Keeping it down
If there’s one thing that interferes with convalescence, it’s a general election.
I’ve been crook. I think I’ve mentioned to you before that, in my family, being “crook” is a medical condition that covers everything from a sniffle to the state of ill-health encountered immediately before death.
Crookness is usually brought on by an ailment known as “the bot”, a mysterious illness with no known cause and wide-ranging outcomes. My father and mother used to tell me that someone we knew “had the bot” and they were “crook”. The outcome of this could be that they “got crook and died” or that they were “crook but got better”.
In my case, I got up one morning and felt a dangerous rumbling in my stomach and nether regions. Obviously, I will spare you the details and draw a discreet veil across the symptoms, other than to say that it was occurring “at both ends”.
I was crook. Several kilos lighter, I lay on the couch, quietly moaning to myself that I couldn’t remember when I last had a cold or flu, or found myself in a general state of crookness. My liver is pickled, my smoker’s lungs have a protective layer of tar, my stomach is lined with impenetrable fatty deposits: no bug can attack me and I am safe from infection. Usually.
But something was happening. I could hold nothing down. My joints ached. I was as weak as a kitten. Food poisoning? I staggered to the fridge and stared at the remnants of last night’s pork roast. Excavating the contents of the bin, I found the joint’s wrapper that revealed it had been cooked at least 48 hours before its “best before” date.
I cast a suspicious eye at the cabbage and mayonnaise from the previous evening’s coleslaw. They looked innocent. Maybe it was a bad spud? Doubtful.
To be on the safe side, I threw out everything in the fridge and didn’t eat for the next three days. Instead, I pumped my body full of fluids.
Not the fluids I usually consume, but several litres of water. The shock of a flood of H O coupled with the absence of alcohol put my body into an unusual state. I felt lighter than air, thanks to the lack of food, but enormously clear in the brain department. This must be why people fast and stay teetotal. I was, for a short time, a yogi meditating on the meaning of life and the effects of being crook. Either that or I had been run over by a truck.
I know: you’re wondering why I didn’t go to the doctor. Well, in my family, the doctor is usually the last stop before rigor mortis sets in. Actually, the aching muscles, joints and limbs indicated rigor mortis may have been creeping over my body, but I took the couch option and watched Netflix instead.
Normally, I would have spent my time listening to the radio or watch television, but the election campaign was still on and, fearing I might be suffering from an overdose of politics, I decided it was best to avoid the risk of any news bulletins.
Too much politics can make you ill. In the last days of the campaign, Twitter, Facebook, talkback radio and the letters to the editor columns became a putrid, festering hellhole of bile. In the week before the election, I insulated myself from the news and views of the nation and, instead, read books and listened only to music.
Swaddled in a cocoon of non-fiction and insulated by a wall of sound from Spotify, that is what I did. The bot abated and I was no longer crook.
So, who won the election?
In my family, the doctor is usually the last stop before rigor mortis sets in.