The Other Me
An ongoing serial about neurosis, beginning with anxiety that burgeoned through my teenage years, and grew into issues also with depression and OCD, amongst other things.
The Other Me
‘Looking For Answers’ iii. The light-headedness often felt like a disconcerting tickle which weaved in from the back of my head. It wasn’t always there, but when it was it was distracting. Again, I saw Dr Warren – I’d done nothing but see him regularly over the last year. He asked me if I felt symptoms this very moment. I felt only the faintest symptom – although maybe I was worrying myself into it. Dr Warren pulled out a little blood sugar meter – the sort that diabetics used. The meter was no bigger than a keyring. Dr Warren stuck a testing strip into the meter, then used a lancet…
The Other Me
‘Looking For Answers’ ii. The fructose test involved breathing into a meter which measured the level of fructose in my stomach, drinking a glass of fructose, and then breathing into the meter every half hour for the next three hours to see how my stomach reacted. If, at any point, the reading was over that initial base reading by a factor of twenty, it meant my stomach wasn’t absorbing the fructose, and thus I must be fructose intolerant. I brought my laptop to the little clinic where the test was performed, breathed into the meter, and got an initial reading of 4. I then downed the glass of fructose, a…