The Times Magazine 9SPINAL COLUMN
MELANIE REID
nyone who’s gone for
lunch with me recently
might have noticed
something slightly odd.
While they’ve been
studying the menu and
pondering soup-and-cake
versus mains-and-coffee,
they might have clocked
me furtively popping a pill. And looking
faintly anxious.
Eating has become really problematic.
For quite a while now, my hors d’oeuvre by
necessity is a tiny, bitter 10mg of ephedrine, an
amphetamine-type drug, because without it...
Well, you really wouldn’t enjoy sitting opposite
me in a public place and having to deal with
the consequences.
Here’s what happens if I eat a plate of food
without taking any. For 15 minutes, perhaps 30,
sometimes longer, I’m fine. A phoney calm.
Then everything gradually goes pear-shaped.
Like some tedious stage routine endured
hundreds of times, I know it off by heart. First
of all, ever so subtly, my peripheral vision
starts to swim. Then my feet become very hot.
Then my upper body. The skin all over my
body starts to crawl. My ears begin humming
and I can’t concentrate on what anyone’s
saying. The only way I am able to keep
functioning is by cupping both hands around
the side of my eyes, like blinkers on a
racehorse, forcing me to focus forwards.
It’s at this point, if I take no preventativeaction, I have an overwhelming sense my head
is too heavy for me to hold up and I’m going to
die unless I can rest it on something. Visions
of cool, fresh pillows taunt me and my arms
start to thresh around in distress. Feebly
I start trying to undress to cool down, like
a hypothermic climber lost on a mountain.
In the distance I may even hear something
moaning like a distressed walrus. I realise
it’s me: crying out because I am becoming
disinhibited and want the misery to end. There’s
a black lid coming down on my forehead. My
brain is leaving me. I don’t hear celestial music
but honestly it does feel a bit like I’m about to
snuff it, and it’s jolly disagreeable.
At this point, if I’m on my own, I have to
marshal what little agency I have left and
try either to get outdoors to cold air, or to put
my head down. One time an attack came on
so badly in the kitchen the Aga became my
pillow, because the risk of burning myself was
a better prospect than the side effects of lack
of oxygen to the brain.
Other times I’ve made it outside to the
garden table and planted my face on the wet
wood. People who’ve witnessed it say I go very
white and haggard, and those who are practised
at it will scoop up my legs onto a chair and
rest my wheelchair back on its anti-tippers.
In restaurants this amounts to a small scene.
After ten minutes in that position with
my eyes tightly shut, I’ll either fall asleep or
slowly start to feel human again. I’ve been
in restaurants where I’ve stayed at the table,reclined like Jacob Rees-Mogg, ordering my
companions to ignore me and carry on. “I’m
listening, even though I can’t open my eyes.”
Hypotension is a side effect of paralysis. My
autonomic nervous system controlling the flow
of blood round my body has been knocked out.
When I eat, especially hard or dry food, the
blood rushes from my brain to my stomach.
The problem’s got much worse as I’ve got
older. It’s life-limiting and I face a miserable
choice: live on a saucer of porridge five times
a day like a sick dog, or delay eating anything
until evening, when an ephedrine pill raises
my blood pressure and Dave puts my legs up.
So many ironies abound here. Like millions
of people, I spent my life in low-level conflict
with food. I wasn’t by any means the worst
addicted or the most blighted, just one of the
tribe who are permanently a bit dissatisfied
with their bodies and fed up with themselves
for being unable to resist eating too much.
And now here I am, endgame, reliant on
what was one of the original abused diet drugs,
simply because I haven’t the self-control (or
time) to eat regular tiny portions. Besides,
it’s darkly funny: ephedrine is performance-
enhancing – ha! – in sport and is a favourite
“fat-stripper” for freaky body builders. And for
me it just means I can eat in public without
people thinking I’m dying. n@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her
MURDO MACLEOD neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010
A
‘I’m reliant
on diet pills
- otherwise
eating a meal
is torture’