Tag / illness

by Isla

Catch a cold

In which we meet a rebellious soul

Seaweed

She’d stood in line for centuries. 

Admittedly some of that time had been spent in an orderly queue of egg sacks while she’d still been in nymph form, but she’d nevertheless been conscious of waiting for something of the utmost significance. The thing that would ignite her faith in the point of existence. The source of all passion and joy.

That thing was definitely not meant to be snot. She was fairly sure of that. Unfortunately, the Bureaucracy Fairy had wrinkled her upturned nose and frowned down at her furled scrolls before declaring that this was, in fact, exactly her calling. 

She was the Snot Fairy. 

She’d been handed a crumpled scrap of bin liner, several wooden buckets, one burlap sack, and a gluey looking feather. She’d seen the looks the other fairies gave her, the wide berth she had suddenly gained. Their slender arms were filled with pots of glitter, gauzy lilac wing extensions, baskets of daisies, tubes of luminescent paint. 

She slumped away to blend into the smudge of night.

The manual had waxed lyrical about the range of skills she was to deploy. There was the bucket of transparent snot that she had to tip at the very top of the nasal cavities so as to ensure a constant sticky trickle. There was the sack of squishy pink-grey lumps she had to haul down into the darkened passages of the lungs, ready to be cough-retched out the next morning. There was the incessant tickling of feathers followed by the art of maintaining a strong grip to avoid being swept out in the ensuing sneeze-fest. She had to pay careful attention to map out who each human made contact with, so as to plan the next target on her route, and she would spin from respiratory tract to respiratory tract with expert speed and accuracy.

Some nights she would spot one of her compatriots – the real kind, not the glitzy kind – bringing in veruccas or athlete’s foot, or painstakingly gluing stubble to twitching expanses of skin. They would nod to each other, acknowledging a fellow occupant of the bodily trenches. And they might share an eye roll if a flower fairy giggled at them from a nearby vase.

Some nights she was left alone in bedrooms filled with the sound of blocked sinuses. And she’d wonder what exactly it was about her that screamed ‘snot’. Why was she more snot than chicken, or begonia, or book?

And somewhere in her bin-liner draped body, there lit a fire of resistance.

Snot was not all there was.

She was going to find more.

by Isla

And so it goes

In which I venture forth

I emerge from my chrysalis. It’s daylight and the sheets have transformed into a hitherto undiscovered substance during my time inside them.

The chrysalis stage involves me, the floor, and the bathroom. I usually stop bothering to eat solids after a while so I can promote myself to vomiting in the sink instead of the toilet (pro-tip). Plus it’s hard to appreciate the colour of bile in a loo.

The final chitterings of cramp have quieted down, prompting the cracking of the sheet walls. A twitched curtain gives a blinding indication that the weather (rather selfishly) has stopped providing an excuse for extended pupation.

My butterfly transformation equates to having a shower, my hair no longer being scraped into a grease-sheened lopsided lump, and my skin making First Contact with Not Pyjamas.

It turns out my nine-ish days of sleep-vom-don’t-bother-rinsing-repeat has led me to forget how temperature relates to my wardrobe (I’ve been meaning to make a Dummies Guide to the coats I own and the temperature bands they function in). Still, I understand that a healthy glow is desirable?

In the words of Pratchett, I am glowing like a pig.

I find myself faintly surprised that the outside world actually looks familiar. It feels like the rest of the world should surely have undergone some sort of metamorphosis as well, but there’s the same old pavement with the same old malformed Lucozade bottle and faded ruin of a Quavers packet.

Home, sweet home.

Life outside my chrysalis scrapes the ears and eyes, but also contains delights such as non-frozen or tinned foodstuffs, and other people – some of whom I actually like. (I might not be deemed the most social of butterflies).

There are queues to stand in, the Tube to be delayed on, inconvenient misunderstandings to have with pharmacies, piles of ignored messages to respond to, and those oh-so-delightfully crunchy sheets to wash.

Today is a good day. It might not be long before my butterfly self catches alight but, on the plus side, a caterpillar always crawls from the ashes.

by Isla

While you were sleeping

In which we step, momentarily, into another world

The sphere market is a strange place (though perhaps not as strange as its purveyor).

Tiered shelves are ranked against the walls, blocked from wandering fingers by a coarse weave wire mesh.

The spheres on those shelves hum softly to one another, together creating the prickling feeling that I am entering a hive.

I nod to the slumped figure in the far corner, he/she is so immobile that my eyes had slid over them before realising what they had seen. The figure grunts, still without moving.

I return my gaze to the spheres. They are marvellous feats of engineering. Around a century ago, two enterprising researchers discovered that they could link small engines to individual humans, harnessing energy while they slept. These generators could be linked into systems and used as a reliable and strong power source – if you could afford one. Even the cheapest (those that were twinned with the arguably-humans that require only four hours sleep a night) cost more than half a year’s earnings.

On a rickety, splintered wooden tray next to the purveyor are the broken spheres and the unpredictable. One has rolled into the corner and repeatedly flashes on and then off – narcolepsy perhaps, or a new parent. Another seems to be humming happily enough, but the stallholder jerks and mutters ‘sinus issues’, I nod, it’s not likely to have a reliable burn time.

The most precious spheres are kept in a smeared glass case in the centre of the room – the pride and glory. They glow in harmony, guaranteed to provide at least ten productive hours a night, and often last much longer than that. The humans they link to suffer from constant fatigue, some due to depression, others due to physical health disorders. In order to be considered the best possible supply, these humans must have been reliably over-sleeping for at least a year under testing.

One sphere sits on a dusty velvet plinth, emblazoned with ‘commar pashunt‘. It’s been there a while, judging by the cobwebs that twine with the filigree of its sphere.

I’ve heard the whispers that the engineers have been pushed harder and harder by demand. That they have been seeding the humans with disease to increase the worth of spheres, and interfering with efforts to research cures. They live in fear that humanity might get its act together before the engineers can figure out how to stop spheres from becoming obsolete.

I suspect that’s giving humans too much credit.

The stallholder shifts, impatience clear in the lines of his/her body. I return to the sinus sphere and slide my fingers around the warm wire cage with its vibrating hum.

After all, sinusitis hardly ever gets better.

by Isla

The MUPS-Files

In which we discuss MUPS (which isn’t a puppy with a suspiciously lumpy neck)

There’s a basement under the Great Hall of Diagnosis. It’s never talked about and the basement door can only be reached by traversing the myriad doors and corridors of the upper floors, with their neat, rectangular, printed labels (Erythromelalgia – Gonorrhea – Vitiligo – Yellow Fever – Ichthyosis).

The label on the basement door is handwritten with an attempt to look authoritative – right up until the writer realised they were running out of space and the letters began to get smaller and smaller:

‘Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms (MUPS)’

Underneath, on a scrappier piece of paper, someone else has scrawled in blobby biro,

‘Welcome to the X-Files’

The basement’s occupants are numerous and varied. Every time medical testing fails to allocate a condition to one of the more reputable rooms above, it gets dumped in the basement.

The patient, meanwhile, receives the good/bad news that there isn’t a diagnosis. On the one hand, you’re not dying more quickly than you ought to be, as far as medical science can tell. On the other hand, we can’t find a reason for those physical symptoms, so we can’t treat them.

The unfortunate subtext is that there isn’t a real reason for the symptoms. There’s a sneaking suggestion that the cause of the symptoms is something psychological rather than physical, of the mind rather than the body.

The mind is a product of the body, of course, and undoubtedly can induce and influence the body’s behaviour. And yet it seems curious that this is the only explanation given weight. There is rarely any mention of the possibility that medical science might develop and learn more, and eventually figure out that there is a determinable cause for some of these conditions.

Conditions like Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue are finally making the journey from the MUPS basement to newly decorated rooms with printed labels on the floors above. Evidence has been found and explanations have been developed following extensive research. Medicine is acknowledging that there is something real to find out about, and is finally validating the experience of all those people who were told it was in their minds.

On two occasions, I’ve been the patient listening to a consultant say they can’t find anything wrong. On both occasions, I nod, and silence falls. I wait for a suggestion of a next step, a new test or another referral, but their benign smiles remain impossibly fixed. I begin to feel flutters of frantic panic, a desperation for something, anything to hold on to, a gasp of hope. They give me nothing.

I wonder if they’re waiting for me to say the words for them, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ and see myself out. I eventually received a ‘Good luck’ from one of them, but it tasted bitter in its emptiness.

Being designated to the MUPS basement leaves you unlabelled, open to the slow erosion of society’s slurs for those who lack a medically approved stamp: lazy, attention seeking, hysterical, weak, a drain on resources.

I’d like to get out of the basement one day.