As Sick as a Small Hospital

“Tis Healthy to be sick sometimes”

-          Henry David Thoreau

 I have been unwell.  I was overtaken by a miserable virus last week, and God, did I share my suffering with poor His Nibs.

It was on a Saturday that I first started to feel under the weather.  I had a really bad headache, I had the cold sweats even though I was roasting, and I felt a bit staggery, sort of faint and dizzy at the same time.

His Nibs isn’t the greatest nurse in the land.  When I’m sick, he tends to assume I’m grand and that I’m just having a moan until my symptoms become so pronounced that he can’t ignore them anymore.  Then he makes me a cup of tea and hopes that will count as taking care of me, until I start making demands on his time and energy.  These demands involve everything from constant tea making, driving from one supermarket to the other, trying to find the specific items that I insist are the only thing that will aid my recovery.  And woe betide him if he brings back the wrong things.  The great “They’re not satsumas, they’re clementines” war of my last flu will long be remembered in this house.

Looking after a sick person doesn’t come easy to him.  All he wants is for me to get over my illness and stop moaning, so that he can go back to his life and be left alone, as quickly as possible.

I’m not a great patient either, to be fair.  There’s a lot of presenting me with endless treats to amuse and entertain me while I wait for the worst of my malady to pass.  And a lot of sighing and throwing these treats aside from me.

So he decided that he’d just ignore my symptoms, in the hope that I’d put up and shut up and not ruin his weekend.  I hadn’t the energy for any sort of a row or giving out.  I had to use dirty tactics to get his attention and make him my nurse.

I started by trying to be a bit classy about it all.  This involved going all Victorian.  You know the sort of thing, referring to feeling faint as swooning, and declaring that I had the vapours when I was feeling shaky and nauseous.  I even lay down with my hand to my head to signify the seriousness of my complaints.  But I got feck all satisfaction for my efforts.  He just asked me whether I was putting it all on, that I looked a bit dramatic.

This lack of sympathy didn’t please me.  But I decided that I could force a bit of empathy out of him, he isn’t an unkind man, it couldn’t be that difficult.  I took it upon myself to tell him every detail of every symptom, as it happened.  It was quite tiring, actually.

“I’m roasting.  Is the heating on?”

“No, and it’s not that warm in here.  Maybe you have a temperature?”

“I don’t know.  Feel my forehead, see if it’s hot.”

He would patiently put the back of his hand to my forehead, while picking up the mugs for another tea run with the other hand.

“Actually no, you feel quite clammy.”

“Oh God, I must have a really high temperature.”

“It’s not that clammy, love, you’re grand.  Anyway, on the television they always so “Oh my God, you’re burning up” if someone has a temperature, so you must have the opposite, since you feel cold, a low temperature."

“You don’t care about me at all, do you?”

Then a few minutes later I would remind him of how bad my headache was, or insist he stare at my outstretched hand and exclaim at how it was trembling.

But there was a limit to how dramatic I could be.  I had to rein it in a bit.  I had limited options, I couldn’t start ranting and raving and threatening to leave him.  There’s only the pair of us in the house.  If I drove him too far around the bend I’d have to do my own tea making, and would have to get dressed and venture outside to buy my own fruit and possibly chocolate.

He suggested that since I felt so awful I go to bed and go to sleep.  I refused, and announced that I would stay downstairs and keep him company, but that I’d be staying in my pyjamas.  That meant, of course, that he would have to do all the running around after dogs, and go to the shop to cater to my demands, and make tea and snacks,  but still listen to me moaning.  Eventually he stopped suggesting I go to bed, and told me to go. By mid afternoon he was trying to bribe me.  If I went to bed he’d bring me up more tea, he’d keep all the dogs downstairs and I could watch Netflix in peace and quiet.  And still I refused.  Eventually he tried to flat out send me to bed.  Only when I knew he was getting really sick of me did I go.  It was nice, actually, tea and Netflix in my cosy nest.  At least I’d put up a fight. 

But I couldn’t help thinking nostalgically of the happy Saturdays when he used to invite me to bed, not send me.

I was sick the whole week. To be honest, dare I say it, I’m still not fabulously well.  I’m wrecked all the time. But I’m back in work now.  It’s a struggle for me to stay alert for the whole working day.  Thank God this is the week that His Nibs is driving us both up and down to work.  I get my car sleep in the mornings, and again in the evenings on my way home.   And as soon as I walk in the door I’m back in my pyjamas.  Last weekend, after a week out of work, I barely got dressed, and it didn’t even cross my mind to put on makeup.  There’s a great freedom, for me, in this level of laziness.  And all the lying down and taking naps suits me down to the ground.

One of the more unusual aspects of this illness, for me, was that I had no gastric symptoms at all.  I thought of those ads, before there was any such thing as Advertising Standards, when sugar laden products like Lucozade and Mars bars were sold as health giving products for sick people.  Of course those ads relied entirely on people not knowing that glucose is just sugar.  I convinced myself that maybe there had been some truth to them, and that since I wasn’t feeling pukey I should make the most of my lying down and watching Netflix time by eating some chocolate.  That swiftly led to the onset of wild nausea.

And that’s when things got very tedious.  His Nibs was getting fed up of my ongoing moaning, I couldn’t eat anything, it’s amazing how fast lying in bed pitying yourself gets boring.   And I was genuinely sick.  It’s not like I could go out and kick up my heels once I got fed up of the whole thing.

I can finally see why His Nibs is such a disappointing caregiver.  Maybe if he was married to someone else he’d be spectacular.  I got so fed up listening to myself moaning, and sighing and carrying on that if I could have ignored myself I would have.  I ended up feeling sorrier for him than I did for myself.