The first week in January and yours truly is distinctly under the weather.
Here I am at the beginning of 2017 and, it has to be said, moderately unwell. I'm not ill as such but the old chest is beginning to wheeze like a concertina and the coughing fits have got steadily worse. I have to be honest here. I'm not in the mood for the London Marathon nor a cross country run and swimming the Channel is just out of the question. Climbing Mount Everest or racing down a ski-ing slope is just not advisable. All I want to do is just relax and re-cuperate.
You know what it's like. This morning I woke up at 10.30 and felt so hungover and wretched that it almost felt as if the world had lost contact with my body. I lifted my head off the pillow and it felt like a thousand marauding armies were attacking me from all directions. Slowly I became aware of my surroundings but then realised that I just wasn't firing on all cylinders. I felt tired, slow and sluggish, unwilling to make any concerted effort to do anything physically demanding or arduous.
At this point I should tell you that it felt like the beginning of a heavy cold but it was difficult to diagnose it as such. It was time for my first sneezing fit, an experience that somehow beggars description. Then it occurred to me that my blocked nose was rather like a blocked sink and ever so slightly bunged up. I couldn't find any of those kitchen plungers so I decided to make do and mend with a couple of Paracetemol, a strong cup of coffee, a quick piece of toast and the rest Mother Nature would take care of.
When I was a kid our local doctor's surgery used to be conveniently situated at the bottom of our road. There's now a house and garage on the same site but back in the 1960s my mum would frequently take her first offspring for a medical MOT with our doctors. Dr Elliott and Clarke were highly respected pillars of the community, doctors of distinction and esteemed members of the medical profession.
But Dr Eliott. it has to be said, although the most charming of men, was notoriously unsympathetic when it came to children's coughs and colds. The good Doctor, greyish of beard and quite possibly ruthless, didn't mince words. If you had so much as a sniffle or shiver Dr, Eliott would administer the ultimate of remedies.
He would look my mum in the eye and tell her, quite firmly, that there was never anything he could do so it would be in her best interests to take her snivelling three year old son home, give him some Aspirin, tell him to have an early night and just rest. What, he cried, did you want him to do? He was, after all, only a doctor and there were far more poorly patients in need of attention. So goodbye Joe, here's some cough linctus and you'll be as right as rain. What a doctor! A giant in the world of medicine.
Of course there were times when even the most hardened hypochondriacs or malingerers would be told what to do by Dr Eliott. But when I look back it almost seems that all of our most eminent surgeons and doctors were just models of commonsense and discretion. Both Elliott and Clarke were marvellous and benevolent gentlemen with a heart of gold but dear old Dr Elliott was just telling it the way it was, straight and right to the point.
Now I know for a fact that I haven't got yellow jaundice, pleurisy, malaria, the Black Plague nor have I a raging fever that may take months to go. Suffice it to say that if you were ask me to run up and down the stairs fifty times without pausing for breath I would have to apologise. I always have the flu jab as a precautionary measure after a severe bout years ago but at the moment I simply want to abandon myself to sluggish indifference to the outside world. Of course I care about the things going on around me but when you feel ill and not ready to respond productively to anything it's easy to just mope around and feel sorry for yourself. Which doesn't really help me does it? Sorry it's a slight case of man flu and I'm just a bloke. The two are interchangeable.
Isn't it strange how we react to winter illnesses such as flu,cold or a whole variety of bronchial and respiratory ailments? We just seem to withdraw into ourselves like tortoises in hibernation. We all think that the world will end in five minutes. daytime TV will become a constant torment and you'll never ever recover. We sink into a self inflicted set of negative emotions and pray for warmer weather. What we don't do is take stock for a couple of minutes, assess our condition in a rational light and try to convince ourselves that sooner rather than later the cold will clear up in the goodness of time and, according to the most realistic of doctors, you'll certainly live.
But the winter aches and pains reinforce all of those natural complaints and grumbles you might be feeling. None of us can ever sit back and rationalise with our worst case scenarios because we all have that inherent tendency to be melodramatic. We all consult the medical dicitionary and look at those old school conditions such as the Pox, German measles or that dreaded disease that Mr Hughes has got next door. Or is it a grumbling appendix or some serious gastric disorder. It could be anything but probably isn't what you at first thought.
Still it's time to stop indulging in self diagnosis and face the music. There is an essential morbidity and melancholy about us at this time of the year which may take ages to clear up. And yet we wallow in our misery. paranoia and hypochondria because that's the condition we're used to at the turn of a new year. We all think that for some inexplicable reason we're all going to end up in a hospital ward with some terrible condition that never really amounts to anything. But January, to quote the 1970s pop group Pilot, was always sick and tired and always angry with you.
The reality is of course that your medicine cabinet does frequently resemble a chemist with every conceivable potion, bottle and packet of pills in the whole of the pharmaceutical industry. There are packets for headaches, lotions and creams for everything and anything We adopt that natural default position. There has to be something wrong with us because we just don't feel right so if you swallow some good old fashioned tablets you're bound to perk up eventually. It's the law of averages.
The truth of course is that as we get older the more dependent we become on the NHS, doctors, surgeons and medical specialists for healing, restoration and that perfect pick me up. Every so often we have blood tests for this and blood tests for that. Surely I haven't got gastro-enteretis doctor. I had that last year.
But we mull over our imaginary illnesses and tend to exaggerate them ten fold. Maybe this is part of the human condition, that ever present sense of being flawed and vulnerable. Perhaps there is some dormant fear that we'll always be burdened by some illness for ever. This could be called an irrationality but then we probably and privately know that. The problem is that none of us know how to handle the whole gamut of every illness or disease known to any of us. We just sit there and turn things over in our mind, ruminating, fearing the worst and not knowing what to do.
Still here we are at the beginning of January and most, if not all, doctor's surgeries will have their full complement of sickness. There will be new mothers with pushchairs, babies in blankets, screaming and yelping plaintively because nobody seems to care. Then there are the people who just sit there staring at their I-phones sneezing sporadically and then coughing because they're patently not well. Some will read the paper and others just fall into a dazed trance when, for no apparent reason at all, there's nothing worth reading in Readers Digest or Take A Break.
In January doctors surgeries are rather like factory conveyor belts of the pale, distressed, the uncomfortable and the inconsolable. We stare mournfully into our morning copy of the Metro paper, burying our heads in our lap and trying desperately to ignore everybody else around us. I've often wondered what goes through their minds as they wait for their compassionate angel of a doctor to ease their pain. Do they think about that evening's tea or how much healthier they could be on some Caribbean island? Or do they wonder whether the grass could be greener somewhere else where illness simply doesn't exist?
Perhaps we've got something horribly contagious and the whole world will catch what we've got. Somewhere deep within us lies a kind of permanent fragility, a trembling uncertainty about our own immediate health in the foreseeable future. There is, it would seem, some deeply embedded, terror-filled trepidation that you'll never feel better however hard you try.
It's probably true to say that none of us will ever be fully convinced that even the most warmest outpouring of re-assurance from any doctor will put our mind at rest. Every morning we look at our medication and wonder if these are just temporary measures, calming palliatives that soothe a fevered brow. Then we look at the clock in the kitchen, grab a box of handkerchiefs, blow our noses, run out of our homes and catch the train to work. It's a time honoured ritual.
Then we get to work, school, college or university, briefly grumble about our blocked noses, sneeze again all over the photocopier, knock back a mug of honey and lemon and then groan light -heartedly. We wish it could be summer but it isn't but let's talk about summer holidays. We'll gather by the water cooler and filing cabinets and just get on with the whole business of survival.
Well that's about it for my first medical bulletin of 2017. Now I've checked my blood pressure and it can't be bronchitis because that would be devastating and I'm not sure but would probably deal with that. And so I leave the doctor's surgery with their familiar array of pencils in holders, family photos, stethoscopes liberally spread over their desk and that blood pressure device they wrap around your arm. No I'm fit as a fiddle and, all being well, I should be well enough to climb those elusive mountains and run around the world twice over. Wish me luck as I go on my way. Keep well folks.
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