Now is the winter of our discontent! After two years of plague, after a summer of torrential rain and flooding and more plague, after an autumn of mould and more rain and even more plague, comes the sickness.
It’s like singing a round. You meet someone who’s got it or is getting over it, then you get it and then the people you live with get it, and then you think you get over it but it returns to the start with a new variation of the old illness and everyone gets sick again. Tra-la-la …
Some students have been forced to return to remote learning, workplaces are reporting a 50% increase in the number of workers on sick leave, hospitals are dangerously understaffed and at capacity.
We’re all sick, or if we’re not sick we are recovering from being sick, or we are about to get sick.
People are getting Covid twice, or recovering from Covid, then getting some other sickness pretty much straight away, or they are not recovering; their sickness is lingering into days of double digits (one person I know has been sick for 54 days!). The sick wonder with dread if they have the extended mix of the sickness, the long version: The Sickness – Uncut? They wonder if this is now them, forever.
As for me, after two years of no winter flu, I am hovering between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. My body can’t decide which way to go. It’s mostly sick but I can still buy my own groceries, which is the metric of whether you are sick or not – can you shop for your own chicken soup?
Today my cough started deepening, moving further down into my lungs (hang on, where are my lungs? Just above the belly button?). Anyway, the cough was descending, like a pit worker going into a mucoid mine …
I keep a watch on my symptoms as I did once with a sourdough starter in 2020, during my year of perfect health. Is the sickness growing? What form is it taking? What is the consistency of my phlegm? What are my lymph nodes trying to tell me? Will the ride be gnarly and or will it be mild and soporific? Will it be one of those sicknesses where you sleep a lot, or will it be one where you can’t sleep at all? Will my ears start to ache? Will I google “head transplant”? Or will it go away overnight if I go to bed at 6pm?
That’s the thing about sickness, it’s unpredictable almost moment to moment. It can trick you into thinking you are getting better, that you are in the last days of it, when suddenly one day you wake up and you are so much worse.
The unpredictability is dialled up this year. Friends are reporting new symptoms, things they’ve never experienced before when ill – like hallucinations, like stuff streaming from their eyes, like no sense of taste or smell, like a swollen tongue. Sickness in 2022 has medieval vibes.
One sick friend (a friend who had been sick for many weeks) told me: “I know four people who have had foot and mouth in the last six months – and none of them have children. My inner ear got all fucked up. I didn’t even know that was a thing! It’s crazy how much everyone is getting sick, all of the time – everyone!”
All day in bed, I am texting others who are in bed, who are all texting others in bed – and we’re comparing. How is it today? Better or worse? Where’s your cough at? Can you smell anything yet? Have you got food? Can you get meals, because I’m too sick to bring you anything – but I can recommend this really good food app.
On Twitter the conversation continues, as people treat the platform like a giant WebMD.
“I’m 24 hours in … and my main question is how in god’s name does my body create so much mucus?” tweeted one friend, forcing me to imagine the large volume of his mucus pouring from his body.
Another friend pleaded: “People who have had Covid and lost taste/smell how long did it take to get it back?? Just wondering the range on how long I could be in for.”
Being sick is, of course, banal – there’s nothing more boring than someone telling you about their cold in great detail.
But after two years of no winter flu season, it has somehow been transformed into what feels like a new experience – novel, like the coronavirus promised to be.
This is a different way of doing sickness than pre-pandemic. Maybe because we became so accustomed to being vigilant about Covid symptoms, about washing our hands, about hearing on the daily press conferences messages related to our health. As a result, this flu season feels more like a communal event, where discussion of our individual pathologies, symptoms and sickness takes place more openly and in public forums such as Twitter, engaging the hive mind in a search for a pattern, a shape, a way through and hopefully out of this kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag in her 1978 essay, Illness as Metaphor, argued that the language of illness (she was specifically referencing cancer and tuberculosis) relied so heavily on metaphor because it was taboo, and our culture could not approach it openly because of the dread surrounding illness.
The antidote to this, she suggested, was to discuss illness openly and plainly, without euphemism, mystery or aversion.
Challenge accepted! This winter we are not shutting up about our bodies. We describe in plain and grindingly banal (yet also vaguely grotesque) detail all the things our body is doing: the sensations and excess of substances it’s producing, its sleeping and waking patterns, its effect on our digestive and elimination systems, its stresses on our lungs and brains and blood pressure.
These times have no use for metaphor.
