Is depression that bad?

As you read many of my little posts you may find yourself querying my mental health… quite frankly you would be right to do so. I was officially labelled mental many years ago but was medically determined to suffer from depression in my twenties. At this stage in my life many entertaining things happened and I can look back on them fondly and laugh.

Firstly I was one of those that as described as living with depression - an interesting category. It basically means at any moment you may decide to kill yourself but on the whole you are pretty chipper and carry on as normal. For me the bit that kept me pretty chipper was my ability to self harm with beautiful precision. Aha! Self harm, you may be thinking, an attention seeking practice carried out by teenage girls. Possibly but in the world outside of television drama a superb way of dealing with emotions that you have no way of being able to cope with but allows you to carry on as normal. Plus not something you want other people to know about as that lets others realise you may not be coping and at the end of the day if you weren’t living with depression, you would actually just be depressed and that isn’t the point at all. Follow? No, very few people do…

My choice of self harm was cutting myself in discrete places. For some reasons the pain and the blood letting allowed peace and calm to be restored to my world. I say for some reason because I haven’t self harmed for many years now and it is detached from whom I am and therefore in the same way of not remembering the misery of childhood, it is hard to remember the satisfaction of self harm. I tried it a good couple of months ago when I was fed up and it just hurt. How irritating. Not sure if that is due to mental stability or the aging process but either way it appears to be lost to me now.

So depression itself not being that bad? Well for starters when I did actually reach the stage of not living with depression and just being chronically depressed I lost my memory. Fantastic! It meant that most days I did stupid things and didn’t remember them. The most annoying thing is when you get better mentally your brain, very kindly starts giving the memories back… so there you are, feeling mentally stable and happy and content and your brain goes – blam, have a memory! Walking down the freezer aisle, picking up items for tea and you get a punch in the midrift that has your nearly prostrated on the floor as you remember the time that your husband asked you to cook burgers for tea and you couldn’t remember how to do it. You are magically transported back to the event and relive it in a way that a depressed person would just forget. I can feel the annoyance emanating from the man who has professed to love me through sickness and health and yet at this moment in time all he wants is something to eat after being at work and his slightly deranged wife is refusing to cook burgers for him. Rather than admitting to the actual predicament I am in I try the wheedling approach. ‘Could you not make tea please?’ Nope, is his steadfast approach, you do it. Can I lie my way out of this one? Erm no, because I am severely depressed and lying takes that extra bit of mental capability that is certainly not available at this moment in time.

So I had to confess and the humiliation nearly drowns me… and with that I’m back in the supermarket and decide to put the packet of frozen burgers that were about to be put in the trolley back into the freezer cabinet. I think we will avoid them for now.

Or another one that arrived at my mother in laws birthday party this year. It is normally a meal out with her husband, two sons and their partners. This year she has invited along a friend. Very nice lady, we sit next to each other and chat. As I sparkle and entertain, a little part of my brain goes ta-dah! I receive a stab of pain in my eyes as I arrive back several years and am sat in my mother in laws front room. The pleasant lady is sat in front of me discussing the fact that her dog is ill and she doesn’t know what to do when he dies. For some reason my demented mind decides to pipe up with ‘Put him in a curry’. Again humiliation strikes, but brain has plans. Everyone in the room studiously ignores my comment. Brain strikes again and I repeat the statement. I don’t understand why I am saying it. I repeat it several times. Exactly same intonation as if stuck on a loop. I no longer appear to be able to control what I am saying. I am still ignored… with the repeat statement sixth time on my lips I back in the restaurant, wondering how she is able to talk to me without wishing to stab me.

So no depression itself isn’t that bad, as long as you remember to kill yourself before you get better.

I am not a number

Except I am when it comes to the British National Health Service. I don’t just mean the 7 digit number that you get assigned for your records but I mean my BMI.

My BMI is what makes everything change in the eyes of a medic. It doesn’t matter what other information they have been given, once they have my BMI in front of them, everything else disappears (and ahh the knowledge that I had had depression but that’s another issue).

For those of you that don’t know what BMI is then, yet again you weren’t listening in your Science lessons at school. Tut-tut. BMI stands for Body Mass Index which is a diagnostic tool used to work out whether someone falls into a healthy range based on their mass and height ratio. For those of you who are now desperate to work this out you take your mass (kg) and divide it by your height (m) squared. From this you get a number. If you are ‘normal’ your BMI will be between 18.5 and 25. Below this number and you are underweight. 25 to 30 and you are overweight. 30 to 35 and you are obese. 35 to 40 and you are morbidly obese. I am morbidly obese. Aha! You are not surprised, for here I sit at a computer wittering away rather than running around in the fresh air. I must sit here devouring food constantly to allow myself to stay at this ridiculously high number! My blood type must be ragu! I must have a blood pressure worked out using powers to the ten. I must have my own natural satellites.

Alas this is not the case. I’m big (well as I am currently what feels like twenty months pregnant, I’m exceedingly big in the uterine area) but not as big as my BMI implies me to be. I am treated fairly normally until the BMI is worked out then usually the medical person dealing with me falls over themselves to tell me how I am going to die at any moment and I shouldn’t just live off crisps and should eat vegetables now and again. But I’m not actually particularly unhealthy or unfit. Prior to pregnancy I was more on the feeling rather fit and could do whatever I wanted to on the physical side of things. Once I became pregnant I became a candidate for a high risk pregnancy because of my BMI. I would develop high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, my baby would be either micro or macro in the size stakes. During labour my baby will get stuck and we will both die. However I do not have high blood pressure, I have not developed gestational diabetes and I doubt my baby will get stuck. We may still die but I feel not for the reasons that my BMI is high.

Why may my baby get stuck you may ask? Well apparently if you have a high BMI, you have a narrower than normal pelvic region. That’s why men always date fat birds – they have considerable narrower chuffs than skinny women. Except they don’t and they don’t but I yet again digress. The reason my baby is considerable less likely to get stuck is because I am hypermobile – I bend rather more than the average person and with that my pelvis separates a bit more than the average person. I say person, I mean women. Obviously weren’t listening in Science again were you? Men have a fixed pelvis, women don’t.

BMI is a quick and easy and most importantly cheap tool to use. Although it doesn’t take into account how much muscle mass you have and how broad you are. Many rugby and American football players count as being morbidly obese yet this would seem to be far from the truth. Other things need to be taken into account.

I had surgery a number of years ago and beforehand had to attend a session where they tested my general fitness to be put under general anaesthetic. Various tests were carried out and it was decided that I counted as a fit and healthy person although my BMI stated I was morbidly obese. It was agreed I could have day surgery which meant arriving at the hospital, having the surgery and going home again in the afternoon. On the day of the scheduled surgery I arrived and the medic, that registered my arrival, took one look at my BMI and said there was no way I could possibly have day surgery as I would not recover quickly enough and would have to stay in overnight after the surgery – totally dismissing the rest of the data present. I was crushed as I had a rather intense fear of being in hospital and had agreed to the life changing surgery on the basis that I would be home in time for tea (aha – fat bird obsessed with food).

I had the surgery and came round much quicker than they had expected – mainly because my body was fit and healthy and recovered from the GA rather speedily. I actually got to go home even sooner than I had expected.

So during my pregnancy I have had to face prejudice time and time again based on my BMI. Except from one midwife. Her comment was that my BMI was not that high, she informed me that there were a number of women on the books that had BMI of over 50 and were counted as super-obese. Hang on a second! How come it goes – overweight, obese, morbidly obese, super obese! That just makes it sound cool. I want to be super-obese. I could have a cape and everything. Right where are those crisps…

A scientist at heart

What defines a scientist? To me it has always been the questions. If you question what is going on and want to find out that makes you a scientist.

Questioning why things happen has almost defined me from a very early age. Yes all children ask why, but most eventually stop. I didn’t. I would ask why and then why about that until whoever was being patient enough to answer the first few questions would just walk away. I soon realised that the only way to assuage my curiosity was to carry out a series of experiments to determine the answers.

I can never quite clearly remember which experiment came first. The one that stands out most clearly and vividly is the car experiment. I had received a state of the art (to me) toy car that could cover any terrain. On the television advert it could be seen tackling plastic mountains and muddy puddles. It was apparently unstoppable. Well the cynic in me developed early. I would see whether this truly was unstoppable. I devised a series of tests. Toy cars, lego, cushions, pencils were strewn in its path, it clambered over them, cutlery, plates, soft toys, household tools, none would stop it in its inimitable path. It reached the wall, kept going, turned itself over and went back again. I had to devise a more cunning test. The cat was often my lab partner, although very rarely willing, on this occasion did allow the car to climb over her rumbling belly.

There could only be one final test left. The human test. Limbs were easily conquered so now it was the turn of the head. I laid down in the path of the approaching vehicle. It mounted my nose and eyebrows and went on towards the hair and it kept on going. It had succeeded! Alas there was one drawback. My hair had been so impressed by its endeavour that it had decided to follow it by wrapping itself around the wheels. The wheels kept turning, my hair hugged them in further celebration until they reached a point at which they could no longer wrap themselves further. The wheels kept turning. I then responded as many scientist before me had done. Achimedes had screamed Eureka and run down the road. I screamed something unintelligible and ran round the room in circles. The wheels kept turning. The burning sensation in my head was causing me to see red in front of my vision. The wheels kept turning. My father and brother entered the room and watched me run in a circle screaming as the wheels kept turning. My father decisively pinned me to the ground and switched off the car. The wheels at last stopped turning.

However my fine blond hair now resembled felt woven around the wheels. My father requested my brother to keep me pinned to the floor as he went and retrieved a knife. I’m still not entirely sure what I thought he was going to do but still continued to scream as he carefully cut the car away from my head. The screaming stopped although the burning pain still remained the red was diminishing from my vision.

I eyed the car. It truly could conquer anything. What a truly magnificent vehicle. It never quite worked as well with the hair around the axels but it remained my favourite possession for many a year after.