You should never get sick of being ill
IF you noticed I was off last week, you probably assumed I was having a lovely extended Christmas holiday.
In reality, pretty much the polar opposite was true.
I was, like you either are now, have been or – WATCH OUT! – are about to be, ill. I don’t even think it was Aussie Flu (wasn’t affected down under), it was just boring old completely miserable normal flu.
My husband was struck down first, but what he had was just a silly little not-that-bad bug which no one could be expected to pay much attention to. Then – definitely on purpose – he gave it to me, at which point it became an incredibly serious illness.
Whatever nationality it was, the flu I got was properly rotten and made me feel completely awful. But then, after the very, very worst had passed, I realised being ill isn’t actually all bad. In fact, if you think about it, there are some definite perks...
You suddenly appreciate how well your body usually works, just at its most basic level.
Being grateful is good for the soul, so how amazing to finally realise that being able to breathe through both nostrils, swallowing without pain, and having a balanced body temperature (rather than boiling/freezing/boiling/ freezing) is what makes life worth living. You vow to yourself that you will never take these gifts for granted ever again. First day you feel better, you instantly forget them.
People cook things for you and bring them round. The irony of this is that it’s usually just when you can’t face eating anything, and by the time you can face eating, you’re considered well enough to make your own dinner.
The only way around this is to pretend to be ill for just a little bit longer than you actually are... or so I’ve heard anyway. Cough cough.
You’re allowed to moan endlessly, and everyone has to listen and sympathise – or at least give a convincing performance of pretending to.
When you’re ill it’s perfectly acceptable to describe in detail what is hurting and exactly how it feels, even if you only moaned about it a few minutes ago – and you don’t have to even ask, let alone feign any interest in, how the person you’re talking to is. Pretty much the dream, then.
Once it stops being super sore, having a croaky voice is sort of fun and quite dramatic.
You learn that what goes around comes around. As soon as anyone finds out that you are, or have been, ill – whether they know you well or not – they won’t be able to resist telling you what to do about it.
Everyone, it appears, in the universe has their own little trick guaranteed to make you feel better quicker than anything else. From boiling ginger to gargling hot salt water – in the last two weeks I’ve heard it all.
It’s obviously well intentioned, but gets quite annoying after a while... and yet, yesterday I spoke to someone who had just started feeling bad, and I didn’t even let them finish detailing their symptoms because I was so busy telling them to go to bed with a raw onion...
A croaky voice can be fun and quite dramatic