Summertime Sadness

I used to love the heat.

Not in the polite British way where we all collectively decide 22 degrees is enough and complain if it rains.

No, I was committed. I was firmly in the "the heat is my heroin" camp.

I wanted to be warm. No, hotter than warm. I wanted to be the person lying in a garden chair declaring, "It's lovely," while everyone else slowly dissolved into puddles around me. I loved holidays in August, evenings that stayed bright until ten, and the feeling that life had temporarily become easier because the sun was shining.

And then this year happened.

Maybe it's the SSRIs.

Maybe it's approaching forty.

Maybe it's climate change (I mean it definetely is that one)

Maybe my body has simply looked at me and said,

"Do you know what? We've done twenty years of pretending thirty degrees is enjoyable. We're done."

The week before The Heatwave feat. The Hottest June on Record, we had been in Tunisia on holiday, where it barely dropped below 30 degrees.

And that was fine.

Because we were on holiday.

When you're on holiday, cocktail in hand, with the only concern being whether you've got enough charge on your iPad to finish your book, the heat is accepted. It's celebrated. The majority of us literally get on planes and travel to foreign places on a screenshot just to bask in the UV.

But the heat when you're trying to work, or trying to sleep, or simply trying to exist is not the same.

It just isn't.

I've been taking Sertraline for eight years now. It suits me, it comfortably features in my morning routine and the benefit it has had on my mental health is splendid.

However, I had always been aware of the adverse effect it can have on your body when it is ever so hot. But being aware wasn't the same as being affected.

Last Wednesday, when the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) issued a red alert for most of the country, I felt that in my soul.

We had little fans dotted around the house, offering nothing but a faint breeze and delusion, a car whose air conditioning seems to have handed in its notice, and work uniforms that are 99% wool but 100% torture.

34 miserable degrees

Our boss is a beaut and, as no funerals were booked, we could get changed and stay in the background. However, I was past the point of saving, unfortunately.

After an hour of saying I didn't feel well, sitting in empty chapels blasting air conditioning at my face and clutching my sumatriptan injection as my head felt like the Battle of Hastings was kicking off in my temples, I became overcome with nausea and threw up.

The heat had humbled me in the most dramatic of fashions.

I did that typical thing of convincing myself I was now feeling fine because I had been sick and parked myself and my laptop at a desk, managing to lean into the "I'm grand now" illusion for a good hour.

Then it hit me again and I had to admit defeat.

That drive home felt like the morning after in Pulp Fiction where John and Uma are staring ahead in absolute despair.

I didn't sing along to the radio.

I didn't even talk to myself.

I put all my energy, which was depleting by the second, into simply getting back to my postcode.

I am usually such a helpful participant on the roads. If someone is stopped, I will ask if they are okay. I will help push a car. Or, as I have no mechanical knowledge whatsoever, if I am the only other person there, offer to Google things or call my husband to try and help solve the issue. But on that journey, I passed four different cars stranded on the side of the road and gave them nothing but my thoughts and prayers.

When I got home, one of our dogs went straight outside to sunbathe on a hot slab

and the other looked at me sympathetically and telepathically asked if I could turn off the oven that seemed to be engulfing the house.

He has had enough

She can't get enough

After a couple of hours of napping, clamping a hot water bottle filled with cold water to my forehead and visiting the freezer on the regs simply to look at the frozen food with envy, I did start to actually, truthfully, feel a bit better.

Humbled

And it was then that I started to properly look into the effect SSRIs can have on the body during a heatwave. Dr Rupa Parmar, GP and Medical Director of Midland Health, explains that antidepressants can increase sweating, reduce heat tolerance and raise the risk of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Which basically means your antidepressants might help your mood, but in a heatwave they will happily betray your entire body.

It will hinder you physically, which then transfers to emotionally as you begin to feel anxious about feeling poorly and convince yourself the chicken you had last night must not have been okay, you now have the salmonella and, in the immortal words of Davina McCall:

"Say your goodbyes!"

The symptoms of heat exhaustion include headaches, nausea, dizziness, weakness, irritability and an increased body temperature.

I felt so seen.

But also so glad nobody could actually see me because I still looked like a Victorian plague victim who had been dug up and paraded around the village by her hair.

This left me at quite a crossroads.

Do I continue to take my Sertraline and risk heat exhaustion becoming a part of my personality?

Or do I let Met Office alerts dictate my medication schedule and stop taking the tablets that help with my anxiety, OCD and general mental health?

I know everyone was struggling and, in the words of my Mum,

"We just can't cope."

I'm not sure whether she meant as a nation, given schools were now closing, or as humans in general.

But it also seems to be a natural reflex that at least once an hour somebody has to say, "Well, we'd rather this than rain." Would we though? The rain never made me sick.

And in the words of the queen of low temperatures: "THE COLD NEVER BOTHERED ME ANYWAY!"

We are made to feel guilty for moaning about the "nice weather."

But this isn't nice.

So I do think it's more than okay to moan.

It's perfectly acceptable to yearn for days where the ice in your iced coffee doesn't melt before you've even mentally taken a photo of it, or where you don't stick to any material within a two-foot radius.

It's fine to wish it was cooler.

It's fine to look at your smart meter in despair as it climbs in the same direction as the temperature while the various fans around your house do nothing, yet somehow cost everything you will earn this month to fund.

So maybe we don't need to feel guilty for being unable to enjoy the heat. Save it for something to appreciate when we are on holiday, or at least not at work/having to parent small people/function as a human.

An example of when it's ok to be ever so hot - Sunbathing on Chaweng Noi Beach in Thailand with an something over ice.

And for all my fellow SSRI warriors, best of luck for next week because, according to my husband, who has now replaced FlightRadar24 with the weather app and announces temperatures like a bingo caller on speed, it's going to be silly hot once more.

But not to worry.

We have a fan en route from AliExpress.

So I am sure we will be absolutely, perfectly comfortable.

In fact, I may even get out a jumper.