I’m ill, a stupid thing to write on many levels but I am ill. I haven’t been feeling myself for several days now, but I don’t have the coughing and throat pain that Adam has, an illness the has prompting several people at his work to ask why he wasn’t off ill and tucked up in bed. I know because we have talked about it many times, he finds it hard to be ill these days. When he looks at me and what my health has been like and how I fought to keep working taking no time off, well he feels he simply can’t measure up and has no right to consider himself ill ever. Telling him that he’s stupid or that everyone has a right to be ill, or that we all deal with illness in many different ways, doesn’t seem to get through to him, he just refuses and carries on. It isn’t just Adam that looks at me and says I have no right, it worked brilliantly over my last 3 years when I was still going into work. I was the one that any member of staff not coming in that day had to phone. The sickness rate plummeted, pulling a sickie when you are talking to someone in a wheelchair with a tube up their nose, kind of made it hard for them. So Adam continues to cough and to blow his nose, taking what he can to help with his chest and he is right now at work, it didn’t stop him either from making sure I would be OK until he came home for lunch.

So here I am and I am ill, what ever is wrong with Adam is infectious and I have luckily a mild version of. I only seem to be coughing at night, real coughing but during the day, well no one would probably even notice it. But I have that feeling the one we all know, the one that leaves us waiting, just to find out what it is going to turn into. It hasn’t really turned into anything, but it’s pulling me down and it will keep pulling me down as that’s what happens with illnesses like MS. I have heard over and over again, people trying to describe MS and many say that it is like living with the flu 24/7 365 days of the year, not a description I would use but I understand where it comes from. Catch a cold, get the flu, what ever it turns out to be, the main thing it will do it pull you down, everything about your body is amplified, each symptom exaggerated and every day it hangs around the further you go down, don’t think getting rid of the bug is the end of it, you may have fought that one off but the damage it has done will take days and days of getting yourself back to the level you were in before that horrid little bug turned up. Sometimes you just can’t make it back to that level the damage it has left may never go, so you are left one more step down with no way of turning it around. I was always the person in the work place who didn’t catch the winter bug, somehow they seemed to pass me by, but I can’t help wondering if the cocktail of drugs I take suppresses or changes it somehow. My throat could be red raw but I doubt that I would feel that with 60mg of morphine inside me, so those drugs do have a use. I’m also reasonably sure the this time the fact I am right now on antibiotics for the bladder infection I have, well put all together there is an possible answer why I just feel ill and not dying like Adam. There is also one good thing, I have lost my appetite, other than porridge, grapes and Jaffa Cakes, the last enjoyed more than the rest but that’s because I have the fun of splitting them into there separate components, there is nothing like nibbling away the chocolate, eating the sponge then licking away the chocolate covering jam, before letting the jam melt in your mouth releasing that wonderful orange flavour. Those small connections to childhood always make you feel that bit better.

I keep checking my email in the hope that I will hear something from my brother, my letter should have been with him over a week ago and for some reason best known to him, there has been no answer. I am thinking of trying to find where my Mum is, Brian gave two hospital names but no wards or anything else. I think from what he was saying that she was to be moved to the second, not long after he wrote just before Christmas. If I can find her, I will check if flowers are allowed and if not, well I will have to find something else that might perk her up although that is a little difficult, taste change and since I can’t send her the type of gifts I gave her in the past. She loves birds but couldn’t get out and about to see them, there were several bird feeders, so I started her a collection of crystal birds, rather beautiful and I knew she loved them. Hospital, then a home reduces what she will be allowed to have with her, so what ever I think of has to be a short lived gift, edible or possibly usable, it shouldn’t be too hard.