Get Down With The Sickness……………

I’m not very well at the moment (sad face).

It’s common knowledge that men, on a whole, don’t handle illness very well. It’s some kind of genetic makeup that we have which prevents us from just sucking it up and carrying on with our day like you ladies do. Instead we men flop around like fish that have just been yanked out of a lake, loudly proclaiming to anyone in earshot about how shit we feel and how this is no normal illness, but a serious one.

Big girlie men.

Of which I now find myself joining the club.

I started feeling rough at work on Thursday.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” I told my friend Elise, who I share my desk pod with.

“Oh, that’s not good,” she replied absentmindedly from the mound of paperwork that always seems to surround her like an administration Himalayas.

“Do you have any vitamins or aspirin?”

“No, sorry,” she replied as my weak, pathetic ill voice distracted her once more from her work.

“That’s ok, “I told her, vowing to just suffer in silence. But of course, it didn’t last.

“I don’t feel very well,” I would continuously tell anyone who wandered past my desk.

The lack of sympathy I got was heart warming.

When I got home, I was soaking wet from the rain, shivering, and starting to get a sore throat. This didn’t bode well at all.

I gave myself an early night in the hope that when I woke up, I would feel a whole lot better. But when my alarm went off in the morning, I awoke to find my throat on fire, my lungs clogged with nasty shit, and my body alternating between hot and cold.

I could see me not making it in today.

So I now had to do the thing that I hate most in the world, phoning in sick. I always get incredibly paranoid about doing this because I always imagine the manager at the end of the phone just shaking their heads and not believing the fact that I wasn’t very well, when in truth, there was a strong possibility that I was going to die. That’s right, die. Because this naturally wasn’t just any kind of illness I was feeling, but a life threatening serious one.

I always try and prepare myself when I have to phone in sick. No matter how shit I feel, I don’t want to sound too ill, because then I always worry that it sounds too false, like the fake ill voice that you used to put on to get out of school. But if you go too far the other way, you might not sound ill enough, and just sound like you couldn’t be arsed to go in to work. So with this dilemma weighing heavily on you, it causes your flu ravaged body to start feeling even more shit, until that worrying thought that you actually might die suddenly starts looking like it might be a grim reality and you have nobody to moan to about it.

When I rang my manager yesterday though, I got her voicemail. I didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing. I left my message saying that I wouldn’t be in, hopefully sounding as genuinely ill as I felt, and resisting the urge to ask her pass on my goodbyes to my work colleagues as it didn’t look like I was going to make it through this one and could she share out my stationary with them all.

With work informed, I now lay in my bed, making sight moaning noises and proclaiming to the empty flat, “Urrrrgh, I feel ill.” Somehow this felt as if I was justifying everything to myself.

I now had to tell Kates, so I sent her a text.

ME: Feel rough. Not gone in today.

KATES: Go out, stock up on soup, medicine, and sausage rolls.

I have no idea why she wanted me to stock up on sausage rolls. Perhaps it was an age old tradition of her family? As soon as someone gets ill, you crack out the flu capsules and pastry covered sausage meat.

Kates has been with me long enough to know that when I get ill, the best thing to do is leave me alone. When we first got together, if I ever got sick, her first natural reaction was to look after me, mainly because she loves me and because I also live on my own as well. She now knows that if I get sick to just to let me get on with it. This is for two reasons. The first is because I loath to take help from anyone, even my girlfriend. If it sounds ridiculous, well, that’s probably because it is. It’s not even stupid male pride; I just never accept help from anyone unless it’s a dire emergency. I don’t know why I’m like it; I just can’t bring myself to do it. I think maybe it’s an offshoot of having to fend for myself from such a young age. I did all that by myself and now I will never take help from no one. It drives her batshit and I totally understand why. Maybe I will change, or maybe I will always be this annoying?

The second reason is a little bit more understandable, I turn into a grumpy sod when ill. Now normally I am not the sunniest of individuals, but man, when I’m ill, I hate everything. So it’s probably a good thing that I’m probably left alone, otherwise I could end up getting a force fed an overdose of lemsip.

I dozed off in my bed for a bit before being rudely awoken by the sudden sneezing fit that overtook me. I don’t know if any of you have sneezed in your sleep, but it’s disgusting, it goes everywhere. My bed sheets, clothes, and one rather startled cat, were covered in it. I had turned into a 360 degree mucus machine.

“Oh, God, “I moaned, strings of it covering me so I resembled something from the set of Alien. “What’s happening to me?”

After removing myself from my cocoon, I gathered up my bed stuff and stuck it in the washing machine. My cat was winding her way round my legs, the fur on the top of her head stuck up in a crazy Mohican style from the huge wad of mucus I had fired at her.

“Sorry Dotty,” I told her, wiping it off with a wet tissue. She just glared back at me.

So I now had the whole day ahead of me, but to be honest, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball somewhere and make an occasional “Meh” noise.

So I did.

And that’s what I’ve been doing since. I still feel like shit. This could possibly be my last blog post, because I’m pretty sure that what I am suffering from is actually fatal, not just your everyday common cold, but a life sucking vital bitch that no man will ever escape from.

Overdramatic? Maybe. But if you’re a man, well, you guys know where I’m coming from, right?

Sniffle.