Facing frailty.
I had to cancel last week’s swimming lesson: I was as sick as the proverbial dog with some gastric virus. (Where does that saying come from, I suddenly wonder? I’ll look it up). I woke up in the early hours of the Tuesday I have my lessons on, feverish and having to run to the loo to vomit, and it wasn’t long after that that I had to run to the loo with diarrhea. There’s no delicate way to say it. My digestive system went into violent and painful spasm, leaving me weak and in protracted pain for three days. Not only tummy cramps, but deep aching in my joints, in my muscles, in my chest. On day two I whatsapped my GP who thankfully always responds: this time with “If this does not settle, have a COVID test”.
It did not settle. Well, it settled enough so that I could drive myself to be tested. “Throat or nose?” I had a choice, I discovered, even as I had steeled myself against the dreaded process of having something pushed up my nose all the way into the back of my throat. I chose oral, not nasal. Easy. (I don’t have a strong gag reflex: when I was much younger, my party trick was to put a shot-glass into my mouth and close it. My mouth, I mean, without even bulging my cheeks. I cringe a bit when I remember this.) I’m a healthcare worker, so the results were ready by day end. Negative. I was relieved.
On Tuesday this week, I returned to swimming lessons. My teacher was in the pool when I arrived. She squinted up and me and said: “You’re very pale, are you ok?” I was caught off guard: “Yes, maybe it’s my make-up”. The foundation I wear is a daily habit, a leftover from when I had bad skin. I had severe acne breakouts in high school and early varsity, and as soon as I left school I searched for the most concealing make-up base I could find and afford. I don’t need it anymore. But I have somehow continued to wear base every day.
It was only when I was in the pool, having to move my body, having to synchronise my breathing with kicking and swivelling my arms that I felt it: I was not ok. My chest ached. My shoulders felt stiff and stuck in place, my legs heavy, my ankles frozen.
I struggled, stopping to rest, interrupting the rhythm of breathing out underwater and breathing in lifting my head out of the water, something I thought I’d mastered rather easily in the last lesson. I pushed myself, not wanting to disappoint my teacher, another familiar feeling: that when I commit to something, I will show up, no matter what. Not so admirable a trait, I have learnt over the years, since the price tag is often self-sacrifice. Something I know consciously, something I even help my therapy clients discover. Yet, there I was, ignoring what my body was saying. Especially since my teacher remarked on how strong my stroke is, how well I was doing.
Until I panicked, my heart hammering against my ribcage. I could not breathe in. I could not empty my lungs without feeling blind anxiety. My diaphragm felt frozen.
Get Ronélle Hart’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It was hard for me to say: “I can’t do this right now”. But I did. “Let’s slow down”, she said, and handed me the little blue mini bodyboard foam thingy to hold onto. “Just kick, keep your head out of the water if you need to”. So I did. All 25 meters, in a slow crawl. And another 25 meters back to the starting point, this time on my back, my arms over my head, my eyes open to the sky and moody clouds and the first, then the second string of bunting-like, faded flags sagging across the width of the pool, marking the five meters from each end, Anne’s fingers at the base of my head righting my body so that I don’t smash into the pool cover in the last lane.
My panic subsided.
Maybe that’s the mark of a good teacher. Like a good parent in a way, and a good therapist: to be attuned enough to their student, their child, their therapy client to know how to stay present and calm in the face of panic. I recognise this. I know how to do this for my patients. But this Tuesday, this third swimming lesson, I could not do it for myself.
I could not stop shivering by the bleachers at the side of the pool where I’d left my bag with the towel and lip-balm and car keys and cellphone. I pulled off the bright blue nylon swimming cap, my skin tender under the wet weight of my hair slapping down between my shoulder blades. I dried myself haphazardly, the backs of my knees first, then my crotch as best I could without removing my bathing suit, then my chest, my face, my feet. I wrapped the kikoi I bought around my waist and got into my car like that, damp and a little dazed, wanting to get home as soon as I could.
I cried all the way back from the lesson. Almost all the way. I cried for myself, my own vulnerabilities, physically especially: that I’m not as strong as I appear, that I feel very much uncertain and afraid that I will not, after all, be able to learn to swim, that somehow my body will fail. Will fail me before I have had the experiences that I have set out to have before I die one day.
I’m going back next week.
But not the week after. Tuesday after next I will be in Cape Town. I’m going there to write poetry: to do a poetry writing course, that is. I may even have a swim in the tidal pool at St James.
Or if I’m feeling frail, I’ll float. Give myself up to the sure and certain sway of sea water supporting me, eyes wide open to whatever sky awaits.
