Feeling green, grouchy and guilty

It‘s the arse-end of Good Friday and I will resist offending the pious by writing that I feel as if I’ve been crucified. That would be an exaggeration but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I have but hours to live.

You all know the feeling: unexplainable tiredness, maybe a cough and a sniffle. In my case, I usually experience an ironic process of being very quiet (due to a red-raw throat) whilst enduring jaw-ache. My teeth appear to be planning the fastest route to the depths of my clogged brain. I wouldn’t blame them as someone has apparently managed to coat my tongue with fresh wallpaper paste.

If I was single I think I would use this as my “about me” description for a dating site. It might be fun to see who would respond.

The following day delivers no surprises. It’s not my first rodeo. Anything more than curling up in bed would be an insurmountable physical ordeal. There’s a corner in our backyard under a tree which attracts birds on the verge of death but I don’t have the energy to crawl downstairs and see if they’re onto something. The way their bodies vanish in the night unnerves me so I’ll remain a bed-blob just in case I recover. I don’t think our flat-cat (his resident’s status, not his shape) could get my neck between his teeth and drag me off. I hope not as I don’t have the strength to fight him off.

According to my “difference between cold flu covid symptoms” Google search I have flu. No common cold for me. I have an aristocratic version of Influenza A Virus. I tip my hat to you, Sir IAV, for you have pulled the silk rug from under my feet.

I’m neither moaning nor fishing for sympathy. Most people are struck down by a similar virus a couple of times a year. This fact does little to assuage the symptoms but the knowledge that the bug will (probably) not be the thing which finally kills me offers some comfort, even if I actually feel like the living dead.

What pisses me off most is missing work again. A couple of weeks ago I had 4 days off. On the evening of the third day I went to bed as usual and woke up barely able to walk. How had someone managed to creep in to the room and insert what felt like a screwdriver into my lower back?

It hurt when I moved and it hurt when I stayed still. I wished for an as-of-yet undiscovered state of limbo between movement and stillness but already know that would also be painful. Off to the doctor, I hobbled.

Like the colds and/or flu, my back problem is a biannual event and my GP knows just what to do with his repeat victim. I lay on his padded table in my underwear as he makes me hug myself and does something with all of his weight as I exhale and a crunch is a small explosion blasting away the problem. The ability to walk in a non-neanderthal manner will return upon awaking the next morning. Tomorrow I will be leaping over fences like a young buck with the scent of spring in its nostrils.

And the next day, as if by magic, I was that young buck. Unfortunately, I was a buck whose back had been shot full of buckshot and landed on his neck. I’d be needing the sick note he passed me for a couple of days.

I work for a small, local company. Well, it was small when I started but is constantly growing, no doubt entirely due to me being on the payroll. The bosses have been good to me over the years and I always aim to do my best for them. For this reason, despite my (almost) Protestant work ethic, I have a Catholic sense of guilt if I’m off sick. I’m aware that my sick pay comes out of the owners’ pockets. I wouldn’t really care if I were working for an international conglomerate with billions of profit but my firm has very much a family feel to it.

After years of abusing myself with aplomb I now look after myself, chocolate and tobacco being (generally) my only vices. Freshly made smoothies have replaced freshly poured beers and I stretch and train a little on days off. I do the right things so I was mightily pissed off when, on my first day back, it took a minute of painful contortions to extricate my uncooperative bag of bones from the car after arriving at work.

I lasted an hour before giving up. There was no point in trying to work so I gave my keys to a colleague to drive the car home and walked to the station. €25 lighter I got onto the train. The train whose usual 83 minute direct journey to my town would turn into a 4 hour trek with 2 changes involving hour waits. Thank you Deutsche Bahn drivers for choosing to strike today. It’s not as if I wanted to get home ASAP.

As the carriage emptied there was only myself and a young woman sitting opposite me. I tried to move seat in order to make her feel more comfortable but after emitting a series of pathetic whimpers decided to stay put, making an effort to look in any direction but hers and doing my best not to appear too creepy. Fortunately, she got off the train before my suffering became too unbearable for her to endure. I don't think she believed that she was the cause of my squeals but you never know.

Thanks to the train strike the doctor was closed when I eventually got back. It was, naturally, a Friday so a weekend of pain lay before me. On Monday a couple of injections into my back and buttocks finally brought some relief and a few days later I was back working, albeit with the speed and mobility of someone twenty years older.

Less than a week later the sequel was released. My burning throat, aching jam and uncontrollable lethargy informed me that I would be having to take yet more time off. Not good.

Every employer knows that their staff will sometimes be unable to work for a variety of reasons. My job can be physically demanding, is sometimes quite dangerous, and short nights with little sleep are often a prelude to a day spent with people from every corner of the World in places where the air is thick with dust and fumes. It’s a wonder that more of us in the trade aren’t sick more often.

From my twentieth year to age thirty I had two jobs and had one day off sick with each. I remember this fact well as the sickies were so rare. Hellish hangovers and horrible colds wouldn’t stop me from dragging myself out of bed but I can’t and won’t do that to myself any more. I have, as a former bar owner, been responsible for thousands of other people’s hangovers but that was their choice. I see little point in coughing and spluttering through the day and making everyone else sick whether they want it or not. Corona viruses have been around for thousands of years but if the last version taught us anything it was that they happily seek a new victim to take up residence within. Isolation is not only a relief but an act of mercy to others.

My guilt goes beyond not wanting my boss having to pay for me to lie on my back at home. The World is a nasty place right now (hasn’t it always been?). Disgusting events in Gaza and Ukraine, for example, put one’s own suffering into perspective. This can be drummed into our psyches from childhood. However, knowing that children in Africa are starving does nothing to make the vegetables any easier to force down. A sprained ankle doesn’t become painless when another person sprains two.

It’s a very British trait to keep a stiff upper lip. Mustn’t grumble, got to struggle on. This forces guilt upon us. Nobody likes a whiner but it’s important not to be consumed by remorse for things beyond our control. We’re allowed to be ill or suffer in any form and we should not try to deny this because others have it worse.

Pain is pain.

I simply could not have done my job during both of my illnesses and it would have reflected badly on both myself and my firm to have gone to work and spend the day collapsed in a corner, giving everyone in my radius the lurgy.

Don’t be afraid to show weakness when there’s no other choice. Nobody will think badly of you. You’ll be doing yourself and those around you a favour. Shedding guilt is hard (I am yet to achieve doing so myself) but it’s a negative feeling which does nobody any good.

I stopped being tormented about pouring a bucket of paint over Catherine’s head at kindergarten years ago.

Good health to you all but if you're also suffering keep your germs away from me!