Convalescent

"Perhaps you should go to the doctor?" suggested my colleagues.
"Nope!" I said, bracingly. "It’s just a virus. The doctor would laugh in my face! I can’t take antibiotics for a virus! That’s ridiculous! This is just a cold! People who request antibiotics for colds are cretins!"
My colleagues looked at me nervously. "O-kay…." they said. With an understandable note of scepticism, as they watched me bury myself alive under an increasing mound of discarded Lemsip sachets, screwed up old tissues, and cough sweets.

The next day, hearing my by-now familiar death-rattle of a cough, they said, "Perhaps it’s a chest infection?"
"It most certainly is not!" I assured them. I was aiming for a ringing rebuff, but what came out was more of a creaking noise.

By the next week, I should have taken notice when even the women in HR heard me speak and said, "Honestly, rumtumtugger, don’t you think you should go home?"

I was determined not to make a fuss. And I was determined not to take too much time off work. And somewhere in between those things, in between popping paracetomol, and blowing my nose constantly, and struggling into work, and struggling to yet another evening commitment with friends that I ‘just couldn’t miss’, I found that I had in fact, missed something. I had missed the fact that I was really ill.

It was only on Thursday as I crawled into the office on all fours, and my team sang, "Morning, rumtumtugger! How are you?" and I said, "Er, a bit better"… but then the voice that emerged from my throat was so horrible that they all recoiled, and said, "Good god! You sound worse!"… it was only then that I looked back and realised, yes, I had in fact been ill for three weeks. Yes, I did in fact still feel like death. And perhaps all those people who had been telling me to go home, or go to the doctor, did in fact have a point.

So I signed out. I signed out of work, and I signed out of my life. I went home that afternoon, and that afternoon felt so comprehensively dreadful that in one smooth movement, like dropping a bag from your shoulder, I unhooked myself from all of the ‘shoulds’ and all of the ‘musts’. I lay down, and armed only with my mobile phone, I cancelled everything I could think of. Well, I tell a lie. All apart from one. On Saturday Jack and I went to his parents in the wilds of the North of England for his uncle’s fiftieth birthday party. But I justified that by reflecting that I could sleep on the train, sleep when I got there… and also that because Jack’s older sister is a doctor, there was at least an outside chance of her illicitly giving me some antibiotics.

Having made the decision that I was going to admit that I was ill, I had half-expected that to be the end of it. But, no. I carried on hacking, coughing with a nasty rattle like a pair of maracas, I went off my food (quite extraordinary for me, let me tell you), I slept in the afternoon. I only made it to the party only through the combined application of bloody-mindedness and make-up: I had bought a beautiful new dress specifically and was determined to give the dress, at least, a good night out. I dosed myself up with Lemsip and with ibuprofen, and walked downstairs swaying slightly, spaced out from exhaustion and glittery-eyed from both eyeshadow and a raised temperature.

Even now, having comprehensively come through the worst of it, I find I’m still not at work, not able to do anything at all. It’s half past three, and all I’ve achieved today is two morning naps, and a bath. Outside the window, everything is bright and new. I feel as though I’ve come out of years spent packed in cotton, and the world is saturated with harsh colour again. Things are too loud, and too hard. My whole body feels soft and new, freshly peeled, and as though it might dissolve. A simple word from Jack yesterday reduced me to easy tears ("Are you ok?" "I’m fine, I’m just so tired…") I’ve lost the thread; completely lost track of the fine thread of tasks and to dos and how do you dos that gets you through the day. I’m outside it all, blinking, wondering whether it’s time to go to sleep again, or if I should take another tablet now or later.

And even through all the unpleasantness, I’m entranced by it. I’m not normally ill. In the train, coming home, I said to Jack in something like wonderment, "I can’t believe how ill I’ve been…". I’m wholly bemused. Completely gone past the place where I worry that my colleagues might think I’ve been putting it on, even gone past the point in our sick policy where you can self-certify yourself, I am off to the doctors tomorrow and I’m sure I will sit in his surgery and say to him in a rapt tone of self-obsession, "I’ve been horribly ill. For ages."

So for now. Limp. Quiet. Sleepy. I have eschewed my normal morning phone call phrase to my team "I’m sure I’ll be in tomorrow" and instead heard myself saying, "Realistically, I won’t be in tomorrow, either." For now I shall just sit. Feeling as though I have been fashioned from silk and thistledown, and inadequately stuffed. Tired out after climbing the stairs. I have given myself up to it. Something almost sensual in totally abandoning yourself to it after weeks of proper English, Blitz-spirit, ‘nothing wrong with me that a cup of tea won’t fix!’. I have relaxed into it. I am open to the idea that I may, in fact, not even be well enough to go back to work on Wednesday. It will take as long as it will take. And me, I will just sit here, tucked up alternately on the sofa or in bed, periodically coughing, periodically sleeping, but mainly just observing, mainly just convalescing. Waiting to get better.

Yours self-indulgently,
therumtumtugger
xxx
(cough cough)