Ill

It’s Sunday 13^th January. The New Year has been going for nearly two weeks and there hasn’t been a recent blog entry; what is going on?

Well, there’s a half-finished post that I had been working on since January 5^th. It was going to be the first of a new style of 2013 entries for this blog – which might be in for a name change – but I was struggling to find much to report back on. The start of 2013 has been dull and anodyne; very little of note has happened and I have been so wrapped up in work and dull day-to-day shit. It’s not been about being uninspired, more like being unmotivated; there have been things I could have commented about, but, you know, I just couldn’t be arsed and that was apparent with the way my first blog entry of 2013 was stalling and stuttering along.

The minutiae of the last week will probably be included in the as yet finished above mentioned entry; this is here for me to talk about my favourite subject – my health. The reason I’m seriously considering changing the name of this blog from Phill Hall to The Diary of an Ill Man is because I am beginning to think that my unofficial nickname is ‘Sick Note’ and because I have been ill, yet again. On Thursday, I was talking to a colleague who had had an awful two weeks off of work with pleurisy. I had not been feeling all that brilliant myself; I’d got into work at 8.15am and by the middle of the afternoon I was feeling as though I’d walked 6 miles – I had, I have a pedometer – and was beginning to ache. By the time I got home I was feeling cold. At 7pm, I had a bath to try and warm me up, but had to give in to feeling crappy, so texted Roger to cancel our Thursday night drink. Remarkably, I was in bed by 10.45pm, with the electric blanket on and feeling decidedly like I had some kind of bug. At 1.15am I thought I had the Noro virus because I started to feel sick as well as cold, but the sick wasn’t to come for another 8 hours.

By 6.30am on Friday I was in a lot of pain. The wife had gone and slept in the spare room because she had to go to work, but she realised that she couldn’t go to work when she saw me. I was coughing up blood and couldn’t breathe without feeling as though someone was digging hot knives into my ribcage. I knew what I had without having to see a doctor – I had got pleurisy… It isn’t contagious and was obviously just a weird coincidence, but Jesus Steve Christ riding a wave on a gold-plated Weetabix I have never felt so ill in my life. It was horrible. I was running a temperature of 104; I was shivering and I really wanted to die. Amazingly I got a cancellation at the doctors’ and was in there at 9.40, but not before I brought up a load of nothing. The doctor confirmed my suspicions, put me on loads of drugs and told me to go and get a chest x-ray this coming week and like whenever I have a bog standard chest infection I thought I’d feel better almost immediately. Ha!

Like I said, it is now Sunday, this was Friday morning. In the last 60 hours I have sweated my way through 14 t-shirts; the bed clothes have had to be changed and I’m sitting here on the Netbook, in the lounge, with a blanket over me, feeling pretty bad. I haven’t eaten much, but have just started to get something of an appetite – I want to eat some dinner tonight, but probably because I haven’t eaten anything other than half a bowl of soup and a small bowel of granola since Thursday night. I look awful; the wife thinks I look awful and she’s also been an absolute star; unselfishly looking after me, because she realised that I have something wrong with me that could have been serious. She hasn’t felt that good herself, but she’s done everything and that’s why on January 29^th I will have been with her 30 years. As I said to someone the other day when they said she would have got less for murder, I said she would have got less for being a serial killer! She is my star and do you know, she probably won’t even read this…

So there was no work on Friday (again) and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I am better than I was but nowhere near well enough to even go out (not that I would want to with winter hurtling towards us like an express train) and this is the 6^th chest related infection in the last 13 months – if I haven’t got COPD then I have to start wondering if I have something else, something serious, because I haven’t been particularly well since early December 2011. I have grown accustomed to either feeling crap or recovering from feeling crap; it would be nice to just feel okay again.

I expect the other blog will be finished in the coming days as I feel more human. I will obviously update you all on my health – so no change there then – because it gives me something to moan about J