> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # HEAT That Does Not Leave - URL: https://soul-harbor-therapies.ghost.io/heat-that-does-not-leave/ - Published: 2026-08-01T16:15:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-01T16:15:31.000Z - Author: Andrea Robertson-Begg **The Slow Burn: Percy and the Work of Staying Balanced** On Monday — the 13th of July, 2026 — on Sky News, the headline read: *Around 2,700 people believed to have died due to UK heatwaves, experts say.* A second line followed, less arresting but no less significant: *scientists estimating that approximately 59% of the deaths during the May heatwave were linked not simply to temperature, but to the additional heat burden caused by human activity*. I read it several times. Then I put my phone face down on the bed, because the bed was the coolest surface in the room. The fan was beating its air uselessly across the crumpled sheets, and my hand needed somewhere to rest that wasn't radiating warmth back at me. There are many ways to write in response to a headline like that. A clickbait headline with no real clarity about how the data was gathered or attributed — just *experts*, hovering somewhere behind the number, unnamed, unaccountable. But it was the figure itself that pulled me backwards, to a time when death — specifically excess deaths — was published weekly. A grim ticker-tape the whole country learned to read. I have no doubt there is an expert somewhere in England right now, watching a similar chart climb. We just aren't being told about it in the same way. The counting continues. Only the telling has gone quiet. I could write about climate change and policy. About the slow arithmetic of a warming planet. The government is running its largest home defence exercise in decades next year, planning for cyberattacks, sabotage, hybrid threats under the cover of night — real risks, worth taking seriously. But heat like this isn't on that list. It doesn't arrive as a hostile power. It just arrives, and stays, and the country's attention is elsewhere. I noticed the same earlier this year, writing to my own MP about something adjacent. A power cut that took out our landline and its "backup" in the same instant, because both, it turned out, depended on the same fragile chain of mains power and digital network. The copper wire that used to run into this house needed nothing from the grid. It simply worked. That baseline has gone, and what fills the gap is whatever the household can build for itself. But today I am not writing about policy, or committees, or a letter still waiting on a proper answer. I am writing about the thing underneath all of it, the thing that doesn't wait for a minister's reply. The body. Our personal environment. Our individual circumstances, each one its own small, unwitnessed infrastructure. Collectively, we become a statistic — a number to set against last year's number, a line on a chart some expert somewhere is methodically still drawing. But on a personal level, this is never a statistic. It is an experience. It is adaptation, coping, the daily, granular work of living inside exceptional heat with a body that has fewer margins than most. What follows is my reflection on that. On the persistent, often lonely, constant work of trying to remain balanced inside a body, *when the heat does not leave*. --- **The House That Became a Beast** I live in a 1930s semi-detached house. It was not built to withstand excessive heat. Nobody, in 1930s England, was designing for this. There are no cavity walls, no meaningful insulation, none of the modern architecture that at least tries to negotiate with a changing climate. Just beautiful, solid red brick, the kind estate agents call "character." In autumn and spring, that brick holds warmth like a simple kindness. The house exhales gently at you on a cold evening, and somehow it feels like a comforting hug. But in the deep of summer, that same generosity turns predatory. The house becomes a beast. It absorbs heat all day, swallowing it into its core. Brick by diligent brick. And by early evening it has become something with appetite. Then it holds on. It refuses to release what it has absorbed, even long after the sun has gone down and when the sky has softened to that deceptive, cooling peachy blue that promises relief. The house has no intention of delivering respite. What was once shelter becomes a slow-burning kiln, and I am the thing being fired inside. I am not unique in the struggle to keep a house cool. Millions of people in millions of houses like mine are doing the same invisible labour right now. In homes that were never retrofitted, never insulated, never brought into a conversation with the climate they now have to survive. Nobody came to insulate this house. Nobody is coming. Whatever resilience this building has, I will have to build into it myself, with blackout curtains and reflective film and the same improvised ingenuity I bring to everything else. But it feels deeply personal when you are the one living inside it, hour after hour, watching the thermometer with the specific dread of someone who knows exactly what is coming. Over the last week, indoor temperatures have been kissing 29°C. Not for an afternoon. For days. 29°C doesn't sound devastating when written down like that, in black and white, flat on the page. People search, at great expense, for exactly this kind of heat on their holidays, book flights for it, lie by pools in it, call it *glorious*. But the issue for me isn't the temperature itself. It's the duration of it. It's the absence of an ending. Because the heat does not leave, and without that nightly reset, without the drop, the exhale, the several degrees of mercy that a body needs to repair itself, the body cannot recover. It just keeps paying down a debt that never clears. --- **The Engine That Cannot Rest** The human body is an engine built around balance, held within a startlingly narrow internal temperature range. A degree or two either side of 37°C, and everything from thought to digestion starts to falter. When external heat rises, the body responds with astonishing, almost tender intelligence. Blood is redirected toward the skin, rerouted from the deep organs to the surface, where it can shed warmth into the air. Sweat forms, cooling by evaporation, the oldest air conditioning there is. The heart works harder, pumping heat away from the vital core like water bailed from a boat. For short periods, this system is more than enough. It is elegant. It is why humans can run marathons in the sun and swim in cold seas and still come home to a stable, unremarkable 37°C. But sustained heat tells a different story. It doesn't ask the body for a sprint. It asks for a marathon with no finish line. Hydration begins to quietly bleed away, litre by unnoticed litre. Electrolytes — particularly sodium — are shed through sweat, and taken without asking. The cardiovascular system runs a race it never agreed to enter, day after day, night after night. Sleep becomes fragmented, stealing back the very hours meant for restoration, the hours when the body does its repair work. Thought loses its sharp edges. Words go missing mid-sentence, patience thins to nothing and emotional thresholds lower, so that small things — a dropped spoon, a slow website, a raised voice on the television — land like grating gears. Nothing about this is dramatic in the moment. It is a slow, cumulative erosion, the kind you don't notice happening until you notice what's missing. And when night temperatures don't fall enough for the body to properly cool, that strain compounds — day after day after day, interest accruing on a loan the body never chose to take out. This is when heat stops being weather. This is when it becomes something the body has to actively survive. --- **Percy, and His Uninvited Passenger** What I am holding within this heat is not just the environment. It is the reality of living in a hot house with Percy — my stoma — and his large hernia. Keeping the house cool is not a matter of comfort, the way it might be for someone reaching for a fan out of mild irritation. For me, it is a matter of structural integrity. Mine, and his. For anyone reading this without a stoma of your own, and I hope you keep reading, because this is exactly who I'm writing for. A stoma is an opening, surgically created, where a section of the bowel is brought out through the abdominal wall so that waste can leave the body into an external bag rather than through the usual route. Mine has a name. Percy. Naming him wasn't whimsy; it was a way of making peace with something that arrived, uninvited, in the middle of my life, and has stayed. Most of the time, living with Percy is straightforward. Far more ordinary than people imagine and far less dramatic than the word "stoma" suggests to someone who's never had to think about it. But heat changes the terms and conditions of our contract. Let's talk about the mechanics of a colostomy bag — because understanding this is the difference between reading this piece as an abstraction and reading it as something you can actually feel. A stoma bag relies on a hydrocolloid adhesive flange which is attached to the skin. The flange is a flat, skin-coloured disc that forms the seal between my body and the bag. Under normal conditions, this adhesive responds to body heat, softening just enough to mould itself to the contours of my tummy, creating a secure, almost intimate seal. It works reliably, invisibly, 90 to 95% of the time. It is, frankly, a small miracle of design, and on an ordinary day I don't think about it at all. In this heat, the alchemy breaks down. The adhesive softens too far. It drinks in too much moisture, my own sweat. It loses its structural integrety, the very quality that made it useful in the first place. It begins to feel, under my fingers when I check it, as though it is melting. The flange turns into something unstable — a soft, gelatinous substance, like a jellyfish left too long on the tideline, all shape and purpose gone. It no longer holds. And when that happens, the bag stops defending Percy. It breaches. And when it breaches, it fails spectacularly. Not a slow leak you can manage with quiet dignity, but a sudden, undignified crisis, often in a public place, often with no warning. There is no buffer in that moment. Only urgency. Only the raw, cold-sweat panic of mess, embarrassment, and exposure. The very specific fear of every ostomate, magnified by heat into something closer to living dread. --- **The Skin Beneath** Beneath the bag, tasked with protecting Percy from that exact humiliation, the skin carries its own burden, largely invisible to anyone but me. It sweats continuously, but the moisture has nowhere to go. Trapped under an adhesive seal, it cannot evaporate the way sweat elsewhere on the body can. Instead it pools, over-hydrating the already-failing adhesive from beneath, a pincer movement of heat from both sides. The skin around Percy is fragile at the best of times. It is thinner, more reactive, more easily wounded than the skin anywhere else on my body. In this heat, it becomes irritated, sore, angry in a way that makes ordinary movement — bending, stretching, simply sitting down — something to be negotiated first. Medical guidance tells you to keep the skin clean and dry. It's sound advice, most of the year. But during this level of heat, "*dry*" becomes a myth, a word from a different reality. Through trial and error, the kind of uncelebrated problem-solving that living with a stoma teaches you, (whether you want the lesson or not) I have fashioned a small "bib" for Percy. A piece of cotton fabric, tucked carefully between him and the bag, acting as a sponge for the excess sweat. It works, sometimes. It buys me an hour, an afternoon, a night of slightly reduced pressure on the skin. But when indoor temperatures reach 35°C, even this small act of rebellion fails, and I am back to checking the seal every hour, sometimes more, my whole day rearranged around a piece of adhesive plastic the size of a coaster! And that is where the frustration truly lives. Not in the effort itself, I don't resent the effort. But in the hard edges of what effort and adaptation can actually achieve, and the moment where you realise, again, that you cannot simply try harder your way out of physics. --- **The Belt as Paradox** Alongside all of this, I wear a hernia support belt. Parastomal hernias are one of the most common long-term complications of stoma surgery. A significant proportion of ostomates will develop some degree of herniation at the stoma site over time. It is not a failure of care, mine or my surgeon's. It is not always a preventable flaw, however carefully anyone behaves. More often, it is simply the inevitable outcome of a body adapting to a radically altered architecture. A structural compromise disguised, in clinical letters, as a "*complication*." To form a stoma, a surgeon must thread a section of bowel through the abdominal wall. In doing so, they create a doorway through layers of muscle and fascia that evolved, over millions of years, to act as a seamless, pressurised container — a hull, essentially, built to hold everything in. That opening, however meticulously sutured, however skilfully closed around it, remains a permanent breach in that hull. It is a necessary wound. But it is a vulnerable one, sitting squarely in the path of the body's constant internal mechanics. Every cough, every laugh, every sneeze pressing outward against it, for the rest of a life. A parastomal hernia occurs when the contents of the abdomen — loops of bowel, or aprons of fatty tissue — spill outward through this frayed seam, creating a bulge beside or behind the stoma. Sometimes it is subtle, a slight asymmetry felt more than seen, something only I would notice. Sometimes it becomes pronounced, entirely redrawing the map of the abdomen. And sometimes, like mine, it becomes a second entity in its own right — an uninvited passenger that alters my centre of gravity and has to be negotiated with, constantly. It is akin to the heaviest months of pregnancy, but without the anticipated joy waiting at the end of it: tying shoelaces, sitting behind a steering wheel, picking up a toy from the floor for someone else's child. They all become a complex calculus of weight-shifting and twisting that sends a ripple of compensatory strain down through hips, back, and knees. There is no singular culprit. Only a convergence of mechanical, biological, and temporal forces, arriving together over years. The abdominal wall has been fundamentally rewired; its tissues may be thinner now, its scaffolding less resilient than it once was. Every increase in intra-abdominal pressure — lifting a bag, stretching to close a window, a sudden cough, even the simple rhythm of walking — acts as a slow, persistent tide pushing against that compromised seam. The tissue stretches. The body, trying to accommodate, quietly gives way, a millimetre at a time, in a negotiation I am not consulted on. In clinical terms, a hernia is often spoken of as something that has "*gone wrong*." But living with one, it feels less like a malfunction and more like a material truth: the body adapted as far as its biology can allow, and then it stopped being able to hold the line. It is not a failure. It is a limit. And from that limit, a different, more vigilant kind of care begins. Heat adds a cruel dimension to all of this. It is not a direct cause of the hernia, but it is a profound strain upon it. In this kind of heat, the body is already exhausted before the hernia even enters the conversation. Muscles are fatigued. Bones ache in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with dehydration. The sense of internal support — the background feeling of being *held together* — feels less steady. The hernia becomes more noticeable. Heavier. More insistent, as though it too is suffering in the heat and wants me to know it. And so the belt becomes essential. Not as a cure, (nothing cures this) but as scaffolding. A way of offering the abdominal wall something it can no longer provide for itself, from the outside in. The belt is my copper wire. A private, self-built resilience standing in for a baseline my body no longer has. Without it, pain increases, function decreases, risk escalates. But in this heat, the belt becomes its own paradox, its own small cruelty. It is a second containment — a necessary cage that traps warmth, restricts airflow, and compounds the heat already baking my skin and Percy beneath it. It is uncomfortable. Constricting. Relentless. A furnace worn against the body, put on deliberately, every single day, because the alternative is worse. --- **The Discipline of Water** For ostomates, hydration is not a suggestion. It is a strict, daily discipline, learned the hard way and never fully unlearned. Under ordinary conditions, fluid management is straightforward, almost automatic. In heat, the mechanics of the gut shift, and everything becomes deliberate again. Fluid is lost rapidly through sweat. Electrolytes are depleted faster than they can be replaced. And Percy's output changes with the temperature, as though he has his own weather system. He can "*dry up*," slowing transit and increasing the risk of a blockage. A visceral, genuinely painful emergency that can escalate quickly to hospitalisation. The stoma itself can swell and change shape in the heat, demanding constant vigilance, constant small adjustments that a person without one would never have to think about even once. Hydration must be constant, and (this surprises people) it cannot just be water. Electrolytes are the anchor. Sugary drinks or squash feel like a solution, the obvious reach on a hot day, but they deceive: they draw fluid *into* the bowel rather than supporting its absorption, making things worse under the guise of help. So I keep it simple. I make an internal coolant of my own: filtered water, a dash of freshly squeezed lemon juice, grated fresh ginger, a small pinch of salt. Served always at room temperature, never cold. Because the body, even now, even exhausted, asks not to be shocked. Ice water is an assault on a system already crying out for equilibrium, not stimulation. Cold drinks can trigger cramping, speed transit unpredictably, and disrupt the fragile balance further — the opposite of relief, dressed up as relief. What is needed is support. Not shock. Not stimulation. Just steady, patient, room-temperature kindness, sip by sip, all day. --- **The Heist of Sleep** And if that were not enough, sleep has all but abandoned me. The body requires coolness to descend into restorative rest — ideally around 16–18°C, allowing core temperature to drop and signalling to every system that it is safe to repair itself. But my bedroom has been sitting at 26°C for nights on end. It is too warm to let go, too warm to fully switch off, and so sleep becomes shallow and interrupted, a held breath rather than a rest. So the night becomes a heist movie, structured entirely around stealing cool air. Staying up until midnight, waiting for the outside temperature to drop before cracking the windows open. Waking at 4am — not by choice, by necessity — to open external doors, pulling cooler air through the hallway in the brief window where it exists, before the day claims it back. Closing everything again at 5:30am, sealing the house shut, trying to trap what little coolness has been gathered like something precious and fast disappearing. If I am lucky, the bedroom drops to 24°C. And then the slow, hellish climb begins again. The sun rising like an opponent I have to face every single day without having recovered from yesterday's round. There is something quietly devastating about watching that thermometer rise. knowing exactly how much labour went into lowering it those few degrees, and knowing, with total certainty, that the sun will win again today. Adaptation becomes instinctive, a whole second job I never applied for. Curtains are drawn at sunrise, not for privacy but for defence. Heavier fabrics replace lighter ones, blocking solar gain. Rugs are lifted. Furnishings reduced. Anything that holds heat is quietly exiled from the rooms I live in. Cold showers, taken not for cleanliness but as a kind of first aid. Fans, angled and re-angled. Damp cloths on pulse points — wrists, feet, the back of the neck. The old, unglamorous wisdom that still, somehow, helps. Moments of absolute stillness during peak heat, because movement itself becomes a cost I can't always afford to pay. None of it solves the problem. But it reduces the load, and some days, reducing the load is the whole of the achievement. I cried when my neighbours cut down their beautiful trees, planted by a previous occupant twenty-five years ago. Not just for the loss of a beautiful, living thing, though that alone would have been enough. But because I knew exactly what their absence would mean, in ways my neighbours perhaps hadn't considered. Trees are the lungs and the air conditioning of a neighbourhood. They create shade, hold moisture in the air, soften the harsh edges of an environment that is only going to get harsher. Their new concrete patio does none of this. It is a passive aggressor. It swallows the sun's energy all day and exhales it back at my house long after dark, radiating through the wall we share with the evening. I can feel the difference. Not abstractly, not as a statistic on the news. Physically. In the way the air sticks to the skin at 10pm when it should be softening. In the way the nights refuse, now, to cool the way they used to. This is the same societal withdrawal again, just wearing a different coat. What used to be shared — shade, water, a cool room that wasn't yours to pay the electricity bill on — has been handed back to the private garden, the private patio, the private choice of whoever happens to live next door. Trickle-down economics, it turns out, does not trickle down as cool air. It trickles down as concrete. --- **The Frequency Beneath the Skin** And then, beneath all of this, is another layer, deeper still. Heat does not merely sit on the skin. It breaches the nervous system. It shortens the breath, tightens the edges of tolerance, and generates a low, persistent hum of agitation. A frequency that's difficult to name but impossible to mute, humming under every conversation, every task, every attempt at ordinary life. This is where I return to something quieter. Not as a cure, but what can soothe, a thread to hold onto when there is very little else within reach. And here, for once, the withdrawal runs the other way. Everywhere else in this piece is a baseline that was taken and never replaced; the copper wire, the shaded street. But this is different. This is a baseline that was never expensive to begin with. Mudras, breathwork, a damp cloth on the wrists. None of it needs a grant or a minister's approval. It needs only to be known, and passed on, hand to hand, the way it once was, before self-care became something you paid a class to learn rather than something an elder simply showed you. It costs nothing. It is available to anyone. And on the worst days, it is disproportionately powerful for exactly that reason. A hand resting in a mudra. Thumb touching finger, not for ceremony, not for performance, but for a somatic signal. Inviting the body to recognise its own boundaries again, to remember it has edges, when the heat makes everything feel like it's bleeding into everything else. A way of locating something steady inside the slow boil. There are three I return to, again and again, like old friends who ask nothing of me: **Apana Mudra** — thumb, middle finger, and ring finger gently meeting. A gesture of grounding. It acts as a subtle weight, pulling attention downward, away from the racing mind and anchoring it in the stability of the lower body. Quietly supportive when everything feels like too much and there is nowhere obvious to put that feeling. **Chin Mudra** — thumb and index finger touching, palms turned upward. A soft opening. It creates a fraction more space in the lungs, a slight, deliberate easing of the mental grip that heat tightens without permission. **Jal Mudra** — the tip of the little finger meeting the tip of the thumb, the three middle fingers extended. Amid an oppressive, drying heat, it is a symbolic draught of coolness, a tactile suggestion of fluidity, when actual fluidity — water, rain, relief — feels very far away. What matters in these moments is not the precision of the gesture. It is the pause it creates. The breath follows, not forced, not commanded, just slightly decelerated. The exhale lengthens, enough to lower the internal rpm by a fraction, which on some days is the entire, modest victory available to me. Meditation, in this kind of heat, is not about transcendence. It is about pure regulation. It is retreating to the least hostile corner of the house, allowing the breath a fraction more room to move. It is an act of seeking out the cool nodes of the body — the backs of the hands, the soles of the feet, the small, phantom currents of air moving across the skin when a fan finds the right angle for a moment. Even a few minutes of this creates a fracture in the heat. Not an escape from it. Just a fracture, a hairline crack of relief, thin enough to be easy to miss, wide enough, some days, to matter enormously. --- **Staying, Not Coping** This is not a unique story, and it is not a story about coping well. I want to resist that framing, because I think we reach for it too easily, and it flattens something that deserves to stay textured. It is about the invisible work of balance, mine, and the work of anyone whose body has fewer margins for error than the world assumes. The small, makeshift systems we build out of cotton and lemon juice and mudras and stubbornness. The quiet, and sometimes desperate, adaptations that no one sees, because they happen in bedrooms at 4am and bathrooms with the door locked and the specific, private math of deciding whether a task is worth the pain it will cost. It is about knowing when effort helps, and when it simply isn't enough. And having the honesty to sit with that second category without turning it into a personal failing. And perhaps, inside all of this relentless heat, there is a different kind of resilience worth naming. Not the kind that pushes through, chin up, unbothered, the kind our culture likes to applaud. But the kind that listens. That adjusts. That stays in the body, in the discomfort, in the relationship with a self that requires more tending than most. I keep coming back to the copper wire, and to the belt that stands in for it. Some of what's been withdrawn will need policy, funding, a minister who reads past the first paragraph, to bring it back. That work matters, and I won't stop asking for it. But not all of it needs Whitehall. The mudra, the recipe, the fifteen minutes of stillness with a damp cloth on the wrists — these were never taken by any budget. They're simply waiting to be taught again, hand to hand, body to body, in whatever shade is left. That, at least, is a resilience I can still reach for myself, tonight, without waiting for anyone's permission. Even when the heat does not leave. --- *© Soul Harbor Therapies 2026, July — Andrea Robertson-Begg*