At the Doctor's

I feel sick. My head hurts. It started this morning. I need to rest and drink water.

Last week I felt very sick. I had a strong headache and I felt hot and tired. I could not work and I stayed in bed all day. I drank lots of water and tried to sleep. The next morning I felt a little better. After two days the headache was completely gone.

A few weeks ago I had a headache that lasted nearly three days. It wasn't very strong at first, but it got worse every afternoon, especially when I was using my computer for long periods. Rest helped a little, and drinking water seemed to make a small difference too. I think the main cause was probably too much screen time combined with poor sleep — I'd been working late for a week. In the end I took two days off, went outside more, and tried to sleep earlier. By the weekend the headache was gone, and I felt much more relaxed.

Hi Sam,

Hope you're well. I wanted to tell you about something that's been going on. For about a week now I've been getting these dull headaches, mostly in the afternoon — nothing severe, but definitely unusual for me. I finally booked an appointment yesterday, more to put my mind at rest than anything.

The GP was really thorough, asked a lot of questions, and worked out fairly quickly that it was probably a combination of too much screen time, not enough water, and working late. Nothing dramatic. She suggested taking regular breaks, getting outside more, and drinking properly throughout the day.

I've been trying to follow her advice for a couple of days now and already feel a bit better. She did say to come back if it changed character or became sharper, but so far so good. Honestly, it was reassuring to get some clear, practical advice rather than a prescription.

Speak soon,
Alex

I'd been aware of it for weeks before I did anything about it. Nothing dramatic — just a low, dull headache that seemed to settle in each afternoon and refuse to leave, along with a kind of tiredness that no amount of sleep seemed to touch. In hindsight, that was part of the problem: it was too mild to feel urgent, too persistent to fully ignore, and sitting in the unhelpful middle ground where I could half-convince myself it would sort itself out.

Looking back, I think I was also reluctant to admit how badly I'd been looking after myself. I'd been working late most evenings, living on coffee, and spending almost no time outdoors. Booking an appointment felt, in some strange way, like admitting I'd let things slip — as if I should have sorted it myself before asking anyone for help.

What finally tipped me over was a colleague mentioning, quite offhandedly, that they'd had something similar and it had turned out to be worth checking. The GP, when I eventually went, wasn't worried — just kind, and direct. Her advice was almost comically ordinary: more water, more sleep, some fresh air. Within ten days I felt properly human again.

I suppose the real lesson was less about the symptom than about how quietly problems grow when we look away from them. I've tried, since, to check in with myself more honestly when something feels off.

Most of us, at some point, have found ourselves rehearsing a doctor's appointment in our heads — mentally trimming the symptom, downplaying it, editing it down to something that doesn't sound hysterical. I know I have. There's a particular dread of being the person who took up a busy professional's morning to describe a feeling that, put into words, sounds suspiciously like nothing much at all. And yet, paradoxically, it is often precisely the people who worry about 'wasting someone's time' who ought to worry a little less about the wasting and a little more about the time.

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that many symptoms simply don't present themselves cleanly. They arrive instead as a vague heaviness, a sense of being 'not quite right', a pressure without a location. In that grey zone, admitting concern feels embarrassingly premature. What exactly would you even say? 'I don't feel ill, but I don't feel well either'? The language of health, at least in English, seems to offer only blunt categories for what is often a much subtler experience.

There's also, I suspect, a social dimension to it. Seeking help is, in a quiet way, admitting uncertainty — and uncertainty, in many cultures, is still coded as weakness. We'd rather soldier on than risk being told it was nothing. So we defer, we minimise, we google things at three in the morning, and we show up, when we finally do, apologising for being there at all.

I've come to think that the better instinct is the gentler one. Not rushing to a doctor at every twinge, but taking our own observations seriously enough to voice them — tentatively, imperfectly, even unconvincingly — to someone qualified to hear them. The real fuss, I've realised, isn't in asking the question. It's in the weeks of quiet overthinking we save ourselves by having the conversation in the first place.