Hello! Here I am again. Where was I? Oh yes, I was just about to tell you about how I never get sick when I got sick. Specifically, I woke up with quite a bad headache that I'd assume I could sleep off. Then I started being sick. We assumed it was a migraine¹ so my wife, bless her, trotted out to get some medicine for me. She returned some time later, unhurried but urgent, to tell me that, according the chemist she had seen, I might have the Norovirus. Now I don't even know if I've spelt that correctly, but what I can tell you about this pesky little bug is that its means of transmission isn't properly understood, which is mainly why is it such a scourge and why they won't allow you in or near any sort of medical facility if you so much as smell of it². So in my house it was lockdown.

By any standard I am lucky to be married to someone so willing and able to look after me when I am sick. This is doubly true given that I am my wife's carer. Many people, probably most people, who are carers look after someone in no real position to switch roles on them should the situation demand it. Providing my wife is up to it she will do everything she can to improve my general wellbeing (she is, in fact, glad of the chance to adjust the balance, as she sees it) and is additionally blessed with both practical experience as a sick person and professional training as a care assistant which mean I would be foolish to ignore her advice.

So there I was, with time on my hands but nothing to do except vomit and sleep. The thing is that everything you touch has to be cleaned and sterilised. It may be that many households don't worry too much about this (perhaps wrongly) but my wife is immuno-compromised so we don't take chances. I was confined to the bedroom. If I ventured into the bathroom I had to sterilise every surface I had touched before I left. After you have just finished being sick this is a real pain in the neck, needless to say. Even after I was past the being-sick phase I spent s further 24 hours sterilising to be on the safe side. That is just plain boring.

The irony of all this is that I spent my two days off work being sick. That's not the irony, actually, that's just setting context. The irony is that the second day off I had specifically arranged so that I could go with my wife to the hospital to meet one of her expanding team of consultants. It was a new department, I always like to get the badge. And, more seriously, it was a big thing and she was very nervous. I protested feebly but, aside from the fact that I hadn't kept food down for 36 hours, I was still potentially infectious and she would have none of it. I wasn't going.

A curious thing about me is that I don't really cry. It's not that I never feel like crying, nor is there any point in me maintaining a pretence that I am too much of a man to cry. I am not. I just don't, very often. I have found that when sobs need easing out the only way is to watch something that pricks very modestly at the tear ducts. Something like the final scene of The Incredible Journey the sort of thing I am a hopeless sucker for. Once the gate is open I can cry uncontrollably. It has been, on such occasions, my lot to work out what the source of the tears actually is. So there we were, watching Dr Who. R had not had fun at the hospital and just wanted to watch something and try to unwind. Anyway, long story short I started to cry. Really, properly, uncontrollably, cry. I had let her down. She needed me at the hospital, to help her with a consultant who was neither gentle nor sympathetic and a diagnosis she did not relish, and I had been languishing in my vaguely sick bed. She had found the whole thing very stressful and, when she really needed me, when she had spent all her time and more energy than she had to spare looking after me, I had let her down.

That's how I felt, and there's no getting away from it. Because this caring lark extracts a heavy toll. It demands a great deal of you. Not asks, for you have no choice in the matter. You cannot neglect or abandon the person when they need you. When duty calls you must come running. And when you are unable, through sickness, or lack of availability, or sheer lack of will or energy, you have got it wrong. It's not fair, or reasonable, or realistic or rational, it just is. How people survive it beats me.

I'll tell you about it next week.

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benjaminpmoore

28.01.13 Front Page

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