Being ill

Oh God, I’m ill. I’m sitting in bed and the only vague entertainment is waiting for the moments of bliss when my stomach stops cramping and the nausea lifts for five minutes. You know you’re ill when the mere sensation of air wafting against bare skin – normally gently refreshing – makes you feel so weak and vulnerable that you feel you might just collapse on the spot. Every trip to the toilet – and there have been a few – is a grotesque battle between the urgent needs of my crippled digestive system and the desperate messages from my brain telling me that if I move I will certainly definitely die. Thankfully I live alone; no-one must bare witness to the injured-puppy whimpers and moans of a 29 year old limping five metres to the bathroom.

Just as bad is the unbearable state of the ill brain – a fever destroys the bits of it that make concentration, and hence pleasure, possible, but leaves the parts that coordinate boredom completely untouched. So the crushing, aching tedium (I’m not blessed with a massively long attention span at the best of times) is all-enveloping. Unable to swim to the surface by reading a book or watching a film, the brain drowns in awful, sickly grey nothingness. Urgh.

We all TRY to appreciate our health when we have it. But it’s like asking yourself to be happy you haven’t got hangover, or give praise that you’re not currently stuck in a traffic jam. Even if you do it, it’s never really genuine. It probably can’t be. And yet every now and again, and with increasing frequency as we age, we find ourselves so angry at this healthy nonchalance. I was feeling fine two days ago. I’d give just about anything to feel that way now. Asked at the time, I wouldn’t have even acknowledged the ecstasy that is being healthy. And I know, or I can imagine, that should I in the future succumb to a genuinely serious illness – which will eventually happen, we all die and not that many of us peacefully in our sleep – I’ll think back to bed-bound-blogging with a weird tummy and swirly-whirly-head-feeling and beg and hope and pray that I could be back here. Which does make me feel a bit better.

But sod it, I’m ill and I’m on my own and I’m not in the mood for existential, long-term positivity nonsense. This is horrible and I want it to stop and that’s that. And I’m annoyed that my addled brain keeps telling me to put an apostrophe in the word ‘ill’. Like that makes sense: ‘Oh God, I’m I’ll’. Urgh, again.