What Happens When You Stop Choosing Health

I want to tell you something I'm not particularly proud of.

From 23rd March 2020 — the day the UK went into lockdown — I stopped choosing health.

Not gradually. Not with any particular decision. Just — overnight, completely, without ceremony — I stopped.

I closed the blinds. I switched my mobile phone off. I worked my corporate job from my home office, eight to five, without problem. And then five o'clock would come and something would shift.

Pizza. Every day. Pies, chips, fish fingers, toast, puddings, cream cakes. Netflix from five in the afternoon until one in the morning. Every single day.

For nearly two months.

I had been choosing health for fifteen years. Yoga, good food, movement, practice — fifteen years of building something careful and sustaining. And in the space of a week it was simply — gone. As though it had never been.

I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. Those things held. But everything else — every habit, every ritual, every choice that had been keeping my body in some kind of equilibrium — dissolved into the sofa and the screen and the daily pizza.

What was actually happening

I know now what I didn't fully understand then.

I was in the early stages of what would later be diagnosed as PTSD — the lockdown stillness reaching back into the trauma of my cancer recovery twenty years before and pulling it to the surface. The isolation triggering something ancient and afraid in my nervous system. The complete removal of structure, purpose and human contact doing what chronic stress always does to a body that has already been through too much.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, what I was experiencing maps to profound Kidney Qi Deficiency — the deepest reserves of vitality depleted by fear, isolation and the complete withdrawal of the practices that had been replenishing them.

The body under that kind of stress does not want salad. It wants comfort. Warmth. Density. Something that feels, however briefly, like enough.

Pizza every day was not a character flaw. It was a frightened nervous system doing what frightened nervous systems do.

But the body was keeping score.

Louise Hay and the language of dis-ease

I have an abiding respect for Louise Hay's work — particularly her concept of dis-ease rather than disease. The idea that when the body is not at ease — not supported, not nourished, not in flow — it creates the conditions in which physical illness can take hold.

I believe, with everything I know about TCM and the body-mind connection, that the 12cm cyst that grew on my left ovary during those months would not have appeared if I hadn't been so profoundly unwell — physically, emotionally and energetically.

This is not self-blame. It is self-understanding. There is a significant difference.

The cyst was not a punishment. It was a message — the most dramatic, unmistakable message my body knew how to send — that something had gone very wrong and needed urgent attention.

The discovery

I started to get bad pain. A swollen belly that made me look eight months pregnant. I hadn't lived this way — sedentary, eating without care — since my twenties. My body was communicating loudly in the only language available to it.

And then I started to bleed.

I hadn't bled for eight years following an ablation. Bleeding, when you haven't bled for eight years, is not something you ignore.

I made an appointment.

The telephone call

The scan revealed a 12cm cyst on my left ovary.

They thought it might be cancer.

This was delivered to me during a telephone call. Not in a room with a doctor who could see my face. Not with someone to hold my hand or hand me a tissue. A telephone call, during a pandemic, alone in my kitchen with the blinds closed.

It might be cancer.

And then — because this is what the NHS was navigating in 2020, and I understand that, even as I describe how it felt — I waited. From April to the following January. Nine months of not knowing. Nine months of carrying that possibility alongside the pain, the cyst, the swollen belly and the slowly dawning understanding of how I had arrived here.

This is, I think, part of why Bonnie arriving in May was so profoundly healing. She gave me something to do with the fear. Somewhere to put the love that had nowhere to go. A reason to open the blinds.

The surgery

January came. The surgery happened.

They removed both ovaries — the cyst was on the left, but both were taken. The surgery that should have been straightforward became complicated. What followed was sepsis, liver failure and necrotising fasciitis — a cascade of events I have written about elsewhere and that I am still, in some ways, processing.

It was not cancer. The tests they should have done during Covid had not been done. When they were finally done — it was not cancer.

Nine months of carrying that word. And it was not cancer.

The grief nobody prepared me for

What I was not prepared for — what nobody thought to mention in the clinical conversations about surgery and recovery — was the grief.

Not the physical grief, though that was real and significant. But the deeper loss — spiritual, energetic, profoundly feminine — of having both ovaries removed.

I felt helpless. Empty. Like something essential had been taken that was not just physical. Like a part of me that had existed on a level beyond anatomy — a part that held something I couldn't name but recognised as fundamentally me — was simply gone.

In TCM the ovaries are intimately connected to Kidney Jing — the constitutional essence that governs reproductive vitality, creativity and the deepest expression of feminine energy. Their removal is not just a physical event. It is an energetic and spiritual one.

The grief I felt was real. It was valid. And it was one I hadn't had before — different from every other loss in my complex health history, because this one felt like a loss of self in a way I had not anticipated.

I wish someone had told me that was coming. I wish someone had said — this is a grief worth naming, worth tending, worth giving time and space and ceremony.

If you are facing or have experienced this — I want you to know: what you feel is real. All of it.

What I learned

Fifteen years of good choices do not make you immune to falling apart when the conditions become extreme enough. That is not failure. That is being human.

The body keeps score — not to punish, but to communicate. Every symptom, every cyst, every physical crisis is the body attempting to be heard when nothing else has worked.

And when we stop giving the body what it needs — movement, nourishment, rest, connection, purpose — it will find a way to ask for it. Loudly, if necessary.

The pizza was not the problem. The fear underneath the pizza was the problem. And the only thing that began to address the fear — really address it, in the way that bodies need — was a small wirehaired dachshund putting her paws on my knees on a kitchen floor.

Healing is rarely what we planned for.

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Suzanne J Lawson is a holistic wellness practitioner, TCM-informed yoga therapist, reflexologist, reiki master and published author. Find free yoga and wellness practices on YouTube at youtube.com/@wellnesstowomb 🌿