Heat

[Image: I'm slumped over resting against the roller door and bracing against the white wall. My hand is extended holding my walking stick. I am wearing a long tan skirt, white t-shirt and green jewellery. I am half in shade, half hot sun. You can't see my face for my red hair which has fallen forward.]



I can hear more than feel the breeze coming through the open door. Beyond the dusty fly wire the leaves of the trees rustle, disturbed by the ebb and flow of small invisible waves. The security door is doing it's job keeping out not just burglars and miscreants, but the breeze that sends the white roses bobbing outside the loungeroom window.

The dull whirr of the air conditioner is all noise no substance. Evaporative cooling, cheap to install and useless when there's even a touch of humidity in the air. A loose print bangs softly against the book shelf and the waist high fronds of the Bangalow palm in the entryway shudder. Freyja lies listless on the floor. Her discontent clear in growled mutterings and halfhearted attempts at movement. The heat stubbornly maintains its hold on the house.

Not to say outside is that much of an improvement. Clear blue skies look straight out of a travel advertisement. Photogenic grey-green gums screaming Australia to an overseas audience. You can feel the breeze, but a moment in the sun is to feel an oppressive weight upon my whole body.

The heat is here and my world shrinks.

A body that cannot cope with heat is a body not designed for the Australian climate. I hear the politicians argue about climate change in terms of economies, in terms of fossil fuels, in pontific terms that only they seem to truly believe. But never the human cost. Never what it will mean to those of us whose bodies are already struggling in the heat of today, let alone the heat predicted in 50 years time. Whose worlds collapse in upon themselves each time the mercury rises.

Heat intolerance is isolation. 

It is claustrophobic. 

Yesterday I dressed to go up the street only to realise that the time required to do all my and my son's errands would far exceed my ability to function in the heat. Not that he wouldn't push me in my old wheelchair. Not that some of the shops aren't airconditioned. But the drain of the heat. From the shuffle from the house to the car. The heat in the mobile greenhouse that serves as transport. The move from car to shop. In and out. Over and over. Each minute in the heat sapping strength. Not just from that day but the subsequent day and the day after that. The heat takes out credit for all the days after. And it never repays.

Heat

It holds me down. It suffocates. It seeps into all my pores and weaves it's way through bone and flesh. Stealing the strength and the functioning. I move through slow setting concrete. Dragging my limbs, my lungs, my mind. It's harder to think. It's harder to interact. My focus sharpens and wavers. I end up stretched too far from the smallest effort. I react like an injured animal when spoken to. Teeth bared, sharp words spit as the remnants of my reserves slip from flaccid fingers. The tendrils of heat reach deep until an amorphous agitation is all I can feel. Brain and body no longer able to find a path out.

From my lowered vantage point on the lounge, a small side window perfectly frames a patch of blue sky and swaying gums. More appealing than the prosaic view I have upon standing where the same window affords a view of red bricks that form the back of our garage and a grey paling fence, but none the less isolating. Spring and Summer days may be beautiful but they mean chest pain and weakness, greying vision and shaking hands. They mean existing under ineffectual ceiling vents, devouring Hydralyte icypoles and the mind numbing, only slightly cooler, four walls that allow for some semblance of functioning. It means peaking out windows for a hint of the world. Short forays into the backyard to check on the chickens and back to the darkened house to listen to the dull rattle of loose prints and breeze through tree leaves. It means a ruthless dissection of time and reserves. Logistical analyses and bitter disappointment.

I can go here. But not there. Not two the same day. Not two consecutive days. Is it evening or day? How far? How long? How much? It always comes back to the cost.

18 to 22C the magic span of time where I function these days. Above or below I am a mess. And now we are set for months of above. Months of missed events and missed opportunities. Regrets and apologies.

I feel the weight in my bones and my heart. My sluggish mind plods along unable to find solutions.

It's 3pm and I am still in my pjs. Showering and dressing no where in sight. The temperature hovers the high 20s and I melt further into the brown leather. I'm supposed to be at an event at 5:30. It's a beautiful Spring day. Not a cloud in sight. A perfect beach day. An in the garden day. And a punishing day if your body is no longer capable of compensating for even a small rise in the ambient temperature.

I hardly sweat now. Even on the 40C+ days. A new medication I started earlier in the year means I now have at least a handful of odd patches where the nerves put in a half-hearted effort, but not nearly enough to cool me down. I feel like my chickens on the back door step, puffed out and puffing. Beaks agape. I chomp though electrolyte icepoles as they chomp their way through the fish gut iceblocks I just put out for them. Only to slump down again to await the evening drop.

The heat is here to stay and I will get through it. Just like the last 11 years. I'll step out into the world in short deliberate bursts and hopefully ED avoiding outings. I'll gaze out the open windows and listen to bird song through dusty flywire, while icepacks slowly melt on my neck. My world will be smaller and heavier. The burden for stepping outside greater. But I'll sip a G&T under my red umbrella in my back yard. I'll listen to the clink of the ice cubes on glass and feel the condensations drip down my wrist. I'll smell the mandarin peel as the oil slowly infuses the clear liquid. Chickens will be coerced into long cuddles and I'll pick cherry tomatoes off the vines in the garden beds. I'll lie on pillows and watch fairy floss clouds disappear as they pass over the edge of the red material above my head.

For a while my world will be small and my connections tenuous. I'll exist until the leaves start to brown and Autumn announces it's arrival in cooling temperatures and fire-coloured leaves collecting on my doorstep. And the reawakening will be celebrated.

Michelle

Ennui. (Because it's sounds classier than 'Ugh').

(source)

When I was working, I'd watch the old ladies with dementia plucking aimlessly at their blankets with small scowls on their faces. Fragile fingers pulling threads from their blankets and the hems of their sleeves. Pulling on the various items around them, they'd spend their days making small noises of discomfort or discontent. They'd be fractious when I went in to say hello or when the nursing staff would try to check their IVs or take their vitals. By virtue of their advancing dementia they were unable to communicate what was wrong, yet all around them were left in no doubt of their displeasure. The advanced nature of their impairment meant that even should they still be able to vocalise their fractured thoughts, they would still be unable to identify the subject of their agitation beyond a vague feeling of restlessness. As I sit here typing I understand them only too well. Just call me Beryl and pass me a boiled lolly. Because this is me today, in all my discontented glory.

Summer has been exhausting this year. More humidity than usual, combined with day after-day of soul sapping 30+C and a broken AC, does not a Dysautonomia-friendly environment make. My body is beyond exhausted and truth be told, I can't exactly pinpoint what is making me feel so out of sorts at this point.

I know the physiological explanations, the dilating blood vessels, the tendency towards rapid dehydration, the effects of barometric changes. I know about heat intolerance and how my anhidrosis contributes to my inability to cool down. But this general malaise is not clearly explained by the realms of science. My fatigue has fatigue at this point and my ability to deal, is nearly non-existent.

I grew up in an area of country Victoria that had Summer's filled with 40+C days. I lived in the top of Australia, smack bang in the tropics, for 7 years, where humidity was part and parcel of my everyday existence and Winter days a lovely 28C. But now, since Bob came into my life, I simply can't cope with the smallest increase in heat.

It gets to the point where there are so many competing sources of feeling unwell that you can't pick where to start, or what to do. It's like some omnipresent fog of malaise where all the various aspects of illness coalesce into one giant super-storm of feeling foul.

I couldn't tell you what is wrong today with any true clarity. I am at the point where it's a case of do I want to throw up, pass out, fall over, have my head explode to finally relieve the building pressure? Do I go sit on the loo, lie on the tiles, drink yet another litre of water, camp out in the fridge? Is it my building migraine or my low bp which is worse today? Or my bradycardia? Or the pain radiating up my legs? Or maybe it's Jeff, my stenosed jugular, who seems intent on sending excruciating pain up my neck and behind my ear? Or perhaps my lower back which I seem to have tweaked yet again as I tossed and turned in the heat of last night? What to pick and where to start? Some days I wish I could just do a reverse hibernation and sleep through the worst of Summer to awake in the more temperate days of Autumn.

The accompanying overwhelming physical weakness makes me want to pick aimlessly at the cushions of the couch and make incomprehensible mumbles of discontent like my old patients. I could fit right in, right about now. A bag of barley sugars, a crocheted blanket and a tube of Ben-Gay, and I'm there.

I am over Summer. I am over the unrelenting heat. The constant oppressive-pressure of the Summer storms. I have always been an Autumn girl and now I am even more so.

Come on Autumn weather and be-gone foul Summer. I'd really like to feel semi-human again sometime this year.

Cheers
Michelle

I've spoken a lot about Heat Intolerance here on the blog but this probably explains my experience best Hot blooded, plus it has a shout out to 80's rockers Foreigner, who can you go wrong with that?

Time like this, Henri the cat says it all.