The start of a Cruel Summer

Greetings from a Tired Girl!

Today I thought I should share the beginning of the story, since that’s how I came to be writing this blog. A quick disclaimer: everything I write is based solely on my personal experience, of which everyone's is different. This is just one story in a million and I am grateful to anyone who takes the time to read mine.

This summer I finished my first year studying Medical Sciences. Like most university students I had end of year exams in May and it will come as no surprise to anyone who is studying for a degree that I was stressed. I mean Britney Spears shaving her head stressed. I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets like this around exams (I hope). Unfortunately, this often means that as students our health comes in second to our studies and I, like many of you, stayed up late revising, ate terribly (does a pot noodle have any nutritional value?) and ignored any signs that I was exhausted.

My exams finished on a Wednesday at the end of May and by the following Monday I was working full time in a pub back home. I was so thrilled to have found a summer job so quickly it didn’t even occur to me that I might need a rest. I continued to work around the clock hours throughout June, not only working my own full-time hours but also covering for other people if they couldn’t make a shift or ended up off sick. I worked so hard in that month that despite being the newest member of the team, I had the best reviews and error scores across the entire restaurant for the first four consecutive weeks I worked there - for which I was awarded a free bottle of wine so that's a win if you ask me.

That was until the beginning of July. Myself, my mum and my sister went on holiday to Thassos Island, Greece for a week. It was a week of beaches, sun and cocktails and for the first time in a long time I felt totally relaxed (if a little dizzy on account of the cocktails). You can imagine I fell back to earth with a bit of a bump but this was more than just holiday blues.

We returned to the UK from Greece on the 7th July and the journey home was unpleasant, to say the least. A coach, ferry, second coach, plane and car ride later we arrived home and I felt awful. However, I don't travel well and this trip was a living nightmare for someone with motion sickness so I put it down to this.

The next day I felt even worse. I was getting intense headaches, so much so that at times I couldn't turn my head or open my eyes. I do not ordinarily suffer from migraines but I imagine that's as close as I've ever gotten and frankly it was horrific. (Side note: if you are a migraine sufferer my heart really does go out to you. The fact that you deal with that so frequently doesn't bare thinking about, you really are incredible).

These headaches continued for the next few days. I was sent home early from my shift on Tuesday and took the next two days off. By Friday I had decided that I needed stronger painkillers than the paracetamol and ibuprofen you can buy over the counter so I made an emergency GP appointment in the hopes that they could prescribe something so that I could go back to work that weekend. That was where the real problems started.

I saw a lovely doctor who I've never previously met. She asked me some questions so I told her about the headaches and as expected, she wanted to do some routine observations. Upon taking my blood pressure and pulse rate she stopped and looked up at me with confusion spread clearly across her face - a face I was going to become very familiar with in the coming weeks.

"Your blood pressure is very low," she said to me. This didn't come as a surprise to me as my blood pressure has always edged on the low side but I could tell that she didn't think this was right. "But your pulse is very high," she managed. Now, I'm not a doctor and I am not pretending to know everything about medicine but I've learnt enough in my year at university to know that having a low blood pressure should indicate a low pulse rate and vice versa. I would imagine that at this point her confusion was mirrored on my face as she suddenly joked "obviously I'm just making you nervous," and then forced a laugh. I was, in fact, not at all nervous. Unlike most people, I have never found myself particularly uncomfortable in doctor's surgeries and hospitals. I was always too fascinated by everything going on around me to feel anxious.

After some time typing away at her keyboard, the doctor looked at me again and said: "do you wear contact lenses?"

I paused briefly, not because I didn't know whether or not I wear contact lenses but trying to make the connection between my abnormal obs and my choice of eyewear.

"No," I responded, and with this she asked me to remove my glasses. I wondered whether she was an optometrist in her spare time and now we were going to engage in some kind of improvised eye test. Suddenly all the emails and letters I had ignored from Specsavers in the last six months telling me my eye test was overdue seemed vastly important. I felt like an idiot for not having my eyes tested first - wearing the wrong prescription would surely have been causing these headaches and how embarrassing that I'd wasted this doctor's time on something so trivial!

"I don't like the colour of your eyes," she says, audibly concerned. I don't say anything but sit still in the chair as she pulls down my eyelids to examine the colour of my eyes, thinking actually that's rather rude and maybe I didn't like the colour of her eyes either but as if I'd ever have said that - what a cheek!

"I thought it was the reflection from your glasses," she continues, "but it isn't. The whites of your eyes are yellow." I process this information and almost like a google search in my head I type the term "yellow eyes" into the search bar and try to think of anything I know that would cause such an unusual symptom. I find it just as she begins to talk again, yellow eyes = jaundice.

"I'm going to send you for emergency blood tests to check your liver function," she says. I remember thinking there's no way it could be anything related to my liver. I didn't drink that many cocktails on holiday and I'm probably the lightest drinker of all my friends at uni. Besides, I was there for some headaches - nothing serious just a headache I couldn't shake. And what sort of liver problem could cause a headache, anyway? It simply wasn't possible.

Before I knew it, I was in another room with a nurse who took three vials of blood and sent me on my way. Just like that I was heading home with a strong prescription of co-codamol to manage the headaches and a cotton wool ball sellotaped to my arm.

Unbeknown to me, this was only the beginning.

Charlotte x