Why I Chose to Have a Pimp
By: Lydia Caradonna
Tags: Health, Sex Work, Feminism, Women, This Happened To Me

To understand why I work in a run-down brothel, we have to go back to when I was 11 years old. My best friend was Anna from down the road. I scored super high on my year-six exams, and I was about to begin dealing with a downward health spiral that still affects me today.

During the first week of the summer holidays, my mum took us to the cinema — a big treat. During the movie, I felt sick and began sweating, unable to concentrate. In the car on the way back, my head lolled, and I couldn’t support it anymore. Then, all I felt was heat and pain and nausea and the days began rolling into one another. I was diagnosed with swine flu and was horribly sick all that summer, and it turned out that the dirty cinema lobby was the last time I ever felt real.

Sometimes, clinicians refer to myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) as post-viral fatigue syndrome (PVFS). You have a virus, and you never really recover. It’s like having the flu, but it doesn’t end. It took six years for me to be diagnosed. Nobody thinks “tired” is a legitimate health concern.

They diagnosed me with myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic pain — something I hadn’t even realized I had. I thought everybody felt this awful all the time.

ME isn’t just feeling tired. I had two episodes where I woke up and everything from the waist down was on fire, like I had been dipped in acid, almost unable to walk. My hands started shaking at random times. I would sleep for hours when I got home from school, waking up just to eat and do homework. The cognitive symptoms were the slowest to creep up on me: a gradual drop in academic performance, the inability to recall basic facts. Sometimes, people would ask me a simple question and I would stare at them.

But my decline was getting more and more rapid.

Halfway through year 12 of school, I crashed. I was attending only about seven hours of classes a week. I could barely stay conscious. Doctors couldn’t deny that something was wrong. I had test after test after test. They cycled through autoimmune conditions but found nothing that really fit. Finally, they diagnosed me with ME and chronic pain — something I didn’t even realize I had. I thought everybody felt this awful all the time. I still remember the rheumatologist pressing his fingers into my skin and explaining to me that, normally, people don’t wince at that.

The most infuriating part of my illness was that I couldn’t think like I used to, couldn’t string together sentences easily or see patterns or understand things, and it was like I wasn’t myself.

In my first year of university, I slept 16 hours a day. I couldn’t find a job that I was well enough for. I didn’t qualify for anything but the lowest possible amount of student finance. I dipped in and out of sex work but hit barriers everywhere I turned. I couldn’t reliably book clients in advance because my health was so unpredictable. Messages would go unanswered in my inbox because I was too ill to reply. I saw clients, but they were few and far between.

By second term of my second year, things had taken a positive turn. I was getting better. It can happen with ME patients; symptoms and the progress of the illness is so unpredictable. I was sleeping only 12 or so hours a day. As long as I didn’t push my limits, I could generally manage my life. Even my cognitive symptoms improved. In return for this ability to stay conscious and think clearly, however, my pain increased in severity. Sometimes I would be walking to class and find myself doubled over in pain. I was still poor and still sick, but I was just about well enough to do something about it.

A few months into this shaky half-recovery, I found the brothel on the internet and called. I had a shift within days.