NOTICED:DOWN WITH IT

(First published on more.ca)

Pardon my absence, but within days of  losing my column, and nearly burning down my house, I came down with the swine flu.

You know how when you get food poisoning and the entire time you are moaning on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, the single thought that possesses you is: it must have been that egg salad sandwich, the night that I came down with H1N1, all I could think about was the party I attended for the closing of Toronto Fashion week a couple nights earlier, and the guy not 10 feet away from me who coughed extravagantly all over a tray of passing drinks. I remember thinking to myself at the time, ‘that’s really uncool, right now, in the midst of all this disease hysteria to be spewing your germs around at a party’. And then two nights later, there I was, clinging to my bed in a hallucinatory fever, like it was a life raft, and I was stranded somewhere out at sea in the middle of a raging storm.

What’s it like?

The first indication that all systems were not go came earlier that afternoon. I had just walked out of a difficult meeting (another possible cause?) and noticed that every time I tried to swallow, there was a strange lump of something dry and scratchy, like a piece of beef jerky wedged at the base of my throat. This piece of meat was not dislodged in any way by a glass of wine before dinner, which was just about as appealing as salted cardboard. It wasn’t long before I had thrown myself onto my mattress with my head bonging and my eyes about to explode.

That night, I tossed and turned as the bottom of my feet burned, my fingernails felt like they were being pulled from my cuticles and my hair follicles hurt. No quarter of my physical being was spared. Every single millimetre ached. I was alternately dripping with sweat and shivering with cold like a wet dog.  And yet there was no real manifestation of any illness other than this hideous discomfort, and the sensation that the beef jerky in my throat had somehow slid deeper into my chest and bloomed into a sort of wet dishcloth dampening my attempts at drawing a breath.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very well. The next morning, it took all of my strength to sit up and tell my husband, first, that he should wipe down all the tv remotes and light switches with some kind of sanitiser, and second that I needed to draw up a living will, and that he had better move to the spare room if he hoped to survive me. I cancelled all of my appointments, swallowed a handful of Advil past the beef jerky with the aid of ginger ale, and slipped back into a weird twilight of deep sleep, punctuated only by episodes of waking up with the bedclothes literally drenched in sweat—for two days.

A recipe for depression

I couldn’t read, since my eyeballs had exploded. I had no appetite. I could barely get out of bed to pee. So the only thing to do, isolated as I was in my plague bunker, was either sleep or watch tv. If there was ever a recipe for depression, the combination of watching Dog the Bounty Hunter, alone, while feeling like you had been run over by a Mack truck would be highly effective.

After 48 hours of this, compounded by a weird, wheezing speaking voice courtesy of the wet dishcloth in my chest, my family began to get alarmed. So I called my family doctor, who confirmed, on the basis of said weird voice and my ongoing symptoms that, yes, I probably had H1N1. Because of my history of pneumonia, she wanted to start me on Tamiflu, which she advised, would most likely make me feel worse, rather than better. But that if I didn’t take it, I was at risk of contracting something else that would only make me sicker, longer.

Tamiflu might be worse than the plague

Tamiflu was disgusting. I tried to take it with a couple of bites of food, but even then, it made the room spin as if I had been the loser in a college drinking game. Nonetheless I had to force it down twice a day, for five days. But gradually, I got better. I took a shower, for the first time in days, and in the bathroom had to admire my clear skin and fashionably starved cheekbones.

I still have little appetite for anything other than nursery food and red wine tastes like poison. As my mother once famously said, there is no crisis in a woman’s life so tragic that she doesn’t secretly say to herself, ‘well, at least I lost some weight’.