MissAniela

The joy of a sicknote

Being ill can be a quite good experience. I haven’t been ill for a while, spare a few odd symptoms here and there, but in terms of having a full-on cold that incapacitates me for a few days, it has not been since my trip to visit Joanne Cruickshank in December 2007 that my eyes have watered and sinuses congested to the point of insanity. Last weekend for the first time in 2 years, I found my throat starting to tickle and skin start to tingle…

A strange start to a blog post, in that the topic is nothing to do with photography, but there’s no way I’m asking for any sympathy for my pathetic few symptoms here of an extremely ephemeral case of cold and sinusitis. What I want to share are my feelings on this particular topic and why a mere few days of illness, and not being my usual self, have actually been quite pleasant.

My reasons fall into two main categories: (a) being pleased to get away from routine (b) being pleased to get back to it. All in all: being ill, at least, when you know what the illness is and know that it’s nothing serious, becomes an exercise of relativity and therefore appreciation.

On the most basic level, when we’re in pain, we long to get back into what it’s like to be without pain. We suddenly feel as if we would do anything to make the pain go away (my ‘pain’ was minimal on this occasion, granted, but the principle is there. My mum who broke her foot last Christmas, fallen in a dark wood all alone, who later waited hours in A&E only to have her bones wrongly aligned by incompetent doctors who only with an X-ray realised they had to stick them back the right way, would be a better person to ask about this kind of stuff, but anyway…) As soon as our pain goes away, we appreciate our bodies again, we appreciate painlessness, in a way that we at least for a short time cease to take it for granted.

However, what I also enjoyed about being ill was something seemingly simpler but I think equally important: that when we’re ill, we kind of go back to square one for a little while, where we strive leisurely to get back to a certain point, where everything we can do slowly but surely is a step towards improvement and normality. So, for example, we might lose our appetite, for whatever reason, and when you’re ill, it becomes ok not to eat. We might nibble on some dry toast or warm up some soup, whereas in our normal everyday lives, it is our obligation to make sure we have three square meals a day, with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, meat and oily fish etc, water and cleansing tea. When we’re ill, we put little pressure on ourselves to do anything but stay in bed or on the couch, watching telly or even having the luxury to take your laptop to bed. You have a valid excuse to postpone meetings and not go out anywhere, or move much at all. In our normal everyday lives however, moving about, and regular exercise, is a priority. We all know the importance of keeping fit, and whether we like to or not, we know we should go for that jog/go to the gym/do 1000 star jumps in the kitchen.

In fact, in our normal everyday lives, at least I feel, that there is an increasing pressure to do everything right. A disconcerting perfectionism: to achieve healthy eating and fitness; to succeed at work (neverending) and make sure both mind is satisfied as well as bills paid; to balance the time spent indoors and out; to keep social life active; to (my ultimate groan) buy dinner and wash up. Plus, those more pressing things, those issues that creep up onto me at night or on thoughtful depressing evenings watching documentaries: to save the environment – to boycott this, strive or campaign for that… or just feel a duty to get depressed about it.

When we’re ill, none of this matters. All that matters is getting better, taking baby steps back to normality. Normality is the goal, the achievement, even if normality was deemed unsatisfactory just a few hours earlier. I enjoy not having an appetite, and the valid reason to not have one, almost like I’m a human running on empty, who doesn’t need food, who just keeps going without it, without the annoying obligation of having to figure out what to put into my stomach every 9am, 1pm and 6pm. I enjoy being looked after, my boyfriend proves to (almost) be as good as my mum is at home. Of course that wouldn’t be so relevant if one lives alone, but it’s generally the valid sicknote, the one really signed by authority and not by a shirking teenager’s forging hand, that makes me appreciate my life the way it was, even just a day or two ago, how stable my legs were, how clear my throat was, how superhuman my body was.

All this can be applied to lots of situations I guess, not just being ill. Being burgled, for example, made me think back to our shopping trip just before we arrived home to find out stuff gone. Matthew said to people ‘we were having a fantastic day before we got home and realised….’ I thought, were we having a fantastic day? Yes, I guess we were… we had gone out shopping for a smorgasbord of our favourite food… we’d drive home I’d watch him cook it whilst drinking tea and surfing the net and then we’d sit down and watch X Factor and then bugger off to bed – yes, we were having a fantastic day. If we didn’t get burgled, I might not have realised that. I have too much of a tendency to worry about other things, to stress about getting this, that and the other done. Being at a low makes you realise how much a ‘high’ normality really is.

That said, this annoying sinus pain had better clear up soon ;-/

More rambling blog posts on their way.

Tags: cold, ill, relief, sick, sinusitus

Posted in Essays, musings on November 22nd, 2009 | 10 Comments | Tweet This!