Girl in the Dark

by Anna Lyndsey

  Aha! Breathing!

  Now there is something a person can do in the dark. I accept my friend’s offer of a set of Breathing CDs and a workbook.

  Some of the exercises make me feel pleasantly relaxed. Others put my back out. On the light sensitivity they have no discernible effect.

  C IS FOR CHELATION

  My friend Tom, advocate of the empowering qualities of the Web, does a lot of detailed health research online. He finds a community of people with a range of chronic conditions who have achieved major improvements in their health by reducing high levels of mercury in their bodies. A test can determine if mercury toxicity might be a problem—some people are genetically more able to get rid of it naturally than others.

  According to the results, Tom and I both have a mercury problem. We start taking a sulphur compound which binds to the mercury (chelates it) and enables it to be peed out of the body.

  I enjoy four months of amazing, cumulative, measurable improvement.

  Then I have a horrible relapse. My total light sensitivity returns, and I am completely exhausted. It appears that chelation puts a strain on the adrenal glands, and mine are very weak.

  I try chelating several more times, but the results are always the same: shaking, sweating, collapse.

  Tom fares much better. He persists with chelation over four years, and becomes well enough to start another business—this time, doing computer modelling for eco-homes.

  D IS FOR DIET

  One New Year’s Eve, feeling rather fine, I eat eight chocolates one after the other on an empty stomach, while drinking champagne.

  Next day, I start the New Year with a truly horrible relapse. I can’t even come out of the black to watch the New Year’s Day concert live from Vienna and dance to the “Blue Danube” waltz, which has become a tradition in our household.

  Intrigued, I investigate the physiological effects of spikes in blood sugar, and discover the low GI diet (GI stands for glycaemic index, which is a measure of how fast a particular food is converted into glucose by the body). I give up alcohol, sugar and refined carbohydrates, and combine protein and carbs at each meal. It definitely helps.

  E IS FOR ENERGY HEALING

  A plummy voice on the answerphone:

  “This is Venetia Winstanley speaking. I have been treating your hair in my machine for the last few days, and I am telephoning to establish whether there has been any improvement.”

  What? What?! Who is this woman, and how has she got hold of my hair? And given I’ve been feeling pretty terrible for the last few days, whatever she is doing, I would like to ask her to stop.

  Eventually the whole thing is untangled. Venetia Winstanley is some sort of distance energy healer, who once saved the life of a child of a friend of my mother’s. The friend persuaded my mother to send this character some of my hair, which she did several months ago, having snipped a few strands from the back of my head. A death in the healer’s family delayed further action until now; the hair had completely slipped my mind.

  F IS FOR FATTY ACIDS

  A blood test shows something in the way I process essential fatty acids is definitely out of whack. A nutritionist recommends a particular supplement, emulsified to make the EFAs easier to absorb. I improve steadily for four months.

  Then the manufacturer stops making the supplement. Nothing else on the market has the same effect.

  G IS FOR GROUNDING

  According to the blurb on my Grounding book, sickness, pain and inflammation are the result of being Electron Deficient, and can be helped by Nature’s own anti-inflammatory—the Earth itself!

  Ideally, you ground yourself by walking about barefoot on grass or soil and by sleeping directly on the ground. If this is not feasible, you can purchase a grounding bedsheet—a cotton sheet incorporating a conductive mesh of metal wires, which is then attached by a thicker wire to a grounding rod stuck into the earth outside.

  I think I must have had some sort of allergic reaction to lying on metal. After two nights, my skin is puffy, my heart is racing, and I have a horrible relapse.

  H IS FOR HYPNOTHERAPY

  “The skin all over your body is calm and cool,” intones the CD made for me by the hypnotherapist. “You continue to become even more deeply relaxed.”

  I lie in the dark and listen to the smooth, soothing voice. My skin, unfortunately, does not.

  I IS FOR INK

  I expend a lot of ink writing to private doctors who specialise in the holistic treatment of allergies and environmental sensitivities. I offer large sums of money to entice them into a home visit or a telephone consultation. Most of them will not treat anyone who cannot attend their clinic.

  J IS FOR JUMPING UP AND DOWN

  I have a small trampoline, known as a rebounder. According to the accompanying book, rebounding is a superior form of exercise, which can have life-changing effects on a whole range of chronic conditions.

  I look forward to my daily half-hour of jumping up and down. It does not cure me, but it certainly cheers me up.

  K IS FOR KINESIOLOGY

  Ask the body questions—and actually get answers!

  Hold out your arm, and let the therapist try to push it down. Sometimes the arm is strong and sometimes it is weak, and from this, guidance and conclusions can be drawn.

  For me, whose body has become an unfathomable mystery, this promise is incredibly, overwhelmingly seductive—and for the first few treatments, during which the therapist recommends certain supplements, I improve markedly. But eventually, I lose my faith. Things that, according to the muscle testing, should be good for my body provoke nasty reactions. And other things, which I know help, come up with negative results. It is hard to persist, once basic faith has gone.

  L IS FOR LOGBOOK

  I write down everything that I try and how I feel. I log it in my logbook, a page-per-day diary. I monitor the data in my logbook for trends, hungry for cause and effect. But there are so many variables—it is like playing multi-dimensional chess, an easy route to madness.

  M IS FOR MEDITATION

  It seems strange to create an oasis of nothingness within a life that is already too full of nothing. What I crave is busyness, purpose and stimulation—but nonetheless I try meditating, having read about its possible benefits to health.

  CDs that invite me to imagine myself in a beautiful garden or floating above sunlit clouds distress rather than soothe me. I do better with techniques that involve simply focusing on the breath, observing it as it flows in and out. Sometimes I try counting the breaths down from ten to one, but my mind often wanders, getting lost somewhere between seven and six, and I have to start over again.

  There is no appreciable effect on the light sensitivity—but I find that this technique does calm me, bringing me back to the present moment when, prompted by some news item about breast cancer or stroke, I think too much about the future, panic about the risk-beset fragility of my existence, foresee a hundred painful ways that I could die.

  N IS FOR NUTS

  On my low GI diet, I eat a lot of nuts.

  O IS FOR OPEN-MINDED

  As an anonymous Scotsman once said to the composer Sir Arnold Bax: “Try everything once, except for incest and folk-dancing.”

  Indeed.

  P IS FOR PRAYER

  Sometimes people tell me that they are praying for me. I feel immensely moved and grateful. Although I cannot travel physically, it is encouraging to think that, in distant churches and cathedrals, I am nonetheless strangely present, at least in someone’s mind, and in their heart.

  Q IS FOR QUEST

  It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive and know that hope has gone. So long as there is a road ahead of me, so long as there are things on my list still left to try, I am cushioned against despair. Even as each episode proves fruitless, I have learned something, each time, by my own efforts, if only that another possibility can be eliminated, and I can now move on to the next.

  R IS FOR RATIONALITY

&n
bsp; I wonder what a committed scientific rationalist would do, were he to find himself in my predicament. Here, there are no randomised controlled trials, and science itself is silent.

  I would like to be researched. The one thing that surprises me is that no one has wanted to take a biopsy of my skin. Where is their scientific curiosity? I am sure the results would be interesting.

  S IS FOR SPIRITUAL HEALING

  After my third session, I tell the spiritual healer that I am very grateful for all her efforts, but I am not feeling any positive effects, and therefore do not think it is worth carrying on.

  She gazes into my eyes. “I sense that you have some deep psychological wound,” she says, “which is causing you subconsciously to resist the healing energy, and you will not get better until you have worked through your deep emotional trauma.”

  I could headbutt her, but I do not. Instead, overwhelmed by glorious, transcendent absurdity, I burst out laughing, and keep laughing as I escort her to the door.

  T IS FOR TESTS

  I have a lot of tests. They are recommended by private doctors and other practitioners and carried out by private laboratories. I get to know the home-visiting phlebotomist, a cheery lady who operates under the title “The Scottish Vampire,” and who tightens around my arm a strap decorated with Dracula cartoons. Pete takes packages containing a range of bodily fluids to the post office; he gradually becomes inured to filling out embarrassing declarations about their contents.

  U IS FOR UPSHOT

  The upshot of all these tests is that vast swathes of me (amazingly, given how I have been living) are working well. The exceptions are my metabolism of essential fatty acids, which is “deranged,” my methylation cycle (something to do with the liver) and my adrenal glands, which are so useless at producing cortisol that by rights I ought to be clinically dead.

  But are these anomalies causes or consequences of my sensitivity to light? And will the huge lists of supplements recommended to treat them actually be absorbed and tolerated by my system? I find I do feel somewhat better if I take stuff to support my adrenal glands, and that eating foods rich in essential fatty acids like pumpkin seeds, flax seeds and grass-fed steak has a noticeable soothing effect on the skin, but the vitamins recommended to promote methylation, and most oily supplements, make things worse.

  One private doctor, impressed by my poor adrenal function, recommends, in addition to supplements, a low-dose steroid, hydrocortisone, and for a couple of months I experience significant improvement. Then, on upping the dose as instructed, the improvement goes into sharp and nasty reverse, and I am back mostly in the black, not venturing beyond the night-time garden. I want to stop taking the things but of course I cannot, now being dependent; any reduction will have to be done very slowly and carefully, with excitingly weird side effects, and no guarantee of success.

  So I have some peripheral pieces for my jigsaw, but in the centre, there is still empty space.

  V IS FOR VISUALISATION

  “My adult student Elizabeth,” says my mother, “had a hole in her retina, and was on a waiting list for an operation, and she visualised the hole closing up every day for three months, and when she went in for the operation, they could no longer find the hole.”

  “Hmmm,” I say, “I suppose it’s worth a go. What should I be visualising, do you think?”

  “Er … what about—the curtain gradually opening?”

  “But then—if the technique actually works—all that might happen is the curtain might gradually open, and that would be no use at all.”

  “Good point.”

  In the end I decide to visualise putting on an all-over protective body suit, like a second skin, and do this religiously every morning.

  Not much happens.

  W IS FOR WEIRDEST

  THE ENERGY EGG (ACCORDING TO ITS WEBSITE)

  • eliminates accumulated environmental stress

  • protects human life energies from all forms of sha chi

  • provides full body protection, including from other people’s energies

  • does not emit any harmful energies itself

  • updates itself manually or automatically

  My energy egg is about three centimetres high. It is indeed egg-shaped, made of polished white stone, cool to the touch. According to the instructions, it must be kept within one centimetre of the body, so I carry it about in my pocket for several months.

  In the end, I conclude that I feel better without it, as it contributes to a slight lopsided tendency, which is not good for my back.

  X IS FOR XPERIMENTS

  In the absence of anyone knowing what to do about my condition, the only way forward is to experiment. But being the sole subject of my own experiments is frustrating and inefficient; every experiment has the potential to make me worse as well as better, and given the general fluctuation it can be hard to disentangle the results.

  I dream of having a library of clones—six versions of me, made specially meek and compliant, kept boxed up in a cupboard when not in use, and brought out to eat strange pills and trial peculiar devices, as required.

  This is not an uncommon fantasy, I find, among the chronically ill.

  Y IS FOR YAWN, Z IS FOR ZZZZ

  Goodness it is boring having to keep thinking about my health. Every so often I become completely fed up with the whole business and have to take a break, simply to be.

  ON THE WHOLE, Pete supports my experiments, and tolerates the more outlandish ones. Kinesiology, however, is where he draws the line. Part of the treatment involves attempting gradually to desensitise the body to a range of substances, in order to reduce its total allergic load. After a session in which I am desensitised to, for example, sugars, I am instructed to keep at least four feet away from any items which contain them for the next twenty-five hours. To assist me, the kinesiologist helpfully places the biscuits in a cupboard, the bread in a corner under the boiler and the fruit bowl in the office upstairs.

  When Pete comes in from work he goes quietly berserk.

  “That woman’s been here, hasn’t she?” he growls, prowling round the kitchen. “It’s bloody bananas in the washing machine again. And where’s the bread? Can you give me a clue? I want to make some toast.”

  Terror

  Terror comes at me out of a clear sky, slamming me into the ground.

  Half a page in a local council magazine. Money available under the Private Finance Initiative to replace street lights in the county more than fifteen years old. A consultation exercise to be held, so that people may make their views known. In place of traditional sodium lamps, the council is considering bright white fluorescent “daylight” lighting.

  If they install white lights, I will never be able to leave the house.

  If they install white lights behind my back fence, I will never be able to use my garden.

  At first, I am too shocked to do anything, too shocked, even, to work out what action I should take. The impending beams transfix me; I can only sit and stare at my approaching doom.

  But after a couple of days, my mental paralysis starts to abate. Stuck cogs shift, small flickerings of electric pulses dart across neural circuits. Avenues that might be worth exploring occur to me; an occasional sentence for a possible letter drafts itself randomly in my head.

  I want to know the council’s freedom of manoeuvre. Is it their choice to install white lights, or are they being directed by a higher power? I write to the Department of Transport, and receive a reply saying that the EU Street Lighting Directive (of course! How could I have possibly imagined that street lighting might be a matter of national sovereignty?) requires only that old-fashioned low-pressure sodium lamps be changed, when they come to be replaced, to more energy-efficient high-pressure sodium lamps, and does not mandate the move to white fluorescent. Local councils should take account of local factors, says the DoT.

  I write a response to the consultation. I receive a letter from the council. It says, “Thank you for highlighting
your concerns about the impact of white light on people with light-sensitivity conditions. I have received many helpful and constructive ideas for future street-lighting provision. Please be assured that these will all be considered before any firm decision is taken.”

  The letter, with its careful, non-committal wording, makes me positively nostalgic. “Highlighting your concerns about the impact of” rather than “explaining the difficulties caused by” is quite masterly—in other words, you say there’s a problem, we don’t have to believe you. I am all too familiar with what is going on—it’s what, in a slightly different context, I used to do for a living when I walked the corridors of power, a handmaiden of the elect. I wrote “lines to take” to help ministers answer difficult questions. And I formulated standard paragraphs for use by correspondence units in replying to letters from the public, such as my own.

  Some time after the end of the council’s consultation exercise, I have heard nothing about the outcome, and am getting jumpy. I know too well the desire of the bureaucrat for things to progress smoothly. I, if I had received my own letter, would have simply placed it in a sort of holding pen for the peculiar, and pressed on regardless, unless something more dramatic occurred.