Now, I've never seen the terms and conditions of the credit limit on my body, mainly because nobody ever showed me an interest rate, but I've been a customer long enough to know two things: the credit limit is real, and the invoice always arrives, whether I can pay it or not. I found this out in May 2026 when I went for my first ride in an ambulance. Weeeee!
The day before, my brother got married, and it was one of the best days I can remember. Everything went off perfectly and he married a wonderful person. However, everything that follows is about me, and about what a day like that actually costs a brain and body like mine.
After the tipping point
I had pushed through the day with steam baths and an elephant’s dose of paracetamol, but around 10pm I had to throw in the towel; I had danced enough to show up in photos at least. I went back to the hotel and did something very unusual for me: I ran myself a bath. I am not a bath person. This is less a preference than a matter of public record; my partner could count my total on one hand. At the time it registered as a treat. In hindsight it was triage: some department of my body, operating well below the level that gets consulted, had already assessed the situation and prescribed hot water and steam.
By three in the morning the treat had been reclassified as an emergency, and I was in an ambulance. By breakfast I was in A&E, where I would spend the next seven-plus hours discovering that I had not one bacterial infection, like a normal overachiever, but at least two. A diverse portfolio across my body, talk about LinkedIn-fected. The point is this amount of infection doesn’t happen overnight.
Honestly though the worst part was the hospital. A hospital, for anyone with a sensitive sensory system, is a special kind of hostile. Fluorescent light with no off switch, machines that beep in almost-but-not-quite rhythm, other people's emergencies leaking through curtains that are apparently soundproofing's final insult. The one mercy was that I travel with a sensory kit out of sheer habit, and somewhere in that waiting room I put my earplugs in and pulled my Manta sleep mask over my eyes, and honestly, it saved me. It is a proper 100% blackout mask with cups that sit around the eyes rather than on them, which means you can wear it for hours in a plastic chair, and it turned an interrogation-lit corridor into somewhere a nervous system could at least idle. In fact when I showed the doctor during my eventual diagnosis, even he asked for the website, he was so impressed by the light seal.
What really frightened me though is my body had deteriorated so much I had entered a new mental state beyond my usual disorders, where I couldn't distract myself or even concentrate enough to use my phone. If you have ADHD you'll understand the scale of that. My attention is many things, most of them inconvenient, but it rarely refuses screens. So from that plastic chair, eight hours deep and running on about 4% battery, I thought about how I’d got into this situation. Was it my fault?
Multiple infections don't happen in one night
My body had been sending reminders for weeks. There was a masters hand-in, a site relaunch, wedding logistics, a five-hour drive that I got up for a 6am exercise class before, which sounds like discipline and was actually me frantically pre-regulating for a big social day. Somewhere in that stretch the reminders started arriving: first notice, second notice, final notice. And I marked every one of them as read without really taking them in.
Some of that is interoception, the sense that reports on what your body needs, which in my case files everything late. I've written before about not noticing thirst until I'm shaky; it turns out the same postal service handles "you are seriously run down" with the same delivery standards. The bath, I now understand, was the final notice, hand-delivered, and I read it as a treat. But some of it is arithmetic that I think every masker will recognise. A peak social event, even a joyful one, especially a joyful one, is the most expensive thing I do.
A wedding is eight hours of reading rooms, performing delight I genuinely felt but still had to perform, absorbing noise, holding a face. The day runs on adrenaline, and adrenaline is a payday loan: the energy is real, it's just not yours. And because the crash arrives in arrears, days later, dressed as illness or a mood, it's easy to miss that it's the same transaction. The wedding didn't give me three infections. But my immune system had clearly been running a skeleton crew for weeks while everything I had, went on staying upright and delightful, and the morning after the biggest spend of the year, the bailiffs arrived.
I got discharged with antibiotics and slept for over twenty-four hours, and honestly it might go down as the best sleep I’ve ever had. Shortly after, I sent my family a health bulletin that included the sentence "I could almost go for a run. I won't, but I could", which is recovery euphoria talking. Luckily I didn’t though, as I’d learned my lessons.
Read your body’s terms in advance
Having reflected a lot on the experience, I realised that while everything worked out, I could have missed my brother’s big day or prevented things going as smoothly. This could have been prevented if I listened to my body more in the preceding weeks, so here are my suggestions on how to look after yourself and let the body stay in the black:
- Take the payday loans knowingly. Adrenaline will always lend you a great day; the trick is borrowing on purpose. I now look at a wedding, a launch, a conference, and price the crash into the plan.
- Watch for the reminders you're marking as read. The tell-tale signs will start with the small stuff first: word-finding, patience, the ability to be distracted. If you can’t even focus on your phone, maybe just try and rest.
- Carry a kit that works in rooms you can't control. Earplugs and a proper blackout mask live in my bag permanently now, because the environments that hit hardest, hospitals, airports, other people's houses, are precisely the ones you can't modify. The mask is only £29 mask and it has helped me reclaim so much sleep in public spaces over the last few years. Sometimes, that’s a luxury, sometimes it’s critical.
There's a Goghini-shaped thought in that hospital chair, and it isn't a triumphant one. In the weeks before the wedding I mostly left my Focus Frames in their case, because I was too busy to bother, which is like skipping the cheap servicing precisely because the car is needed every day. The frames exist to do one job: catch the peripheral movement and visual debris my brain would otherwise process manually, forty times an hour, every hour I'm at a desk or in a crowd. That filtering is never free; I just pay for it in the background, and the background is exactly where my balance was quietly draining. I can't claim a pair of glasses would have stopped the infections but everything here is holistic and everything adds up: interoception files late, alarms refuse to downgrade, and every unfiltered input is a small standing charge on the same account that eventually paid for a wedding.
