An adventure in Cushing's and stroke

Okay, I don’t *really* treat my body as a temple. I really love chocolate and dessert and hot chips and ice cream. If I treated my body as a temple, I would avoid all fast foods, anything processed, and probably not even think about sugar. So perhaps this post is a little hypocritical, but I’m going to write it anyway. It’s been on my mind, and more so after a comment my friend made.

I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. I’ve also never been drunk. I have friends who smoke and drink and get drunk, and I’ve accepted that it’s their choice. I know that they are smart people and they know the consequences of smoking and drinking.

And so that’s why I don’t really understand why they do it. Why, when we have so much knowledge about the effects of drinking and smoking, perfectly wonderful and smart people continue to do it?

The woman next to me when I was in hospital had a stroke. Her entire right side was paralysed, and she wasn’t making particularly good progress at regaining motion. She would get very depressed and emotional, and you could see that she hated being dependent on someone else for virtually everything. Her memory was also very bad, and she would forget what had happened throughout the day. She couldn’t even remember how she met her husband.

She had her stroke because she had been smoking for about thirty or forty years. Smoking doubles your risk of stroke because it causes your arteries to fur up and your blood more likely to clot. And that’s what happened to the woman next to me.

When I had dinner with my friend who had been recently treated for a rare cancer, he said to me that he doesn’t understand why anyone would knowingly do something that would increase the risk of getting cancer. Because really, hospitals, chemotherapy, lumbar drains, daily blood tests, and knowing that there’s a high risk of dying is not something we could imagine anyone wanting to go through.

And similarly, I don’t understand people who drink to excess, or do other stupid things like drink and drive. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or what gender you are, or how fit you are, YOU ARE NOT INVINCINBLE. No one is.

Bodies are really, really amazing. They do so many great things that keep us alive and well, and most of us don’t know a lot about what goes on behind the scenes (or under our skins). They repair themselves when we do things wrong, they regulate and replenish and they forgive us when we do things like skip a couple of gym sessions or eat the last brownie.

Why would anyone willingly choose to abuse it? There are so many people out there who would give anything to have a healthy body and know that they will have a reasonably long and normal life (as far as their health goes). And there are people who have that and don’t realise how great it is. They take it for granted and they abuse it. Or they think it’s not good enough and they change it with surgery, but that’s a rant for another day.