the strange feeling I’d become untethered from the world, nor did it dampen the feeling I’d eschewed a fundamental obligation of being a decent person — in that I was seemingly unable to witness the horror of what was going on. There was guilt too: that through sheer good luck, I had the luxury to sit in a warm home and stew over a string of hypothetical catastrophes that were now stopping me from reading the news; catastrophes that were anything but hypothetical to those in Ukraine.
‘I just keep thinking this is not about me, this is not about me, which is why I hate the way I feel even more’, I say to Naomi.
‘Don’t forget’, she responds, ‘years of living with OCD means you have a very well-run gully in your mind, and the obsession marble can so easily run in it.’
I tell her I like this analogy and she responds that she literally just made it up on the spot.
But it’s true. In our information overload times, those of us predisposed towards anxiety can find no end of dark materials on which to fixate. And as Naomi talks, my mind briefly wanders to my late grandad. Born only sixty years ahead of me, but his was a life largely spent hundreds of metres down the pit and most definitely without smartphones and a relentless cascade of news updates.
When did he even have the space to bathe in unadulterated anxiety? Probably his only time for reflection was when he was sooted up to the eyeballs in the tin bath at the end of the day.
(And, of course, he lived through an actual war.)
But I could not opt-out of living in the 24/7 news cycle era, and avoidance wasn’t exactly making me feel better. So I left the session agreeing to tip-toe back into being a consumer of news. This meant not automatically turning down the radio when it came to the end of an hour. Browsing newspaper features, if not immediately the news section. And finally joining the local Facebook group set up to provide support for Ukraine, which until then I’d only skimmed to find out where to drop off those thermal hats — and that’s where I saw humanity in all its glory.
Teenagers spending their evenings making bracelets to raise funds. Volunteers agonising over running out of cardboard boxes for donations. Endless discussions about the best things to send. (Garden gloves for those affected to easier sift through rubble yes; baked beans, most definitely not.)
My therapist was right.
By avoiding the news I succeeded in stopping myself from seeing the darkness. But I also stopped myself from seeing the slimmest shaft of light.
Where my head goes while stuck in a giant toilet roll
On the surface, having an MRI scan is a total doddle. What is there to do, except lie down and think of nothing? There’s no child asking you for a snack, no dog demanding the back door be opened so he can use the garden as a toilet, no partner asking you where the laundry ball is for the washing machine…
From that perspective, it’s bliss.
But then, you’re lying there, and you’re in a tube, and there’s a little box over your head, and you’ve got to stay still for at least twenty minutes. Then there’s these loud beeps and judders — somebody recently compared it to feeling like you’re trapped inside of a photocopier machine, which is actually pretty accurate — and sometimes, oh dear, I just want to sit up and shout: I’M AN MS PATIENT GET ME OUT OF HERE!
I mean, it’s impossible to do this because of the whole tube thing, plus that bloody little box over your head, which I’m still not sure is attached to the board you’re laid on or not (anyone?), but I guess you could shout it and trust you’d soon be saved, thanks to the little communication buzzer they put in your hand as you’re slid headfirst into the contraption…
Yes, it was routine MRI time again this week, and I had perhaps overthought this specific scan. This was quite unusual for me because typically, MRIs are one of the few areas of my life I don’t overthink, but with days to go ’til this one I was still not fully reacquainted with the news headlines, and I’ve found that listening to the radio while being scanned is a good diversionary tactic to the thought spirals that sometimes commence.
So I always say yes when the medical staff ask if I want the radio on, and I always make sure I specify the station — Radio 2, as it’s well-known enough so I don’t incur the wrath of the technicians by making them faff about looking for a more niche request. But I do make sure I ask, because for the first MRI I had in the ‘MS era’ — this was #5 — I wasn’t given a choice of music, and Classic FM was forced into my ears. This might have been okay were it not for at that point, I’d just been hospitalised with an unknown illness and I honestly thought I was possibly dying (okay, so I am prone to catastrophising but in this instance, the catastrophic thought was created with understandable reason). And Classic FM just enhanced this feeling that I was in a tight space, on my own, listening to funereal music… well, you can imagine where my mind went.
However this time, when the technician places the headphones over my ears and I ask for Radio 2, she looks momentarily confused and then says ‘oh sorry, it’s broken’, before sliding me in, somewhat apologetically.
Never mind. Thanks to my overthinking I had developed a back-up plan on the off-chance I would choose to say no to the radio, and thus the news headlines, anyway. After all, the scan was to straddle the top of the hour and I wasn’t sure it was the best idea to continue my ‘exposure therapy’ in a claustrophobic environment, as undoubtedly the war would be top of the news agenda.
So Plan B was to hum along to my favourite songs — well, actually, after therapist Naomi told me that when she recently had an MRI she’d found herself reciting the spoken words at the start of All Saints’ Never Ever — my plan had been to visualise Naomi lying in the same position mumbling along to what must be, at least on a subconscious level, her favourite song.
But once that idea had been exhausted (I should have practiced the lines ahead of time), I then resorted to my other trusted tactic, which was thinking about all the other people with MS I know (if only though thumbnail pictures and not ‘IRL’) who also have to periodically corral their thoughts while in this restricted space.
Then I had a brief flicker of panic — how much longer to go? — so I found myself thinking about Nazanin, newly free, and how relieved she must feel to be finally home. And then I reflected on the many newspaper features I’d read in recent days about Ukrainian people and their indomitable spirit; stories which led to my anxiety being supplanted by a deep reverence for how they are dealing with this most brutal and senseless situation, and have made me feel truly humbled too.
(Sometimes I think we downplay the benefits of being humbled in our ‘be kind to yourself’ times, but I do find it helpful for my anxiety management to feel cut down to size from time to time. Because really, in contrast, some of my anxieties are utterly pathetic.)
Then out of nowhere the radio blasts out.
Oh, they must have fixed it!
The end of a song — Toni Braxton’s Un-Break my Heart if you must know — yes, the superior upbeat version, that one — is briefly savoured, before a dramatic jingle fades out to accommodate the sage tones of a deep-voiced man.
‘Now, the top news this hour…’
And even though I was no longer avoiding the news headlines, I still scrunched up my eyes in apprehension of what was to come.
‘A fire has broken out in a ground-floor flat on Cotton Road…’
Oh…
Local radio, innit.