Fever in the morning …
When you get the flu, rational thinking seems to vanish in the haze.
When you get the flu, rational thinking seems to vanish in the haze.
The tui in the little valley that runs down behind our house is croaking. I don’t normally notice it, though I often enjoy the honeyed singing of the summer pairs that feed on the flax flowers.
But as I lie in bed with nothing much to do except stare at the bare spindles of the leafless fig tree, this raspy tui crowds everything else out of the aural landscape.
I gather that they devour and regurgitate sounds they hear – the beep of cars unlocking seems popular – but if that’s so, Old Croaky must have been inspired by a lawnmower that wouldn’t start. After three days of his tunelessness, I’m certainly beginning to wonder whether killing native birds is okay if you’re acting in self-defence.
It’s an oddity of the human condition that when we are ill, we soon start to doubt we will ever be well.
Being seasonally sick always feels like it’s the first time. This winter’s bout of flu was the first in 13 years to get under my defences, reinforced as they are by 20 years of vaccination. And to keep it in perspective, it wasn’t the full serving: I had a decent fever, but no night sweats, no aching joints. The hacking cough, which persisted for three weeks after I had “recovered”, was never accompanied by a serious shortness of breath.
Yet without being prepared to cop to a charge of having man flu, I have to say I was pretty miserable. And from the depths of my bedridden misery, I couldn’t recall ever having felt so bad, because present-moment lived experience trumps memory every time. I can remember the colour of my lunch box in primer one and the date decimal currency started, but I have no memory of previous attacks of influenza. This was sickness such as no one had ever felt.
Imperceptibly but quite suddenly, I suspect, that sense of dumb surprise gets replaced – I’m not sure when; I’ve not been well – by a creeping fear that this is the way it’s going to be from now on: life, which is sickness, will be sickness. It’s an oddity of the human condition that when we are ill, we cannot remember what it was like to be well, and we soon start to doubt we ever will be.
It’s a function, perhaps, of how the invalid’s world becomes bed-size or room-size at best. As symptoms ebb and flow, we slip in and out of sleep at odd times – late afternoon, say, or just after breakfast, when the normal napping of healthy people would be out of place.
We eat oddly too: soup in the morning, porridge at night, and we wonder at the ease with which everyone else carries on living as if the world were not, in fact, coming to an end.
In this shrunken world, our present reality becomes the only reality. Try as we might to recall sunlit days at the beach, time spent with grandchildren and the joys of cooking and eating, all these memories sink into the grey sludge of the immediate moment.
Friends are no use. They might email or text an instruction to “Get well soon” – or the even sillier Americanism “Be better” – as though recovery were an act of will and illness were some sort of failure of character. They never think to visit, to make a cup of tea, maybe play a hand or two of cards. “Oh, it’s just the flu,” they say. “He’ll get over it.”
It takes smug wellness to generate such offhandedness. They’ve forgotten that you forget: you forget how bad it is until it happens to you, and then you can’t believe it was ever this bad.