Tag Archives: illness

Virus

The shapes on the textbook pages look alien, technological – as if they’re custom-designed docking stations intended to board my human cells. Spiky and staccato. The smell of freshly printed knowledge sheens from the paper, engendering a fog of half-formed understanding.

I can’t feel each individual cell fighting back – instead, a generalised malaise. My head aches in a non-specific way, and the throat begins to feel raw and dry. After a few days, my body spasms painfully with gargling, chesty coughs. The clear phlegm is essentially tasteless as unpleasantly spat out into the toilet bowl.

Now is the time to retreat into mounded duvets and escapist fantasy tales – to accept depression and feelings of hopelessness and overwhelm. Perhaps I can sweat it out in a few days of total rest.

I spend a whole day watching the contorted, popularised fantasies of Once Upon a Time.

Nose

It itches, wants to sniff, and makes my eyes squint and water. There’s been no pepper involvement, but that’s the feeling. There’s a sneeze coming.

Feeling the dryness of skin, knowing it’s reddened and flaky there – some genetic predisposition in the male line. My throat and forehead and inner ear all quietly mutter “Something’s amiss!” and I guess the placebo fizzy C pills will have to be administered.

I squeeze my nostrils and snort like a coke-head, but nothing clears.

Remember that old remedy – Friar’s Balsam? Sat the varnished kitchen table with my face above a steaming mixing bowl, towel rough and damp tenting my head, steam infusing all and condensing on reddened ears. A bitter, brown smell.

Or the taste of eucalyptus chapstick, and the cold-yet-hot sensation of Vick’s Vaporub evaporating from my chest.

That opaque pink medicine I’ve not seen in decades.

The sensation, for weeks after my ear drum burst, that the whole side of my head was dead, absent. Like half of a painted face – one side black, one white.