I sat in A&E. Waiting. My wonderful physiotherapist had sent me straight there when he realised that I couldn’t focus or control my eye movements. I’d gone to see him because I’d been feeling dizzy and thought I might have a trapped nerve in my neck. I’d been away for the weekend and had felt out of sorts the whole time. Queasy and unsteady. I thought I’d eaten something bad or maybe I was just tired from the travelling. Or from work. Things had been intense – weren’t they always? – as we tried to produce a strategy document signed off by multiple Ministers. It was my first role in a really senior grade. A major step up that came hot on the heels of a high-profile project I had led. There hadn’t been much time to rest in between.
But now I was forced to wait. I couldn’t look at my emails because my eyes wouldn’t follow my instructions. The physio had said this was a sign of a neurological issue. But he said it calmly and gently sent me to where I needed to be, without scaring me about just how serious this could be.
What followed was very frightening. CT scans, lumbar punctures, a night in the geriatric ward alongside a disoriented older woman who kept calling out desperately for her mummy. Medical students trooping in and out to take a look at this mysterious case and asking the same sets of questions over and over again. By now the symptoms had developed. I had lost strength on one side of my body, had a burning sensation in my skin and, oh my, the headaches.
At first they said it was a stroke. I was 31 years old and ‘fit and healthy’. Eventually I was moved to what I found out later was a world-leading neurology ward in London. The verdict was in – an inflammation in my brain. It might be a one-off or it might be Multiple Sclerosis (MS), they said. We won’t know until and unless it happens again. The doctor said not to worry: it was “an exciting time to have MS” because of all the advances in research and medication. It didn’t necessarily mean ending up using a wheelchair anymore. Exciting.
My boss sent a message saying I should take all the time I needed to get better. In truth I didn’t have much choice because it took a few months for my eyes to get back in order. Reading was kinda important for my job. I was grateful then to be in the public sector, with solid sick leave policies, including the option of coming back part-time to gradually build my stamina back up as the symptoms subsided.
Until that point in my life, work had taken pole position. I thought nothing of the late nights, weekends or other ‘extra miles’. It was worth it. I loved my job. I was building my career, and with the classic arrogance of youth, I thought I was invincible.
I’d like to say that what followed was a transformation story in which my ‘wake-up call’ turned me overnight into someone with zen-like work/life balance and that we all lived happily ever after. But the truth is it was grindingly hard to change the habits and patterns of behaviour I had got into over the first 10 years of my career. Luckily for me, some of the constraints were physical. I simply got too tired to work as hard as I had before. Then I had Sam, my husband, to police me and help me stick to the rules I had set but struggled to keep. There were no laptops or blackberries (remember those?) on in our house in the evenings. There were also a couple of bosses who made it possible for me to turn up differently (sadly, there weren’t many of them and I had to change jobs to find those who went beyond the rhetoric to actually support me to work in a different way). And then there were the amazing team members who stepped up to lead and proved to me that letting go has value beyond managing your own time.
That was all more than 15 years ago, and I’ve definitely fallen off the balance wagon multiple times since then. But overall I think I’m doing OK. It helped that two years later I got taken off the MS watch-list. It turned out that my illness was a one-off encephalitis whose defining characteristic is that it never happens again.
To this day, I don’t know if work made me sick – I caught a virus that inflamed my brain. Maybe I wouldn’t have caught it if I had been less run-down. Or maybe it would have happened even if I’d been on a beach somewhere with my feet up. What I do know is that it made me change my relationship with work. I am still passionate about my career and the difference I make, but I understand that without my health I can’t do any of that, so looking after myself and making sure that my teams look after themselves is part of my job too. It changed the kind of leader I then strived to be. And that seems to have made an even bigger difference in the end – just last week someone I worked with nearly a decade ago shared how impactful it was for him to see me set boundaries on collecting my children from school back then, something that he now does every day.
I share all this not to be a harbinger of doom or to scare you into taking a break. Or, come to that, to pretend that I’ve got it all sorted. This is still daily work. My question is this: what more could you achieve if you took care of yourself too?
