It started with a bottomless tiredness, and soon novelist Sarah Perry was unable to function. Had she brought it all on herself?
On Christmas Eve 2013, with hail falling on Norwich, I set out to jog three miles through the storm on the path beside the river. The spire of the cathedral was obscured by pearly cloud; snowdrops speckled the riverbank; it was pleasant to feel the little cut of ice on cheek. All this I recall with wonder, for that moment has crystallised in my memory as youth’s last day before, at the age of 34, old age struck me like a brick in a sock.
I cannot say when I first began to realise I was ill, for it came on me surreptitiously, with each new symptom readily explained. I was tired, probably; I was anxious, that was it: cared too deeply about the fate of my debut novel, of the work in progress. Yet by the following Christmas I felt as though I were a badly stitched garment coming apart at the seams. I was no athlete, nor had I ever been, but I’d never been troubled by anything more serious than an asthma cough, and had always thought of myself as rather like a shire horse: healthy, stolid, large of hindquarter and small of foot; willing to walk any distance in any weather, given the promise of a nosebag. How could it be, then, that washing my hair exhausted my arms until I let them fall by my side? How could a brief walk weary me to tears? Why did I wake at midnight, at two, at four, at six; why did I topple against the arm of the sofa at nine in the evening, and ask, like a child, to be put to bed? Why did I ache from heel to hip, with that dreary pain, hardly worth a single Nurofen, that comes when one has been chilled to the marrow? By the time 2016 put its malevolent head around the door, it occurred to me that I’d been in pain every day for 18 months.
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