wasted time

Just as beds are only nice to be in when you choose to be in them, a good night's sleep is only really possible when your dreams don't begin before your eyes have even closed; vivid and violent, mired in a dark haze of bloodied, ethereal humanoid shapes whose bodies seem to shear apart at the skin with each pulsing movement they make towards you. Pulsing. Pulsing. At the same rate as the blinding pain in your head. And then you become aware that this frustrating staccato of movement and hurt and decay is simply a function of your beating heart. That you're not in hell, that you're just very ill, a little delirious, and having very little fun in the process. Then off you drift again, shifting around miserably because no change in position takes the pain and freakish visions away, but it's all that you can do to try to find a moment of comfort.

And that's the stylish way to spend five days in bed when you'd far prefer to be doing something else. What frustrates me about this particular malaise is that there's nothing I can do about it; 80% of adults in the developed world carry it, approaching 100% in metropolitan areas and gay communities. The majority present no symptoms, some are badly affected on first infection and generally fine thereafter, and some, like me, like my friend Frank in NYC, are completely clobbered the first time around, and then have to deal with latency; periodic flare-ups that aren't ever as bad as the first time, but which take you down more memorably than any bout of influenza each time they occur, or just sometimes, periods many weeks long when you just feel tired and ill, but without any obvious symptoms. Say hello to glandular fever, infectious mononucelosis, kissing disease.

My first time, back in 1996, had me on a drip and cooling fans with a maximum temperature of 41 ºC (106 ºF); if you had taken a small mace to the back of my throat, used both hands to twist it around a few times, then used a barbed fork to pull the mangled tissue inward to close up my throat completely, that would be a fairly accurate image of the back of my mouth that first time, the vile looking exudate notwithstanding. Now, as with every other subsequent flare up (perhaps one every one and a half years, but double that during times of stress, yay Ph.D.), my throat didn't tear itself open, but my temperature shot up to an impressive degree, the lymph nodes in my neck, knees and spleen became painfully swollen and I got a blinding headache that made keeping my eyes open painful, the sum of which was no sleep, intense discomfort, and the unpleasant bleeding-monsters delirium.

Today will be my first full day out of bed; the headache will persist for a couple of days, and I'll feel tired for a fortnight at least; I'm familiar with the pattern. Chronic fatigue syndrome (yuppie flu) is associated with this particular bug, and I'm glad that the tiredness and lack of willingness to do anything at all only ever creep up on me when I'm really stretched to the limit, a luxury real sufferers don't have. I may seem otherwise robust, active and healthy, and I am, but if science could find a way (well, there is a way, but it involves chemotherapy for cancer treatment and total B-lymphocyte destruction; I'll thank you not to point that syringe at me) to remove this element from my existence, I would pay through my nose and abstain from all vices forever. Except one perhaps, but he probably doesn't count as a vice.