The year was 2010.  It was February.  I felt really stressful at this moment to finalise my PhD thesis.  Due to that, I didn’t take care of myself really well.  What happened then?  

I started to have a bit of swelling on my right cheek.  I had that for a week or two.  I didn’t think too much about it.  Then, on one morning, I started to feel a painful throbbing.  When I looked myself in the mirror, my right cheek was swollen.   I started to feel something hard on the inside of my right cheek using my tongue.   I didn’t know what the thing is.  I brave myself to endure the late winter chill to go to school to edit some of my work.  

I googled the symptoms and I came across this term “Salivary Duct Stone”.  I know what causes it.  It was my fault of not drinking enough water.  I neglected my health.  It was not a time for me to panic.  So, I googled more information on how to get rid of the stone naturally.  Going to the doctor was the last thing on my mind.   I tried several ways to flush the stone out naturally.  I did it!  My salivary duct was a little bit infected because there was yellowish /reddish puss coming out with the stone.  The puss didn’t stop for a while.  Once it stopped, there was a hole inside my cheek and my cheek was still swelling and the throbbing still persisted.  This was when things became unbearable.  

So, I went to the nearby clinic.  The doctor gave me a referral letter and asked me to go to Sunderland Hospital which would take me around 1 hour journey from Durham.  I called K Ila and she sent me to the hospital.  I packed some clothes just in case I have to be warded even though that would be the last thing that I want.  Alhamdulillah, it was just a salivary duct stone.   I showed the doctor the stone and he told me the stone was out and he couldn’t see any stone left.  With that, he gave me a prescription to reduce the swelling and I didn’t need to be warded.  It took me an hour and half to reach home.   

This serves as a lesson for me: I need to drink enough water everyday to keep myself hydrated and avoid of having a stone inside my mouth.  Alhamdulillah, I don’t have any recurrent swelling until now.  

A recent message about burn out that was shared by a colleague makes me think about my friend.  What makes her to be depressed?  Is it triggered by burn out that she experience but go unnoticed?  Now, she has to take medication twice a day to regulate her state of well-being.  She has become medically dependent person.  I asked her, “How do you feel if you forget taking the medication once?”  She would say the effect would be immediate.  She won’t be able to fall asleep (stay awake more than 24 hours) and has difficulty to focus (due to sleep deprivation).  She said “I cannot ‘function’ and I will start to imagine things“.  That’s serious.  Since she was professionally diagnosed as having a depression, she was on medical leave for undisclosed period of time.  

But to tell the truth, it is not easy to distinguish between burn out and depression or to differentiate between burn out and stress unless we get someone who are clinically trained to do the diagnosis.  No one is immune of depression.  There are many cases of people who seem to have everything succumb to the bout of depression.  Some even inflict harm towards others or themselves. 

So, in this matter, one has to be vigilant and aware about one’s well-being.  Also, administrators too play important role to support and be emphatic to those who have started to show some “symptoms”.  Sometime, we overlook the physical symptoms that indicate underlying psychological problems that we might have.   

Of course, one can easily use depression, burn out and stress as an excuse of being less productive.  But, if we look at the person from different angle, does he/she display any symptom that indicate psychological problems that we should be aware of?  Is it fair to “punish” this person as being less productive and thus he/she is given low evaluation for the yearly appraisal even though he/she could not perform well due to undiagnosed psychological problems?  

It is an paradoxical phenomenon.  But perhaps in this rat race world, we need to be more emphatic towards each other, especially towards our own self.  Sometimes, we are more concerned about others and thus, we tend to overlook in taking care of ourselves.