Under the weather

September 4th, 2004

As this week has gone on I’ve felt increasingly rough, to the point where yesterday I felt so ropey that I took the day off as sick.

As ever, the early signs were there, and with me there are two key indicators of an impending illness:

  1. Extreme sensitivity to cigarettes. This translates into an ability to detect someone smoking at roughly 100 yards. Being in a train carriage whilst someone outside on the platform is smoking is unpleasant; being in a pub is totally out of the question.
  2. Frequent and intense yawning. I’m talking an 8 or 9 on the yawn scale here, accompanied by severe, almost violent stretching.

From experiencing these on Wednesday I was on a steady downhill trajectory until early Friday morning, when I hit nadir. My immune system had really started to kick-in by this time and with this mobilisation came a pounding head, a swollen throat, and a feverish cycle of hot and cold flushes – with their dislikeable cousin, the night-time sweats.

Thankfully this unpleasantness wasn’t entirely without a silver lining as some strange and semi-delusional thinking (which I can now write about) was the result:

For a while as I drifted in and out during the early hours, it felt as if my consciousness was chattering away simultaneously in many different voices, seemingly competing for attention. Variously asking questions like ‘would it be good to roll over now?’; ‘do I need to cool off a bit?’; or saying ‘kidneys are starting to ache a bit now’, it seems in retrospect as if my various body systems were reporting in and I could hear their continual monitoring as a kind of articulated stream:

“Brain, this is kidney control. We’re starting to feel some increased pressure down here. Can you get in touch with bladder control and see if there’s a problem downstream?”

Perhaps being unwell heightened and twisted my awareness of a normal process, or maybe it was just the strangeness that being awake in the middle of the night can often have…

“Thanks kidneys. Yeah, looks like we’re going to need a level 1 purge pretty soon. Initiating wake-up routine jimmy-1.”

… but either way, it was pretty odd.

And if you find that head-space a little difficult to get into, imagine what it’s like to look over at the digital clock for the thousandth time and find your first thought not to be ‘it’s 01:40’ but rather ‘that’s Ohio written upside down!’. A strangely semiotic experience, and of course after that I started looking for messages every time. In my heat-addled state I interpreted 04:45’s message as ‘Shh’ and actually felt calmed enough to lose consciousness for a while.

I’m on the upswing now and can definitely recommend Anadin Extra for anyone needing to do anything even vaguely useful during a similar spell. Now I’m looking forward to that 24 hours of feeling better-than-well whilst my immune system hasn’t quite realised that the war is over. I should plan to do something really useful in that time, when I’ll be super-effective …but I think I’ll plan that later. Right now I’m going back to bed.

Update

It turned out to be tonsilitis and I was rotten until Tuesday. As of Wednesday 8th I have yet to experience the post-illness boost.

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