It wasn’t one morning, but over the course of several weeks’ of mornings, that I came to terms with the pins and needles. They had become an everyday problem, in that they were there all day, every day. I couldn’t shake them. And, as pins and needles tend to do, they were accompanied by the most irrational numbness. As if it’s not mad enough to (quite literally) lose touch with the world. Now there’s this nonsensical stitching and itching as the contents of a sewing basket make their way across your disembodied surface.
Right, so I’m not going to try and sell you a sob story about how bad it all felt. As I’ll explain, it was mostly okay. Except that I was very aware that there were pins and needles creeping around my bones. Bones that I couldn’t feel, because I was completely numb. My skeletal frame, as far as I could tell, had adopted the consistency of thick gravy. Which is the good kind of gravy. Still, it was worrying. I don’t want to complain, but it really is inconvenient trying to negotiate reality as a salty, delicious goop.
I couldn’t figure out how long this had gone one.
“How long have you experienced symptoms of the condition?”
One from the e-consultation questionnaire I’d accessed through my GP’s website. It was during week five or six that I decided I should get in touch. Was it week five or six or was it month five or six? The pins and needles, the numbness, had settled in a way that had made it impossible to tell. Had it always been there? How could I rate the pain on a 1-10 scale (a non-optional question), if I’d misplaced ‘skin’ in my corporeal filing cabinet. Speaking of skin! Mine was now purple! To be exact: it was a translucent version of Very Peri purple — the Pantone colour of 2022.
Extremely on trend. I would have been impressed if it weren’t also the 2022 colour of my literal skin. Of course, the e-consultation questionnaire was built to triage only one health concern at a time. The UX was built so that you could only report symptoms related to your chosen pathway, categorised anatomically. “Skin Conditions” and “Pain” were separate categories. You’re only supposed to fill out one e-consult questionnaire at a time — the NHS is already overloaded and you look like a bit of a hypochondriac otherwise. I chose Skin over Pain; I don’t know why. Maybe because I’d gone Pantone 2022 purple. Annoying, not ‘bruise’ purple — which was an option to be selected, where Very Peri was not. I did check the box for eczema, which even more annoyingly, had not dissipated. You had to attach a photo, which I did; a picture of my arm, which was taken with considerable difficulty since, again, I couldn’t feel my hands.
Now that I’d done the extent of what I could do, medically at least, I decided to get on with living. Feeling so faraway from myself had its advantages. I’d already become pretty numb to all the terrible news, of which there was, and is, so much of. There was the war, all of them. And the earth is getting hotter all the time. Not like, balmy, palm-lined beach hotter but apocalyptically hot and it seemed (and seems!) like it was far too late to do anything about it. Also, everyone in parliament had bad hair and were out there on tv making partygate speeches like it was normal to have hair this bad. The sheer brazenness of having hair this bad, truly they must think we’re all stupid.
Anyway, none of it was getting anywhere close to the perimeter of my prefrontal cortex; which I’d never been able to feel anyway, that would be odd.
There was other stuff I’d stashed. Like: An overwhelming suspicion that I was, in fact, 32. That layers of my time and of all the times I’d ever known, of everyone I’d ever loved, were peeling away to the floor. That everything was just repeating over and over again, just another Halloween or another Friday; and it had begun to feel like I’d just woken up from a nap I didn’t mean to take and now I was disoriented and sick and it was far, far too late. It all sounds pretty dramatic but like I said, it was stashed away and of course, it was no longer the priority; not since I came to terms with the pins and needles. The numbness and the purple hue. I had to figure out how to live with it all while awaiting a response from my e-consult questionnaire.
☾☽
Do you know what? It was easy. Okay maybe not easy — and definitely not ideal. But I’d been doing it for a while anyway, maybe without realising it. The Very Peri was no challenge to Rimmel Wake Me Up foundation in 01 Light Porcelain, an Avon liquid concealer and a setting spray my sister bought me two Christmases ago. Combined with highlighter across my nose, cheekbones and forehead, the previously disconcerting purple was a lovely glow-y base. In fact, masked in my normal makeup, my skin had never looked better.
I could, for the most part, keep the pins and needles from stirring. This took some testing and practice. I noticed that self-reflection of any kind would cause the pins and needles to become restless. Lean further into a psychological numbness and they’d settle down. It was basically fine as long as I didn’t think about anything at all. The physical numbness, once I accepted it might be a while to hear back from the GP, slotted pretty well into my everyday routine. Stairmasters and cross-trainers keep you moving in the right direction anyway. Muscle memory meant that I could walk and dance and basically do everything I’d always done, without anyone knowing how strange and impossible it felt for me. My fingers did all the typing and I could do the work and pay the bills. On nights, I’d watch consecutive episodes of Real Housewives (Beverly Hill + New York) horizontally and sometimes drank gin. I drowned into the infinite, space-y embrace of the sofa and the numbness felt pretty great.
There were a few instances while I waited to hear back from my e-consult that I lost my cool grip on the whole thing. On one occasion I was in the taxi home from a long sunny day where I’d thought about nothing because I’d been drinking. It was all vibes and they were good ones. The taxi driver asked how long I’d been here, and I’d said ten years. Well, he said, I’ve been here twenty-five. We talked about how often people in England complain about the weather, even on the long sunny days — which aren’t even that sunny, compared to sun in other places. We agreed that when you’ve lived somewhere else long enough, it starts to become harder to know who you were before you’d left. How you can squeeze what you remember of that place so tightly in your hands only to find, on returning to it, that you’ve been unable to freeze it between your palms. How you can begin to feel like parts yourself, and all your feelings, are stretched across the sky like a contrail. Honestly, said driver said as we pulled into my estate, I tell people: stay where you are. Go on vacation, travel — but don’t go for too long. Make sure you come back.
We’d reached my house; the pins and needles rattled. I Google self-diagnosed my way into ego death and filled out another e-consult questionnaire.
The last time it happened was around 2AM. I awoke to find the ghost who lives in my loft hovering next to my bedside table. I say she lives in my loft, but she’s haunted me all the way from the other side of the Atlantic. Honestly, I’m fine with her. She’s only about 3 feet tall and is rarely interested in me. I’m not even sure she’s a ghost. Sometimes I think she’s a figment of my childhood imagination that snuck away for a night and returned to find herself locked out on the street of my pre-teens.
I don’t know what her problem was with me, on this particular evening. Maybe she was feeling fed up with the diet-positive energy I was filling the house with while trying to think of nothing. Whatever the case, she descended from her dusty lair, only to sit by my bed and shout: wake the fuck up.
Which I did. I thought I could feel my bones for the first time in months, and they were shaking.
☾☽
Extra Extras.
Read: Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki; 70s sci-fi in short story form
Watch: RHOBH, Seasons 1-11
Listen: “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg
As of today (28/04/2022), post emosh is totally and completely free, no heartstrings attached. If you would like to support my writing via my ~ViRtUaL tIp JaR~ aka PayPal click here.
If you’d like post emosh delivered directly to your inbox, fill out your details below: