You wake up and you’re already tired. Not a little. So tired that at eleven in the morning you’re wondering whether to just go back to bed. And tomorrow. And the day after.
The stairs are a mountain. You can’t get enough air, as if someone had pulled a belt tight around your chest. Your legs tingle in the evenings until you could scream. Your hair is lying in the plughole, your nails break, the corners of your mouth crack. You’re cold. Always.
You’re standing in the kitchen and you don’t know why any more. You start sentences and lose them. Your head is cotton wool, and behind the cotton wool something is pounding.
Your calves cramp at night. Your eyelid has been twitching for weeks. And inside you’re vibrating, as if you were live with current, even though nothing is happening.
Then comes the fear. For no reason. At the till, in the car, in the middle of a conversation. Your blood pressure shoots up, just like that. You sweat the bed through at night. And your bladder does whatever it wants, and you’re so ashamed that you don’t tell anyone.
And then, one night, you’re lying on your side, and your heart cuts out.
For one beat. Just one. But long enough for you to jolt upright, hand on your chest, thinking: Now. This is it.
It doesn’t hurt. It just scares you to death. Night after night.
You go to the doctor. You do everything they tell you. Heart: ectopic beats, harmless, unpleasant, you’ll have to live with it. Thyroid: fine. Lungs: fine. Blood count: fine, apart from little things. Nothing worth mentioning.
Everything’s fine. Except you.
And at some point, very carefully, the sentence drops: Maybe you should talk to someone.
And you sit there and wonder whether you’re going mad.
You’re not going mad. You just haven’t finished searching yet.
Ask what was actually measured. The standard blood count misses a lot: ferritin, your iron stores. Vitamin B12. Vitamin D, as 25-OH-D. Magnesium. And if you’re a woman in your late thirties: the menopause doesn’t ask whether you’re ready.
“A bit low, but still within the normal range” is not a finding. It’s a shrug. And years disappear behind that shrug.
I had that. Almost all of it.
I stopped taking lifts. Stopped driving on motorways. Because the panic could come anywhere, and it came everywhere. My blood pressure shot up without anyone knowing why. I went over on my ankle barefoot, on level ground, just like that. I had flickering in front of my eyes, those zigzags and lights that normally come before a migraine, except no migraine came. My eyes watered. My skin was sallow and blotchy, my hair was falling out.
I looked in the mirror and saw a sick person. And everyone said: Everything’s fine.
At some point I stopped hoping for the next appointment. The trust was gone. So I went looking myself. Night after night, in forums, in studies, with people who’d been through the same thing as me. And then I started topping up. On my own, without testing, going by what I’d read.
Once my stores were full again, it was gone. The skipped beats too.
Which substance it was, I don’t know. But it was gone.
And now I’ll be honest with you: I wouldn’t advise you to do it exactly the same way. I’m not a doctor. I carried my risk, and it turned out fine. For you, it might not.
Three things, and they’re non-negotiable.
- Get your heart checked. Skipped beats are usually harmless. Usually. Only an ECG can tell the difference.
- If you want to play it safer: test first, then top up. Then you know where you stand, and you’re not swallowing blindly. Swallow blind and you swap a deficiency for an excess, and that makes you ill too.
- If you take antidepressants: never stop them overnight. Your brain has got used to them, and it punishes abrupt decisions hard. Taper off, with support.