Student Life and Mental Health
I perhaps write from a different point of view.
I’m a disabled student.
I didn’t start off as one. During my second year of my undergraduate in February, I was working as a waitress in a Korean smokehouse. I had finished a Saturday night shift at the usual time of about 1am. I only lived around the corner, so I didn’t mind the late finishes (plus tips are always great when people have had a few Korean lagers!). The Sunday morning, my legs felt strange. I tried to stand up, and felt my right leg was almost entirely weak, with such pain from my hip that I had to sit down and shouted out to my partner.
I took the Sunday off work, trying to stretch, take a shower sitting down to ease the pain and dosing up on painkillers. It went away after a day or two, but after my next shift, it happened again. I needed to work, so I kept going to shifts and spending a few days in recovery mode, with my legs propped up with pillows.
I spoke to my doctor who sent me for an x-ray, thinking that perhaps I had fractured something without realising, but that scan came back as normal. Eventually, it got to the point where even after recovery days, I was still in pain. My partner walked around the city hunting for a walking stick, which are remarkably hard to find when you’re looking for one, and overnight I became the waitress with the walking stick. It got worse. By the end of April, on my 20th birthday, my mobility had reduced so much that I was mostly sat down during work, working so that I could afford taxis and taking taxis so that I could get as close to my university lectures and seminars as possible to avoid walking and over exertion. It was an endless cycle and at the start of May, I had to hand in my notice at my job. I also had to relentlessly self-advocate where my university was concerned, trying to explain why I wasn’t always able to get to classes or why I needed deadline extensions, why I needed my seminar leaders to be more understanding about marking me so harshly for seminar performance when I couldn’t speak for pain and why I was struggling.
In May, I finally got diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. This meant that my hip pain was caused by the fact that my joints were sliding in and out of place. Where muscle would be able to hold the joint in the right place for a while, the Fibromyalgia meant that the muscles fatigued almost as quickly as they started working, so the joint slipped instantly. Everyvery time I had been working at the restaurant, on my feet for at least 8 hours, if not more, the pressure and movements that I had exerted on my malfunctioning body meant that it took longer and longer each time to recover.
Eventually, the recovery process stopped, and I learned to live at a certain base level of pain. By August, I was using a wheelchair most of the time, and crutches the rest.
As I’m sure you can imagine, it wasn’t just my physical health that suffered. My mental health took a dramatic toll. I already knew that I had anxiety and depression, but my psychological welfare went downhill as quickly as my mobility. My anxiety heightened every time I had to leave the house – will I be able to make it back? Will I cope with the journey? Will I cry in public (again) from how much pain I was in? Am I a complete burden on my partner, my friends and my university? Should I just drop out now? My depression equally began to raise its head. You are a burden. You should drop out. What are you bringing to anyone’s life? I bet you’ll fail anyway. This is the end of the road for you. Say goodbye to those dreams. My social life fell away. I had enjoyed going out after work with my colleagues or meeting friends for drinks and dancing. I had travelled all the way to Birmingham to stay with my oldest friend at her university and stayed out dancing and laughing until 6am, then caught the 10am bus home. I liked to walk and run. I loved going to Zumba classes with a friend or going swimming with my partner. My partner and I used to travel to various coastlines to walk along for hours. We would take the train to cities we hadn’t been to before and explore, finding somewhere to stay overnight. All of these things relied on me being able to move and also groove.
I felt like my life was over and it hadn’t even had a chance to begin.
I fell down into a deep depression. I had issues with alcohol, using it to push all these voices out of my head. My relationship suffered immensely, with me trying to push my partner away before she could have a chance to leave me first. My grades went down. My attendance was non-existent. My bank balance was almost as low as I was. Panic attacks were daily, and each was more unpleasant than the last. Any thoughts that I had of completing a PhD and entering my dream world of academia were gone from my head. All I could see was red: red pain, red emotions, red now and red future.
So, what happened? I didn’t find God or find a cure. I started writing. I began a blog called Lucy Hannah Hassah Life, because I decided that I would have a life. I wouldn’t write myself off at 20 years old; I wrote myself onwards. It wasn’t easy, and it still isn’t easy now. My partner poured all the alcohol down the sink and declared a dry house. We’ve both been sober for nearly a year now, after a few relapses. I worked my way through various pain medications and have found a level that allow me to work with my body, instead of against it. I also took part in some NHS courses for mental health, prescribed by my doctor and found that a high level of Escitalopram anti-depressants worked for me. I worked persistently. That’s the key word here: work. It’s the last thing you feel like doing when all facets of your health are poor, but you have to work. Some bodies, some minds, they hurt. There might be a reason, a trauma, a memory, but equally, there might not be. It can be purely chemical. So, here is my advice:
Start talking. If you notice that your mood is low, that life doesn’t feel quite right, that getting up and into the day is getting harder and harder, find your GP. Tell a trusted person how you’re doing. Maybe get them to come with you, if you feel safe and confident asking them
Think about glasses. If someone has bad eyesight, they wear glasses, no questions asked. If your mental health is bad, don’t be ashamed of or scared of medication. You wouldn’t expect anyone with bad eyesight to walk around blind and you shouldn’t expect yourself to walk around with poor mental health. Wear your glasses, try some medications.
Be Goldilocks. Don’t get disheartened if the first thing you try doesn’t work. The first medication I tried made me a lot worse. The second one made me marginally better. The third one, much like porridge, was just right. They will take a few weeks to make any impact before you know if it’s going to be the right type and the right dose. There are so many. If it doesn’t feel like much of an improvement after the settling in period, go back to the GP and try again. Remember: work.
Get holistic. Medication can only do so much. If there are other factors in your life that you can change, take stock and start changing. Open the curtains and windows, change your diet to include more fruits and vegetables, get more sunlight.
Get out! It’s amazing what some fresh air, some light movement and a change of scene can do for the brain and the body. If you’re like me and can’t move too much, a chair outside the door, a walk to the end of the street and back, a taxi to a bench that you like or the addition of an aid like crutches or a wheelchair can really help.
Take a break. When I’m having a bad day, I go to the sea. It refreshes me and I’m lucky enough to be within walking distance of the water now. When I can’t get out, a film, a book, a podcast or a great playlist can really lift my mood. It breaks up my day and my mindset, stops me ruminating on the negatives, and even if I still feel like dirt by the end of the day, I might have had just five minutes where my brain was distracted from itself.
Write it down. Whenever my mind feels too full, I make a list of all my concerns. When your thoughts are swirling like a washing machine, it’s very hard to pick just one out to make sense of. When they’re on a piece of paper, you can run through them. Maybe one on the list you can achieve, like putting the laundry on. Maybe one on the list you can’t change, so then you try to change how you think about it.
Most of all, keep going. I did graduate with a first class. I changed universities, am still with my partner, have a more controlled mood and am almost a pro at dealing with bad news now. Toni Morrison writes, ‘You are your best thing.’ You can do it, with a little work. It’s not going to be linear, but it’s life: it hurts, it moves and it’s beautiful.
- Lucy Hannah