WAYS OF SEEING
When writer Emma Stonex suffered a mini stroke at the age of 25, the walls of her world closed in. Here, she describes how she broke free from fear
Aged 25, writer Emma Stonex suffered a mini-stroke, and the fear of it recurring became an all-consuming emotion that took over her life. Here’s how she broke free
IT STARTED WITH A HEARTBEAT (AS EVERYTHING DOES). For an instrument that beats more than billion times in an average lifespan, there are maybe only a handful of occasions, if we’re lucky, that we’re properly aware of it. When we’re afraid, or in love. When, as children, the doctor presses a cold metal disc against our chest and we watch them listen. When we hear our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. I was 25 when mine told me something was wrong. I was living in London, watching TV late at night after my boyfriend had gone to bed when, like dimming a sidelight, I lost the vision in one eye. The best way I can describe it was like creeping fog, from left to right: a silver curtain closing. I don’t remember what I was watching – you’d think I ought to, but maybe the brain tunes things like that out when it goes into shock. The body knows when it’s in trouble. I’ve since given birth to two babies. It hurt, and I was scared, but nothing has scared me more than that advancing grey mist. Blindness is a primordial fear. Sight is our truest anchor: without it, we’re adrift. I washed my eyes out in the bathroom, trying not panic. The vision in my left eye had almost completely gone. Music was playing next door, Kings of Leon. It was the summer of Sex on Fire, when you couldn’t walk 10ft down the street without it bleeding out from somewhere. Even now, hearing that song makes me queasy. It was my fault: I was tired, I’d been drinking too much, smoking too much. I’d been staying out late, getting no sleep, doing no exercise. But as I sifted through reasons, the realisation set in that it could be any or all or none of these things – and what did it matter, when the harder I tried, the less I could see? There was always a suspicion that my heart beat differently. You know that scene in Dirty Dancing where Johnny puts Baby’s hand on his chest? Ba-boom, ba-boom. I’d touch my heart and think, Mine doesn’t sound like that. More like someone toppling downstairs, or a galloping horse pausing to sail over a jump. Whenever I lay down, I could feel that erratic rhythm – I still do – and it wasn’t the reassuring 80-beats-aminute everyone said it should be. If you tried dancing to that, you’d get motion sickness. But it never caused me problems beyond faint curiosity, so I thought no more about it. In the bedroom, I turned on the light and said something farcical like, ‘I’m going blind, I can’t see.’ My left arm felt ticklish with pins and needles. My boyfriend sat up and looked at me, but he wasn’t looking at me. He said, ‘How many euros did you get with the exchange rate?’ (He’d never talked
in his sleep before and hasn’t since, so it was kind of him to do it then.) I felt like I’d slipped into a deep fold in the fabric of the universe: everything slightly to the side of where it should be, like someone moving during the exposure of a photo. Idiotically, I started flashing the overhead light on and off, one hand clamped over my unseeing eye like a tableau in a David Lynch movie. We were in the early hours by then; the edges of that fog were softening and breaking apart. My right eye was OK; I’d go to hospital in the morning. But I didn’t sleep. I kept vigil over my sight like a sick child, afraid that if I closed my eyes, even for a moment, it would flit away from me altogether. The next day, a doctor performed an ECG, diagnosed atrial fibrillation (a type of heart arrhythmia) and said I’d had a TIA. A transient ischaemic attack. I’d never heard of it. ‘A mini stroke,’ he explained, with kindness and a touch of pity, which in a way was worse than the judgement itself. The blood had been obstructed on its way to my brain. I was confused; distraught. Strokes happened to old people. How could one have happened to me?
“I felt as though Id’ slipped into a deep FOLD in the fabric of the UNIVERSE”
I WAS IN HOSPITAL FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, dizzy and terrified, but, by evening, with my eyesight back to normal, there was no reason for me to stay. I was told to call 999 if I experienced numbness on my left side or pain in my chest. Returning to the flat, I was overcome with fear. What if it happened again? The idea is that we shouldn’t be aware of the inner workings of our bodies. Human anatomy runs on electricity and magic – the older I get, the less sure I am which there’s more of. The fortunate among us live in healthy ignorance without ever coming into contact with the machinery that keeps us going. When we do, it’s like glimpsing the scaffolding holding the set in place, or seeing the actors at the stage door having a fag. The strings, the rigging, the apparatus that keeps the show on the road, we don’t want to know about it – because we are the show, right? It’s distressing to be reminded that it’s all as temporal as an assembly of parts that, like any other, can one day stop working. I rang in sick to my job in publishing with half the story. I felt embarrassed and upset by people’s sympathy whenever I said the S word. My boss sent work home, but I felt too fragile to focus on it. I lived in fear of the blindness returning, or that I’d look in the mirror and wouldn’t recognise my face. I had elaborate nightmares about my truant heart: one where it dissolved through my fingers like sand; in another, I followed an echo in a house, only to discover my heart in a wardrobe. I didn’t go out, terrified of being away from home in case of a relapse. I felt confined by the walls of my flat. I became low-level agoraphobic. Anyone who knows a cousin in that family – anxiety, PTSD, depression – knows they are closely related. I’d always been independent, but for a time I grew needier. When things are about to slip away, we hold on ever tighter. I felt I’d had a lucky escape: what if the clot had been worse or the blockage hadn’t cleared? If life could be pinched out so swiftly, what guarantee was there that other things, other people, wouldn’t vanish? But there are no guarantees. That’s the point. Life is skating on thin ice. We can fall through it at any moment. For weeks, I blamed myself. I’d been hurtling along with the arrogant assumption that I was invincible. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t taken care of myself, I was young and would make up for it later. There’s always a later when you’re twentysomething. There’ll be time to achieve the things you want. But as the days passed, it slowly settled that, lucky or not, I’d escaped. Doctors ran 24-hour recordings of my heartbeat and an MRI on my chest and head. They offered me beta blockers to manage my arrhythmia and daily aspirin to prevent clots, but warned taking either over a long period could result in problems later. I said no to both. My GP stressed there was no reason to think I’d have another TIA. I could make lifestyle changes but, beyond that – and she said this quite happily – living is a risk. We all worry about how and when we’ll reach the lowering of the light. Illness, injury, getting knocked down by a bus. You’d never leave the house if you thought like that, my mum used to say. Only I hadn’t left the house, had I? This had happened at home, in the quietest way possible: death and life wrapped around each other; two sides of the same coin. The fact is, nowhere is safe and nothing is sure. We give in or we get on. As I began to absorb the meaning of my doctor’s words, I realised I had to make some lasting decisions. Little by little, I gathered the courage to go out. I went for short walks, then longer ones. I rode the bus, then the Tube into town. One day, I felt brave enough to drive on the motorway. I went back to work and looked at my career anew. I loved editing novels but had always secretly yearned to write my own, so I decided to begin a manuscript. When an agent agreed to represent me, I quit my job. I promised to ring my family more often and spend meaningful – sober – time with friends. I drank less and stopped smoking (almost). I took long walks and did yoga. I reminded myself to look up at the sky every day. My TIA didn’t steal away life’s pleasures. Rather, it showed me how to enjoy them more. We’re only here once, after all. There’s a thin membrane between life and death, and I feel it with every beat of my weird, wonderful heart. The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex is out now