For months I’ve had a pain in my stomach. It comes and goes but generally it stays…just there, like an unwanted visitor, disrupting my life, like the Tiger That Came To Tea or more like the Gerbil That Came For A Snack. Every now and then it will get so bad in class, that I will have to sit down and take a tactical time out. This is clearly not good, as it disrupts my normal way of teaching. Suffice to say I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of why this is happening and what I can do about it.
Over the past seven months or so, I have visited my doctor, had numerous tests and yet nothing conclusive has emerged. But guess what? It suddenly disappeared…the gerbil has gone. I’m no longer in discomfort. What’s going on?
Ever since I started teaching, I have always been quite chilled about teaching. One teacher in my first school told me I was the most laid-back teacher there. I’m still not sure whether that was a compliment but it might have been true. Ofsted never bothered me, observations, performance management, results meetings, delivering assemblies and so on. There would be a few nerves but nothing that would suggest I was hugely anxious or stressed.
Fast forward 25 years and nothing noticeably has changed and yet, there I was with a pain in my stomach. And like I say…just like that, it suddenly went.
Can you guess the day it went away? I’ll tell you in a moment but suffice to say, the years of being in the classroom have clearly taken its toll and the stress of being in the classroom has been making me ill, despite ‘not being stressed’. I know…it doesn’t make sense but stress is a funny old thing and it seems like I’ve been internalising it for years.
I’ve had a few clues along the way. One day on my normal run, I was bitten by an insect. I have no idea what it was but unlike any other time, I started to see bumps rising on my body, my breathing was going a bit funny and by the time I got home I was having a serious allergic reaction to whatever it was. For the next few hours I was in A&E being observed. I was then informed I had a very high white blood cell count and that it was likely to be caused by stress. I was quite surprised. I was then asked if I was a teacher.
Sleep on a Sunday night should also have been a clue that something wasn’t right. During term time, nearly every Sunday sees me struggling to sleep, with my brain not really settling, despite having the same bedtime routines I have every other day. No phone in sight, lavender spray on the pillow and a chapter or so of a book.
When I was trying to get to the bottom of my stomach pains, my doctor told me that he worked with 13 independent schools and he was often dealing with teachers that were stressed, who’d then go home and drink. This double whammy of stress and alcohol was creating these issues. I thought it couldn’t be stress and therefore it must be the booze, so I gave up the booze. I wasn’t a heavy drinker but did like a whisky or two on a school night. Now it’s 8 units a week, as suggested by the doctor. I actually thought drinking was helping because over Christmas, I had no stomach pains but maybe (I thought) it was suppressing the pain because after Christmas it came back even worse. It just so happened that it coincided with the start of a new term.
After weeks of little drinking, the pain continued but the doctor told me that all my results from the tests he requested were positive, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. The final throw of the dice was a stomach scan and after that, all avenues would have been explored. Four months later I’m still waiting for the scan but maybe I don’t need it. The pain has gone.
The doctor had suggested three things – eat healthily (I do most of the time), exercise (I run each weekend) and try some mindfulness. Only the last one I do not do consistently but I have used breathing techniques but as I said, none of this has rid me of the pain in my stomach.
So what day was it that the pain went away? The day after my Year 11 and Year 13 classes had gone on study leave. This is both good and bad. Good that the pain has gone and I am more comfortable in my classroom but bad because I’m thinking, what’s going to happen in September? When I’m back to a full timetable, will my stomach pains come back? Everything I tried to reduce the pain didn’t help, only the classes leaving did and obviously that’s not happening in September.
Therefore what can I do? Are there stress techniques I could use to help? Can I keep going through these teaching cycles managing the pain? Is this another reason why so many leave the profession, the sheer wear and tear of being a teacher over a certain period of time. I’m lucky I’m in a very good school, with lovely students, lovely staff and lovely management but I can imagine a more intense cycle of this, which burns teachers out very quickly. Who wants to be ill every day?
If you’ve ever felt like this, I’d love to hear from you and who knows, maybe you might have some solutions. Having said that, I might have a stomach scan and there could be something wrong after all. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse!!!
On Teaching... 