Is Dr Google fuelling your hypochondria?

ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Australia's always been the lucky country. Sunshine, beaches and that one magpie that always seems to know where you live. Yeah, get away from my chip, please. Luck might not cut it anymore. So can we make our own luck and turn this complicated world to our advantage? That's our global roaming summer season. Can Australia surf the world's chaos?

without wiping out fresh new episodes all summer search for global roaming on the ABC listen app or wherever you get your podcasts do you get anxious about health Norman You know, you do. I think everybody who's done medicine does. I mean, I was really bad when I was a medical student. Did you get it when you were a medical student? I did. I had some sleepless nights thinking I had weird and wonderful conditions. I'll tell you mine if you tell me. It's the day before my final pathology exam.

And I'm sitting in the pathology museum looking at a pot. And I explained what a pot is. This is like a plastic box with a pathological sample in it. And you've got to be able to recognize it and then talk about the condition and its treatment and so on. In the pot... front of me was part of the lower leg with osteosarcoma so known as cancer of the bone in it and it says you know

It's changed since then, you know, really bad prognosis, you know, 5%. It has changed. It has changed a lot. 5%, five years survival. And as I'm reading up, my hand is drifting down to my knee and I feel this lump. So I go into this sort of... complete cold sweat thinking my life's over this brilliant career and I go into this dream state and it's the afternoon and I walk across out of the pathology museum across the way to

the hospital into the professor of orthopedic surgery's office. I mean, this is amazing. And the secretary looked at me. And let me in. And I go into his office and he says, well, he's an orthopedic surgeon, remember. So this is, you know, it's not. This is a big deal. Well, sympathy is not exuding from him. Can I put my leg up on the couch? And I say, you know, tell me how long I've got, professor.

And he solemnly feels my knee and he said, have you felt the other one? There's a lump just like it. It's called your tibial tuberosity. In other words, what I was feeling was just the normal lump that anybody listening to our conversation can feel.

And I walked out of his office, and for the first five minutes, I was floating, thinking, I'm going to live. And then five minutes later, I thought, I hope he's not phoning up the professor of pathology telling him about this complete nut job who can't even recognise the tibial tuberosity.

My story I don't feel like is as bad as yours, but I have read things and I see things in the clinic and then I start to believe that I have them. I've learned strategies over time, but at one point I had inflammation between the sternum and the ribs where they connect so you can get... some chest pain. And I convinced myself, Norman, that I had...

sternal cancer. Oh, no. Very rare. Something I've never seen. That's right. Incredibly rare. And that's the usual thing with health anxiety. It's incredibly rare. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, last night I was sleepless because I've got this viral infection. You might hear my throat. I'm getting better from it.

You thought it was tuberculosis. No, I was coughing a lot. And I thought, why am I coughing so much? It must be lung cancer. And I thought, no, this is not how lung cancer presents. And I went back to sleep.

But health anxiety is a real issue. We are making a bit of fun of ourselves, but it's not fun for people who've actually got it. And that's one of the things we're going to be covering on today's Health Report. I'm Priya Alexander on Wurundjeri land. And I'm Norman Swan on Gadigal land.

Also on the show, about one in seven Australians are on an antidepressant with more and more people taking them long term. So what happens when they want to come off the medication? How mindfulness helped one woman through a cancer diagnosis only for a stroke to strike. at a young age.

So I know we're into 2026 now. My God, doesn't time pass quickly. But 2025, as with many years, was a big year for infections. And lucky we're not living in North America where they've had this measles outbreak. Yes, so measles outbreaks in Texas is the most significant one where two school-aged children who were unvaccinated with no underlying health issues tragically died.

But lots of other countries had issues with measles last year. So India, Thailand, Vietnam as well, and Australia. We had imported cases. Last year, we had just over 133 for the year, and it doesn't sound that big. the number, but by comparison, there were 57 cases in 2024, 26 in 2023, and we had none in 2021. So it is a concerning trend.

So it's partly people coming back with measles, but also our immunization rate for measles is dropping down. And according to the experts, it's getting to a level where... We have not got enough herd immunity. And if measles does get in because it's imported from overseas, it could spread naturally the way it has in Texas, killing some kids. Very rapidly. So measles is highly contagious. And that herd immunity number...

95%, which we spoke about a lot last year. And it's currently said that the two dose coverage of the measles vaccine for kids two years of age was 94%. And we spoke to an expert. in 2025 about the fact that kids are catching up. They're getting vaccinated perhaps a little bit later with their second dose, but...

There are some concerning trends here in the fact that people are potentially missing out on being vaccinated on time, and that's going to have implications. And for the first time, influenza overtook COVID. in terms of people, you know, sadly, it's rather macabre to talk about, but people dying of the virus. August was the first month where influenza deaths surpassed. COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic which is not a great milestone but we did talk about the fact that potentially

There was a seasonal component, maybe. You said it was too early to tell. Yeah, but it's settling down and it just shows you how serious influenza is. And these are not insignificant. In October or so, I think there have been about 1800. COVID was still outpacing on the annual basis, outpacing influenza, but influenza was catching up. But we're talking about, you know, the two of them together, either directly or...

directly, causing over 3,000 deaths. I mean, these are a lot of people who are dying. They're not all elderly people. No. And we are under immunized. The Australian Respiratory Surveillance Report says exactly that, that we are under immunised. So nationally, about 11% of adults had received a COVID vaccine in 2025 and influenza coverage for 2025 was around 30%. by the end of the year. I mean, that is...

And really, unfortunately, kids who are aged under five are at higher risk of the flu. They are disproportionately affected and they are under vaccinated. And it's a funded vaccine and safe for any child over six months of age. And anybody who's listening who's pregnant. Get yourself immunized against flu, COVID-19, RSV. It's not good for you.

to get these infections, and it's certainly not good for the kids. And there's that study we covered on three-year-olds of offspring of mothers who got COVID-19 during the pandemic. Yes, that their offspring might be at higher risk of neurodevelopmental diagnoses by the age of three. and that there were certain groups who were more at risk. So if the mother had the infection in the third trimester and if the offspring were male. So lots of reasons to focus on prevention.

And perhaps in the good news space for last year, the RSV vaccine rollout happened for pregnant people in February. So people were offered the vaccine that usually costs $300 for free between 28 and 36 weeks of pregnancy. Significant uptake. So for 2025, around 146,000 doses were given. That's pretty good.

And it's estimated that it resulted in an almost 40% drop in RSV notifications for young children. So the whole intention of vaccinating mum is to protect the baby in their first RSV season. And it's also had an impact on hospital admissions in a positive way.

way. So that's the good news. On ABC Radio National, you're listening to The Health Report. We know that lots of people are taking antidepressants in Australia. And there's been a recent article published in the Medical Journal of Australia, which says one in seven Australians are now taking antidepressants and women are prescribed antidepressants at one and a half times the rate of men. So there's lots of people on these medications.

And whilst they're prescribed a lot, they're often not de-prescribed and that's due to a multitude of factors and withdrawal symptoms are one of them. So this is a topic that impacts a lot of people. I spoke to Professor Catherine Wallace from the University of Queensland, who leads the release program, which stands for Redressing Long-Term Antidepressant Use, to chat more about this huge topic.

What we do know is that Australia is amongst the highest users of antidepressants amongst OECD countries and that use is rising so that we've got two antidepressants in the top 10 prescribed drugs. country, up there with the high blood pressure medications and statins and those commonly used medications. And that's only happened in the last few years. So yes, it's high and it's rising.

Why do we think that's the case? Why do we think that there's more prescriptions happening? Evidence shows that the rising use of antidepressants is largely due to rising long-term use, which tends to suggest that people start antidepressants and then they fail to stop them. Okay, so it's not necessarily that there's more actually being prescribed, but it's a cumulative effect because people are actually staying on them for longer.

Do we think that perhaps there's an element of people being unable to access psychological services, maybe due to availability or financial barriers? Do we think that primary care is turning to medication sooner? I don't know that there's strong evidence. There's certainly people suggesting that. But it seems that internationally, and including Australia, antidepressant use is normalised.

So there's one in seven Australians taking antidepressants now. Half of them have been taking antidepressants for longer than 12 months, which is longer than what the clinical guidelines recommend for most people. And so whether that's lack of... alternatives or whether that's just a culture of pill popping, it's likely to be a combination of factors.

But we know that there are effective ways of helping people with mild to moderate depressive or anxiety disorders with exercise, other lifestyle measures, and also therapy if people want and need therapy.

So you've just mentioned that more than half of people are taking them for longer than 12 months. What are some of the potential risks there? Because you've just said there's not that evidence for longer term use. So what are some of the potential harms? Yeah, so the harms associated with antidepressants include what people describe as emotional numbing. So they're not able to feel the highs of life as well as the lows of life. So the medication can't selectively numb.

There's also things like weight gain and the sexual dysfunction, which includes reduced libido and difficulty reaching orgasm in both men and women. And in older age, risk of falls. Yes. Okay. So an older age risk of falls. What about trying to come off them? Because some people can struggle with withdrawal symptoms, and that's certainly a big component of what's discussed in this paper in the MJA. There's been increasing evidence over the last few years about antidepressant withdrawal symptoms.

how common these symptoms are and how severe they can be in some people and often when people first started taking antidepressants there wasn't much awareness about withdrawal symptoms. But now people are becoming increasingly aware of withdrawal symptoms. And the withdrawal symptoms include emotional symptoms such as anxiety and irritability. And so people often misconstrue those symptoms or misinterpret them as relapses.

an anxiety disorder or interpret that as ongoing need for medication to correct something. And that, we think, does contribute to long-term use of these medications.

But we now know and clinical guidelines internationally recommend hyperbolic tapering of drug dose to minimise withdrawal symptoms. So it is possible for people to come off or most people to come off antidepressants. if they take this approach. So what kind of time period are we talking about there? Are we talking about weeks? Are we talking months?

It really is variable. So for some people who've been on antidepressants for decades, we don't even know yet that it's possible for them to come off their antidepressants. But if people have been on antidepressants for only a shorter period of time, it's likely to... take less time for them to come off but you could take a year you could take several years just very slowly tapering your dose

Some people may be able to do it in months. And we know that there are some drugs that are higher risk for antidepressant withdrawal symptoms than others. Can you just talk us through some of the other withdrawal symptoms that people might experience? You mentioned the emotional ones, but are there others?

Yeah, so there are also symptoms that can help people to distinguish withdrawal from relapse. And those symptoms include things like dizziness, electric shock sensations or brain sort of zaps, a feeling of... disorientation or gastro side effects, palpitations, sweating, vivid dreams that were never part of the original condition for which the antidepressants were started.

So that might suggest it's in fact a withdrawal symptom and that we just have to go really, really slowly, perhaps even slower than you might think, to try and support someone coming off them. That's right. So you might recommend that somebody takes a step down in drug dose every two to four weeks. They might start at 100 milligrams, then take 50, then 25.

then 12.5, then 6.25. And they might think, well, they've got to 6.25. That's not much when I've been on 100 milligrams for years. But actually, that is still doing quite a lot of work. It's suppressing withdrawal symptoms. And that's why you need to take it increasingly slowly.

Is there enough deprescribing guideline information for primary care, do you think, to help patients potentially wean off medications like antidepressants? Well, the work that we're doing, we've developed a toolkit to support GPs to support their patients who want to come off their antidepressant.

to do it safely and successfully. So we've developed drug-specific tapering plans for each of the antidepressants and a slower, faster and even slower version for these drugs so people can select their drug. what speed they want to taper. And then there's a plan that provides step-by-step instructions for how to do it. One thing that we need to sort of work out is how to access these mini doses that are required for tapering because they're not widely available.

And it's often that some of the formulations might not able to go to that really tiny dose that you talked about, that kind of 6.25. Sometimes medications come in a capsule and so it's really difficult to get that tiny dose that your patient might need. That's right.

Compounding pharmacists are coming in handy here, and they're able to manufacture low-dose capsules. But you're right, and that can be expensive for patients. And is it fair to say, Catherine, that you're not suggesting that absolutely everybody needs... to wean their antidepressants. There are some people who may need longer-term therapy beyond that 12 months or two years. Is it fair to say that we're not talking about everybody here?

Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to do is provide the supports and... tools and resources to help people who do want to come off their antidepressant because a lot of people started these drugs and weren't aware and even their prescribers weren't aware how common withdrawal symptoms were and how severe they can be.

And now they find themselves stuck or unable to stop. And so we're trying to support that. That was Professor Catherine Wallace, who's a GP and leads the release program at the University of Queensland. And of course... Always do this wean with your health professional guiding you. We were having a bit of a laugh.

at the beginning of the show, Norman, about our experiences with health anxiety. To be fair, a laugh at our own expense. That's right. But it's not a fun topic, really. It's not. And for people who have health anxiety, it can be quite debilitating.

It can actually be a barrier to people coming and seeking care because they can get quite anxious about what might be found. And it's quite common. One in 20 can deal with it in their lifetime. And this leads to over-investigation, tests that you might not need.

going down avenues where you don't necessarily get answers and can raise the anxiety level, tests that find out stuff that doesn't actually matter. I mean, it's an enormous issue. So we thought we'd cover this issue in some depth, and our producer, Shelby Traynor, has prepared this.

The hypochondriac thing, I think people assumed that I wanted attention and I did not want attention. I wanted the symptoms to go away and I wanted to be able to do the things that I love. You might have called someone a hypochondriac before. I have. I've also called myself a hypochondriac many times. but it's a term that those in the know don't really use anymore because it's steeped in stigma and it's typically used to dismiss people who are experiencing real distress.

What's now known as health anxiety is increasingly being recognised as a genuine condition that can take over a person's life. You might see someone obsessively checking their body for signs and symptoms of illness. spend a lot of time searching the internet. They might seek a lot of reassurance from their loved ones or medical professionals. I've dealt with health anxiety before.

And when it was at its worst about 10 years ago, I had no idea it was a diagnosis or that there was treatment that worked. Experts suspect many people are still going without, being shunted from doctor to doctor instead of to treatment for anxiety. But diagnosing someone with health anxiety is tricky for doctors. Because we don't want to be alarmed or raise false alarms, but we also don't want to ignore things. So it's quite a delicate balance.

There are many reasons a person might develop health anxiety. A family history, a stressful job. For Emma, it was actually a medical emergency that kicked things off. Rocked up to hospital. They did an x-ray. They were like, oh, your lungs collapsed. I was 19, I think. My parents lived overseas, so I was alone. Everything happened really fast. They were like putting tubes in me and talking me through what was going on, but I was sedated, so I didn't know what was happening.

And then I spent a week in hospital. So that was really scary. Mum came from Dubai, where she lived, so she jumped straight on a plane and I held it together until I saw mum and then lost it. It was not so much being in hospital, but it was when I got out.

that I just kept thinking it would happen again. Doctors had explained to Emma that this was a real possibility, so there were warning signs she needed to look out for. Every time my back would hurt, I'd be like, oh, my lungs collapsed again. I need to go to hospital. And I did that so many times. They just would take me in and do an x-ray and then send me home. No one asked, how are you feeling? Like, are you okay? Or why are we jumping to this big extreme of presenting to hospitals?

Health anxiety can be very adaptive for a lot of people in certain circumstances, but it's when it's really getting in the way of life and becoming very debilitating, that's when it's really helpful to get more support for it. This is Jill Newby, a professor of clinical psychology at the Black Dog Institute. She researches health anxiety, which can sometimes be difficult to pick up in the doctor's office.

That's partly because anxiety can manifest in physical symptoms. Digestive trouble, nausea, dizziness, disrupted sleep. It can be hard to separate the physical from the mental. Emma's collapsed lung was spontaneous. It wasn't due to anxiety. But the symptoms that emerged later were, she just didn't know it at the time.

Because it wasn't only the lung. That was the main event, shall we say. But there were lots of other symptoms like mouth ulcers, digestive problems as well. Yeah, I had rashes. Rashes? Which is another thing. Unexplainable rashes. Yeah. And headaches, I had headaches for about four months. And they eventually, because I forced them to scan my brain and to make sure it wasn't a tumour, they were like, it's a tension headache. And that's just what a tension headache feels like.

But it was constant Googling, constant body scanning, making my partner check my body, making my friends check my parents and just like telling anyone to try to confirm my findings.

Health anxiety existed well before the internet, but the constant googling that Emma describes has become more and more common, and it has its own name, cyberchondria. What people used to do is probably consult with their doctor or they consulted with things like encyclopedias to try and get a sense of what might be going on in their body. But now we have so much information at our fingertips. It's free, accessible, 24-7, whenever we need it, for whatever we need it for.

Googling was a big part of my own health anxiety, but what often started out as a search for something that would calm me down would just end up making things worse. And I'm not the only one. The research that has been done in this area has shown that when you do spend more time searching about your symptoms or about illness, it can escalate your anxiety, so much so that it becomes uncontrollable.

I used to see clients at the anxiety clinic who would spend hours per day searching the internet about symptoms and illness and it was like a compulsive behaviour that they just couldn't control. You could be at work and in your mind you're like, I just need to quickly check this symptom because I've got a new ulcer. A new one's popped up or this rash on my leg. I'll just quickly Google that. So it's like it takes a lot of your time.

I think that's the two things that I noticed was the time spent worrying and the money I was spending on GPs and tests. An individual can spend hundreds of dollars on tests, scans and appointments each year. That's a direct cost, but a recent systematic review found the indirect cost of health anxiety is much higher. That's when a person has less productive hours, takes more days off work and loses wages as a result. If we rush to investigate with too many tests...

We often create anxiety. It requires a person to pay money and to take time out of their life to have that done so that their anxiety is building up just at the prospect of having a test.

Kathy Andronis is a Melbourne GP who also works as a psychotherapist. She meets with anxious patients daily. When we do see people like that, the most important thing we need to do is to help them feel calm and safe in the room with us. While there are no guidelines for GPs on how to approach health anxiety, Dr Andronis says it's important that all patients trust that their doctor is taking their concerns seriously.

This means doctors should be taking a thorough history and ordering tests when necessary, but also they should know when it's time to stop testing. It's about doing the right test at the right time. and been able to communicate very clearly that we are doing this together in collaboration and we're just going to take it slowly, step by step, because we don't want to be alarmed or raise false alarms.

Doctors get anxious too, about missing something serious or being seen as dismissive. This is where Dr Andronis says it's the doctor's job to check in on themselves. and stay grounded. We should be in the position where we're able to think, OK, this person's really anxious. Let's just slow things down and just become a bit more systematic about it.

If nothing comes up but the anxiety remains, this is where Dr Andronis reassures her patients. We can never say never. You know, we never know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow or the day after. but reassure the patient that if anything changes, that we're quite happy to revisit the case.

However, there can come a point when seeking this kind of reassurance becomes compulsive. So it's getting in the way of being able to function at work, at home. That's usually an indication that they probably would benefit from CBT. It took a long time for Emma to find a doctor who broke this cycle. For years, she was poked, prodded and scanned any time she felt off.

And then eventually I presented to the ED and he was like, I think you're having a panic attack or an anxiety attack. And that's why you're experiencing shortness of breath and like that pain. And I think you should say psychologist. What was your immediate reaction when the doctor said that? I think because I had presented to the emergency department so many times, I was like, I think he has a point.

I mean, he was so kind about it. He was so empathetic. He didn't make me feel judged or he genuinely was showing empathy and care. So he did it in such a way that made me take his advice and go and see a psychologist.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is effective for health anxiety, and there is a form of CBT adapted specifically for the condition, CBT-HA. It helps people identify when they're having irrational thoughts, It also helps people develop better coping skills to manage their anxiety rather than seeking reassurance from loved ones or doctors.

Emma went to therapy for 18 months and says she wasn't the first to notice changes. My partner and my parents actually said... you seem different and I was like what do you mean and they were like I'd get a rash for example and I wouldn't immediately be like I need to go to the doctor right now I'd be like

oh, I have a rash, it'll probably go away in a couple of days. That's huge. Yeah. Somehow therapy helped me to not elevate it so high straight away. So my big thing is when I get a sore back, that's usually a trip to the hospital. Now when I get a sob back, I'm like, what else could it be? Like I do Pilates and I run and I go to the gym. So it's probably a pulled muscle.

And I think in therapy, she got me to like really unpack what the actual symptoms were. Because with a collapsed lung, the real symptom is you can't breathe. And then it's trying to distinguish between an anxiety attack or a panic attack. Because you feel like you're dying. You feel like you can't breathe. Yeah.

So how do you bring yourself back down to get past the episode? Then I can identify, is it lingering or has it passed enough that I can go and do something else? And if it's still there, then I can get help. And nine times out of ten, it's not there anymore. I felt like, you know, a very small amount of people were like, I wanted to be like that. And it was not fun. It was so, so crap.

To constantly have these thoughts of, you know, the worst thing's going to happen to me, I'm going to get a chronic illness and I'm never going to be able to recover. No one would choose to live like that. It's scary and it's debilitating, really. And I wanted support. I wanted to be back to my normal self. Emma worries that stigma could be keeping people from seeking help. And Professor Newby agrees that trivialising this condition, dismissing people as just being hypochondriacs, is doing harm.

People, they might have a family member that they label as a hypochondriac and laugh at their worries or concerns, but they don't realise how distressing these anxieties are for the person. Just even recognising this on a community level that it's a serious mental health condition but there are good treatments available is really important so then people can start to get the right kind of help.

I saw a psychologist for the first time when I was 27, but my lung first collapsed when I was 19. So that's a lot of years. In hindsight, I wish I'd spoken to someone earlier. With therapy, I think it's talking to someone and being... validated, knowing that you're not the only one experiencing it, even talking to you. But, you know, when we first spoke, I was like, oh, cool. Yeah. Someone else gets it. For me, being open about it has really helped.

Emma Mannering there was talking to producer of The Health Report, Shelby Traynor, and earlier you heard from Professor Joe Newby and Dr. Kathy Andronis. And we'll have some links to online resources to help you with health anxiety, inform you, and maybe even undergo online cognitive behavioral therapy. That'll be on the Health Reports website because that's where we are. On Radio National.

On The Health Report, we've been running a series, A Stroke of Luck, and last week we heard from Kylie and her experience having had a stroke, but this week we hear from Julia Norman and I... think this is a really insightful story. Gillian's had a cancer diagnosis. followed by a hemorrhagic stroke. And the key here is they're close friends, which preceded the strokes. And they've reconnected. And Gillian has relied on mindfulness through her journey.

I think people will be quite moved because you also hear from Gillian's husband. It gives you some really special insights. So here's episode two of A Stroke of Luck. Were you connected when you were diagnosed with breast cancer? And that was not long after your son, James, was born? Yeah, I was going back to work in December. And so I'd been back five days, literally. And by the week end, I realised I had cancer. It was an awful shock. And at that stage, it was the worst.

thing that had happened to me, of course. It was shit. And then when you went back to work, you weren't back that long before you got made redundant. Yeah, I think it was about 18 months. That was really hard, but actually I really wanted it because I knew that I had to do something different. A friend said to me, would you like to come and do some mindfulness training with us?

Who knows what would have happened? And I thought, he could have been setting up a blue cheese factory and I would have said, it's good. I'm down with blue cheese. I'm good. In the next week, we had some training and it was really funny because at the end of it, everyone passed except for me. But then that ended up being your whole job. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I made a fairly nice niche for myself around mindfulness and compassion.

So your life changed after the cancer diagnosis and with the stroke your life's changed again. Yeah. I feel like our stories of the day of a stroke are pretty similar. Yeah. Absolutely. I had a bad headache, but I'd just taken some Nurofen because... You know, every day you can have a headache. And I had a presentation for my client. I was just about to step on stage. And then I said, oh, actually...

Mmm, this feels like it's a bit more than a headache. Well, the call came right out of the blue. They said something along the lines of Steve, we're here at a conference with Jill and Jill's had a turn. And she's in good hands. They gave me sort of, you know, the usual things you'd expect which make you think, oh, holy shit, it's not quite as normal as.

You'd want it to be? And they said, you know, the paramedics are here, they're taking her to the hospital. I could hear in their voices that they were concerned and... You know, it wasn't sort of a normal thing for them to be dealing with on a Monday afternoon at a conference. Pretty soon the ambulance that came rushed me through St Vincent's. And I can only remember going down the corridor and then that was it. And it was it for basically a month.

And that was where they said, have I had a conversation with you about what to do in this situation? Because everyone has one. Yeah, exactly. And of course, I just went, yeah, sure, we have. Absolutely. So you lied. Well, I possibly. I don't know. I just felt that we probably had had some sort of conversation. at some time, some point, that gave me the sort of impression that you wanted to live? I have really vivid dreams during that time. So every situation was a hospital.

and I just need to get to the door, and someone would come and they'd tell me what I had to do next. From their perspective, I don't know how my son, who was 12 at the time...

reacted really, and I still really don't know. But for my husband, he went into full, just keep everyone calm. You know, the first week you kind of think, oh, Jill will probably... come good at some point in the next few days and things recover and then it became more obvious for us visiting that wasn't just the hemorrhage but it was the impact the hemorrhage had on your breathing

throat muscles, your leg, your arm. So we spent a lot of time watching to see if your right arm or right leg would move, you know, would jump up if we saw it move until the nurse and they'd come back and go, no, I think that's just, you know, whatever. There were things like, well, we can start you coming out of the coma for 15 minutes or half an hour or a couple of hours to see if you could breathe on your own. I couldn't speak because I was still having trouble breathing.

So I can't do anything except for go inward and just be beneath all of the things that were going on top of my, almost in top of my chest in a way. to the bit underneath that was just like, I'll just stay here and it'll be okay. And it might be that I can't do anything except to move my eyeballs, for example.

And that would be okay. I was so chilled. It was almost like there were so many things about my internal body, if you like, that I had to get right before we started worrying about the outside. The reality is it took me another month, I think, to actually be looking around and knowing that's a bottle and that's a computer. For me, it was if I... get any improvement from this, like just lying in the bed, feeling this next breath. If I could get any more than that, it would be a miracle.

It was really hard for people to come and see me like that because they were assuming the worst, that I would never get better from that place. And it's interesting now when I look at my dad's diary. It's got no other emotion in it, but it'll say, Jill smiled at me today, or Jill started rolling our eyes at something. You could communicate certain things with your eyes. There was some humour in it sometimes because I know what your looks are.

And there are definitely some looks where you're going like I'm frightened or I'm not happy or get me out of here. Like I could see that sometimes in those eyes. So three months in hospital, then you went to the rehabilitation hospital. Yeah, that's right. They got me to walk, but even now it's like a terrible limp. But I got to limping, so that's a good sign. And they also had speech. And that's probably the thing I've had the most success in, in that you can...

Probably just about anything else you could live with if you're able to communicate. I think the stroke has been just so much harder to deal with than the cancer. The stroke actually is life-altering in a physical way. I can't use my legs, I can't use my arm, and I still think every day, bloody hell, how did I get like this? You had all this mindfulness training. Has it helped at all? Yeah, it definitely really was helpful for me initially. Really interesting though.

Once I got to rehab, I actually didn't remember that I knew how to meditate. I just didn't. It's like it just never happened. And it was only about the six months mark, so I was in rehab. At that stage, one of my old friends came into the rehab and said, oh, how are you going with mindfulness? I said, what do you mean mindfulness? And so it's taken me probably around six months after.

I was at home to actually feel like I can do this, I can meditate and I can do compassionate practices that were my life before. It is what it is, like that acceptance. I think, came from a mindfulness and also the active hope, still feeling like every day you do the best you can. That was Gillian Cootes and Kylie Betts. And you can check out all four episodes of A Stroke of Luck on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

That's it for The Health Report this week, but don't forget our sister podcast, What's That Rash?, where we answer the health questions everyone is asking. This week, it's Don't Sweat It. conventional versus natural deodorants. And why do we have body odor in the first place? And you can hear what I use. Oh, wow. Everyone's going to tune in now. Sniff my armpit. Oh, geez. see you next week see you then

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