Influenza. The
scourge of the middle-aged.
‘No need to worry,’ the posh pretty nurse had said.
‘It’s a dead virus. It cannot affect
you.’ ‘How many strains of flu are there?’ I asked. ‘Forty-nine’. ‘And how many
does this jag cover?’ ‘One. We use an algorithm that highlights the most likely
strain, and we prepare an inoculation to guard against that. Now hold out your
arm.’
Two weeks after the flu jag, I caught flu. I never trusted
algorithms, even if I knew what they were.
Now I sit, enfeebled, in my white chair, two weeks before Christmas,
contemplating nothing very much in particular, for my head hurts too much. It’s a peculiar form of influenza. For a start, it only affects the right side
of my face. My scalp hurts, as do my teeth
and the right side of my throat is completely closed. Have you ever tried to drink tea and swallow
with the left-hand half of your throat? It’s not easy. I had to change my shirt
three times in one day as tea dribbled uselessly down from my mouth. An
execrescence erupted on the right hand side of my nose at the same time as a
rash bloomed on my right cheek. Every joint and muscle on the right-hand side
ached and throbbed. My energy
disappeared as quickly as Lord Lucan and when I looked in the mirror I thought
I saw an image of the Phantom of the Opera.
‘Go to the doctor’s,’ my wife said. ‘I hate the doctor’s,’ I
replied. ‘I don’t even know who my doctor is these days.’ ‘That doesn’t matter. You’ll have to see whoever is available.’ I
looked at the internet. It didn’t help.
‘Don’t go to the doctor’s, unless the symptoms last for longer than a week and
you’re over 65.’ It’s been six days now and I’m 66, so I suppose tomorrow is
the tipping point. Unless I make a
miraculous recovery in the meantime, I’ll have to ring up the health centre and
make an appointment to see a doctor.
Then I’ll be obliged to sit in a large modern waiting room on one of the
overstuffed benches reading a January 2013 ‘Woman’s Own’ whilst waiting in vain
for the doctor to come to the door and call out my name. Around me will be a bunch of miserable and
degraded people snuffling and sneezing and exhaling more germs per square metre
than particulates of carbon round Trafalgar
Square . The doctors used to have a public address gubbins
but the sound was so bad nobody could make out what was being said. The medic would have to sit, impatiently tapping his stethoscope waiting for someone to enter his
consulting-room. No-one did. He would eventually have
to haul himself out of his chair and come to the door of the waiting-room to
see if his patient was actually there. That ensured his bedside manner would evaporate and the terrified patient would say there was noting wrong with him that 'Lem-sip' couldn't cure in a bid to flee the surgery without delay.
So here I sit, in my white chair, whilst leaves build up on
the patio outside and Christmas cards remain unwritten. I feel like a
nonaganarian and I dread a trip to the quack’s.
In the back of my mind is the thought that I might actually just be
tired after a harrowing year and in fact be a hypochondriac of the type
highlighted by Robert Burns: “But human bodies are sic fools/ For a’ their
colleges and schools,/That when nae real ills perplex them,/They make now themselves
to vex them.”
