I'd had my usual autumnal encounter with Death, this is the one where he pops into my life surrounded by his 18 - 21 year old acolytes brimming with whatever influenza they've encountered in pastures distant, and says, “ARE YOU READY YET?” When I answer in the negative, he merely pats me on the back and says, “Try these.” So it is the end of a week that has mainly consisted of sweat and exhaustion (the Gods of Alliteration are still there, going, “sleep”, “somnolence”, “soubriquets (?), well something that begins with ‘s’” but exhaustion is about right. I have spent three days i.e. seventy two hours having the same “edge of sleep” dream, whereby I had to do three things to stop me coughing, for seventy two hours I could only manage two, then I would have to breathe in, which would make me cough, so should I breathe in or not?
“ARE YOU READY NOW?”
Today I have moved out of the fever, and now am firmly in the zone of the hacking cough, hacking as in the axe that folds my trunk in two, the cough that leaves me surprised not to see my lungs decorating the floor in front of me, the cough that leaves me woozy after its onslaught (I haven’t worked this one out yet, I can’t decide if it’s a massive increase in blood pressure or a massive decrease, though I have decided it’s not a carotid aneurism, no – definitely not one of those).
Anyway, I came home and decided to do something positive, what could I do? I opened the ‘fridge, the cauliflower, the neglected cauliflower, spoke to me, it said, “You haven’t been eating much while you’ve been ill, have you? Me I’ve been ageing, I hope we can still get along?” The goat’s cheese just looked smug and self-centred, so he’s in the sauce, the smarmy git! I quickly closed the door, waiting for a time I could guarantee a rush of air through the house, and embarked on the sloe gin instead. I am now running a “with-“ and “without-” sugar experiment to see which matures faster.
I am, of course, on drugs, I favour cough remedies with dextrometorphan, a morphine analogue, that causes a decrease in the responsiveness of the airway, why? So that every time I take a breath, I’m not forced to cough, though one can argue about the wisdom of taking a respiratory depressant while suffering from a respiratory crisis, actually, you can argue, I like sleeping, especially after the first two days of not! When this moves depressingly on to lungs full of, hmm, stuff (as it invariably will in my experience*) then the regime changes, I produce large involuntary donations of sputum that I test a gamut of absorbent fibres with (not to mention detergent), and then, when it goes green, I have to try and persuade one of my GP’s that the current moratorium on antibiotics for colds, doesn’t apply, as I do not have a virus (any more). No, not even a green one!
In the meantime I’ll try to keep breathing, and swirl my sloes.
* Since I wrote this, it has, each breath sounds like an echo in a soup kitchen, I reckon my vital capacity is down to about fifty percent, which makes stairs quite exciting, and the prospect of attempting to attain the horizontal for sleep-purposes, a challenge. As I approach the preferred angle of somnolence, the mucosal tide comes in and washes the alveolar beach with raw crude, leaving my pulmonary pelicans in need of several volunteers with a bucket of soapy water and a consolatory herring. I hope to survive, watch this space
“I’M READY FOR YOU NOW SIR.”
“I’ll need a few minutes thanks.”
