Sick

I get colds like it’s going out of style. Some people seem to get gentle colds that leave them a little sniffy, a little croaky, a bit tired by the end of the day. When I get colds, they knock me absolutely flat. The typical advice about drinking lots of tea and eating soup and resting is all very well and good, but, as my godmother says, if you leave a cold alone it lasts seven days, and if you treat it, it will last a week. Unfortunately, I am not a patient patient. I can tolerate being sick for about five seconds, and then I get cross. I have things to do! Who has time for lolling around in bed, waiting for a pestilence to pass? Being angry doesn’t help, but I struggle not to rage. Very quickly, I am swimming in a soup of self-pity, throat pastilles, disgusting cough syrup and a head that feels full of feathers. I often find myself reminiscing about how wonderful it was to be able to breathe, and desperately promsing whoever might be listening that if only this cold would go, I would never take my nose for granted ever again. This is a lie: as soon as I am better, I go right back to thanklessly expecting my nose and lungs and throat to behave themselves as a matter of course, but while the cold is in full force, I feel nothing but nostalgia for those halcyon days when breathing was a breeze.

It’s difficult to write about sickness, or pain. Pierce Brown claims that pain is a universal language, but I am not so sure. I know how my pain feels when I stub my toe or my dull, diffuse ache the day after a tough workout, but no matter how many words I throw at it, I cannot feel your pain, and you cannot feel mine. I am more inclined to agree with Virginia Woolf, who tells us that pain destroys language: the fuzzy, groggy, heavy-but-light, dizzying feeling in the head during a cold is how I experience it, but really, all those words don’t quite explain that particular sensation. A head full of feathers - what does that mean? Very quickly (in this case, almost instantly) I find myself devolving into metaphor and simile, waxing poetic about an experience that is anything but poetical. Suddenly, we are abstracting pain, something that is quite real, but cannot be made real outside of ourselves. We run into this difficulty at the doctor’s office - is my pain a one or a ten? How on earth should I know that? Maybe it would be better to use sounds to indicate pain, not words or numbers or a smiley face chart. The even, nagging ache of delayed onset muscle soreness is a low, rumbling hum. A stubbed toe starts out as a loud cry and softens to a whimper (much like the sound I actually make when that happens). Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrkrrrkrrr for the tension in my jaw; a high-pitched, unending sqreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee for that time I burned my hand on a pot handle. Pulling a splinter is a quick, churlish beep!, quite loud. Chronic illness is the grinding of ill-fitting cogs rubbing together: you may sometimes be able to tune it out, but it never ends. And colds? Well, those are almost certainly a grumbling, creaky mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmm in the throat, dry and raspy, like a growling dog. It might be strange, but in some ways rather comforting, to go into a doctor’s office, and when asked to describe your pain, let out a deafening bellow or ear-splitting shriek. It would certainly be more satisfying than meekly pointing at a face on a chart, and hoping to be believed.

Jennifer