Why a Cholesterol Check Has Got Me Thinking About My Impermanence
Crash Rhino’s Rebecca goes to get a medical check up and starts to question her mortality, amongst other things.
Fats, glorious fats
Perhaps I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I’m a secret hypochondriac. With every unexpected ache and twinge (which after the age of thirty ramps up in frequency), I tend to start writing my will in my head, wondering which of my nieces would like my first edition copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude and if I did enough writing to consider it a ‘legacy’: spoiler, I didn’t.
I also automatically assume that every plane I get on will crash, despite the likelihood of this happening being around 1 in 13 million, as well as thinking that I’ll be one of the seventeen people who die in lifts each year. My Google search reads something like:
“Why does my left side hurt?
Are tingling toes normal?
Can a headache be a sign of cancer?
How do you know if a lift is faulty?
”
However, low-level hypochondria doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I have a fairly legitimate reason to be concerned; hearts in my family seem to have an expiry date of between fifty and sixty years. My Granddad had a heart attack whilst he was in Portugal on holiday, to be precise. My Dad had a heart attack whilst he was in a meeting at work and didn’t tell anyone until the meeting had finished; his PA had to perform CPR on him. Luckily, he was able to get to the hospital in time for emergency surgery, but my Granddad wasn’t so fortunate. And to top it all off, my brother has recently been told his cholesterol is unusually high for his age and is taking statins at age thirty-something.
I’ve always felt as if I had a ticking clock in my chest, with the hands slowly corroding and the face starting to melt– not to be overly dramatic or anything. But faced with all this empirical evidence (and with my brother’s insistent WhatsApp messages that we’ve drawn the short straw with dodgy tickers), I was compelled to stare the prospect of my mortality right in the eye. Because once you know about your cholesterol levels, you can’t unknow them; it’s a Schrödinger's cat of arteries, both possibilities are true– one box contains a Rebecca surrounded with custard tarts, parma ham, and chocolate eclairs, the other box is a despondent Rebecca reluctantly shoving dry quinoa into her face, shedding a singular tear.
Rebecca in happier times surrounded by pistachio croissants and full-fat milk lattes
Due to Sam’s and my nomadic lifestyle, I am somewhat of a medical tourist these days and have gotten various parts of my body scrutinised across the globe (if you’re in Vietnam, I can recommend an excellent dentist), so I booked a full medical screening as I’m now approaching my mid-thirties and I did enough binge drinking in my early twenties to kill a herd of wild horses. If someone is taking my blood, then they might as well run it for all markers of early death and give me something else to worry about in the dead of the night when my brain’s playing the top hits of all the embarrassing things I’ve done in my life: yes – thank you brain – I do remember in A-Level English when I said gonorrhoea instead of Goneril in front of the whole class when we were studying King Lear.
I couldn’t help but see the irony of my situation when, as I was consulting with my doctor, she gave me a handwritten list of all the food I needed to try in Melacca. This wasn’t an official part of the medical screening, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless. However, it was evident that most of the foods on the list were either deep-fried or high in saturated fats; in fact, the roti canai (one of Malaysia’s best breakfast items, in my opinion) is probably 85% ghee and 15% more ghee. It was the Schrödinger’s cat of arteries slinking into the room again, tail covered in triglycerides. I was standing at the precipice of having a life with reduced roti canai consumption – and was this a world I even wanted to inhabit? Perhaps the unknowing of my cholesterol levels was a happy oblivion. But I couldn’t help but wonder (with my best Carrie Bradshaw impression), would the sacrifice of knowledge lead to twenty years from now, where I’m in a meeting about AI corruption of water supplies on Mars, pretending I’m not having a heart attack like my Dad?
Food recommendations free of charge
I don’t want to bemoan the chronic underfunding of the NHS, but I was able to get an appointment within two days, and my test results came the same day, so I didn’t need to mope around being overly existential about butter. I was sent a PDF via WhatsApp with the advice I needed to make lifestyle changes. The results were in, and they weren’t dreadful, but they weren’t brilliant either. Anxious to see everything through the lens of academic success, I compared my scores with my brother, and I’d done better than him on every lipid profile. He was in the E minus territory, whereas I was a D to a C plus; my good fats were well within the healthy range, which I would like to attribute to my stalwart determination to find porridge in whatever country we’re in.
But it was a slight cause for concern, and deep down, I know I have a penchant for ‘treats’, except they aren’t really ‘treats’ and more just commonplace in my daily routine. Emotional eating is my go-to coping mechanism, I’ll have a white chocolate cookie when I’m stressed, I’ll have a pistachio croissant when I’m sad, I’ll celebrate it being Wednesday with a mango sticky rice, and then, because it’s the weekend, I’ll travel to some obscure bakery because it sells milk chocolate buns with eyes on. I’ve been living on borrowed treat time and the truth is finally out in the open, quinoa-munching Rebecca needs to emerge from her box-prison and ask what aisle the chia seeds are in.
Would travel upwards of an hour again
Butter now has to be regarded as a foe and not a friend, only to be fraternised with on a weekly basis at best. I can’t use kaya toast to plug the void in my existence anymore, and I’ll need to find a replacement; something like ultra-marathons or learning how to ferment pickles should do the trick. Expect me to start posting my Strava maps on my Instagram stories imminently, saying things like: ‘great pace for the first 5km but dipped after my achilles heel twinged’.
And I can’t even return to binge-drinking because that’s also bad for cholesterol, and not to mention increasingly exhausting these days. Hangovers now last half a week and come with crippling anxiety and thoughts of my A-level English class when I confused a Shakespeare character with an STI. I much prefer activities like looking at particularly nice trees and birds, and endlessly doomscrolling Instagram Reels, because I’ve banned myself from TikTok after spending up to 5 hours on the app each day.
‘In moderation’ is not something that’s synonymous with my personality. I swing from obsession to drought and back around again. I’ll read entire books in the space of a day and then not read anything for two months; I’ll take up hobbies like painting and draw jellyfish and rabbits for a week straight, buy all the equipment and then never pick up a brush again. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything ‘moderately’ in my life, so having one custard cream from the packet instead of eight doesn’t sound that fun to me.
Sorry Sachertorte, I’m breaking up with you
I’ve got six months before I need to be retested. As a recovering ‘gifted and talented’ pupil (although I got kicked out in year seven because I wasn’t very good at Maths), I feel the inherent need to ace my cholesterol scores – now all I can think about is oily fish and avocados. I’ve implemented a training regime where I’ve ripped off a popular brand of interval training classes and now shout things such as:
“One minute of burpees, followed by squat pulses. Rest period in three minutes. Can you go any faster? Climb that hill, everyone.
”
Sometimes being insufferable is preferable to the alternative. I guess it’s marginally better to be the kind of person who gets up at 5 am to go barefoot running, than a person slowly filling their arteries with profiteroles.
Look Kirby Car, we were never that serious anyway
These words are part of Crash Rhino’s Rhino Revelation series. They are completely free of charge, however, we would love to be paid for our craft by other means.
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