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...

Yea Though I Walk Through The Valley Of The Shadow Of Snot

It begins again.

Sniffle season.

Pandemics aside, during winter my workplace becomes a seething mass of germs and the inhabitants are divided into two camps: the martyrs and the prophets.

The martyrs could be at death's door and yet they will still drag themselves wheezing and dripping to their workstations where they stare blankly at their assignments and overdose on sugary fake hot lemon drinks.
If you suggest that maybe they should be at home in bed or possibly calling a priest for a dry run of their last rites, they wave a pendulous tissue and rasp something about people depending on them and the pain not being that bad.

The prophets are of the fire and brimstone variety with blazing eyes and saliva flecking from their lips as they roar and pontificate that maybe if people stayed home when they were effing sick we wouldn't all effing get it and it wouldn't keep going around and effing around all effing season.
Whilst the martyrs are in nearly every day getting almost nothing done in their feverish haze, the prophets follow an almost uncanny week-on, week-off schedule as they power through their uninfected days and then retire to convalesce when the miasma overtakes them.

The output of the two camps is roughly equal, the suffering is relative.

Personally, I take strategic sick days when my body so demands and double my intake of garlic for the duration of the conflict which has the following three benefits:

1. Garlic - it's effing delicious.
2. It is said to boost your immune system and even if some of the effect is psychosomatic it is a tasty placebo.
3. Everyone mysteriously seems to maintain a steady distance. I like to call it 'the exclusion zone'.

For any of the martyrs too blocked up to sense my garlic barrier I have my second line of defence, namely Meshuggah, Heaven Shall Burn and Devin Townsend.
Martyrs don't dig the metal.

Biohazard: Maintain A Safe Distance...

First cold of the season.
Feverish, cranky, feels like flesh is crammed full of electrified cotton wool.

Big storm the other day.
No electricity.
Laying in dark feeling sorry for self.
Won't leave candle burning as keep having visions of burning to death, snot streaming from corpse as it plunges from the second storey window and face-plants in downstairs' herb garden.

Contemplating new career as country and blues singer with wonderful new woeful material.
Mull this idea over and decide leaving the candle burning would be preferable.

Electricity back on.
Light bad.
Milk in fridge gone wrong.
Return to blanket cocoon and reinforce protective minefield of tissues around bed.

Call work.
Don't want to go in.
They don't want me in either.
Germs go through workplace like the plague.
Stupid building-wide ventilation system, stupid non-opening windows.

Return to bed.
Glad nose all blocked up.
Bet bedroom smells like a giant's armpit.

Over-judicious application of medicated lozenges, skin scalding hot showers and hot lemon with honey.
Cats taking advantage of semi-comatose fever paralysis to use body as heated couch.
Too tired to protest.

Still not dead.
Still pretty gross.
Settle in to wait for immune system to resolve industrial dispute and fix this shit up.
Could be a while.