Lord I Don't Know What I Have Done To Offend Thee...*

Being sick when you're the only person in your house is stupid.
It is hella stupid.
I'll go as far as to say it is dang hella stupid.

First of all there is nobody there to feel sorry for you so you have to do it all yourself.
It also means that you have to fight through the hallucinations, the wistful longings for sweet death and the confused musings on how on Earth someone managed to replace your mattress filling with bricks and syringes and organise your gross self.

Examples

• If you have enough strength to stagger to the bathroom and sob brokenly into the toilet roll about how your eyebrows ache, you have enough strength to find a face washer and a container full of cold water to keep it in. Later on, if you're lucky, you'll forget that it's beside your bed and you'll get to kick it over!
• If you are lucid enough to remember the existence of such concepts as hunger and thirst you must take advantage of this God-like knowledge and take bottles of liquid and boxes of mild, non-threatening dry biscuits into your germ hovel for when you're too weak to move but too hungry not to whine about it.
• If you don't take a bucket you will need a bucket. If you do take a bucket, take a towel too. Just in case. You'll need it when you kick over your face washer water anyway.

I don't get seriously ill very often so when I do I tend to go on about it and mythologise it to a grand degree.
I honestly do flail about in bed muttering phrases like 'Why hath thou forsaken me?' and 'I wonder if I could suffocate myself just enough to achieve unconsciousness without causing brain damage...' which is all just self-indulgent tripe and 90% just to amuse myself but this time I really was feeling a bit forsaken.
Because this time the Family Failsafe failed me.

When my family is ill unless bits of us are actually falling off or changing colour we do one thing: we sleep.
We sleep until we're better.
Usually it works a charm.

This time I couldn't sleep. But I also could move or focus enough to read or even watch anything.

So for three days I lay there somewhere between awake and asleep, nibbling vitawheat and listening to an unabridged audiobook of Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay on an endless loop.

I like to think it was the healing powers of Sam Vimes that restored me but the cold and flu tablets I managed to procure on Day Three probably didn't hurt either.

Now that I'm fit to mingle with other human beings again I'm probably going to stay on a paranoid supplemental diet of hot lemon drinks and extra vegetables for a while just to stave off any relapses or the like.
And I am not taking my sleep for granted.
I am going to be in bed by 9pm every night!
At least until something really really good comes on the telly!
But it'll have to be really good.

Now if only I could get my damn ears to pop...



*Well it could be any number of things really... but they're more misdemeanors than actual offenses...