Living in Survival Mode: How Abuse Reshapes the Body

One year before I left my husband, my body was struggling in ways I couldn’t explain. I was exhausted no matter how much I slept. My joints ached constantly, I had frequent headaches, and at times I experienced crippling stomach pain, yet every medical test came back completely normal.

Around that same period, I caught Covid and was extremely unwell for weeks. Shortly after, I had an accident where my heel got caught in the spokes of a moving bicycle and I needed 15 stitches. It was a painful injury, but one that should have healed within a few weeks.

Instead, it became a long and drawn out ordeal. The wound repeatedly became infected, and I was eventually admitted to hospital, where I spent a week being treated for a serious infection that came close to sepsis. It took five months for my foot to finally heal. I felt like my immune system was at ground zero.

I went back to my doctor, who ordered more detailed blood tests to try to understand what was happening. Almost everything came back within normal range, except one set of results that stood out immediately.

She explained that the hormones responsible for helping the body cope with stress were drastically out of balance. The part of my system designed to keep me alert and functioning under stress was working overtime, while the hormones that should help you wake up, feel steady, and get through the day had almost flatlined. In simple terms, my body was operating in survival mode, but it was running out of fuel.

My doctor looked at the results and said, “These stress hormone patterns are what I would expect to see in a soldier who has just returned from a battlefield.”

I remember thinking, I feel like I’m in a battlefield too.