One good reason to get good and sick

I’ve long thought that sickness is a way of forcing pauses. Cease and desist; your body taking out a restraining order on you. For the past few weeks I’d felt hollowed by all the stuff I managed to organise for myself – at the moment I have a full-time job and a part-time job, a night class I’m taking once a week, a close family member in need of lashings of love, a boyfriend who needs to be reassured of his significance in my celestial hierarchy, and a score of neglected friends in both hemispheres.

In the last month, my mum and stepdad, and my dad (separately), have all come over to London to visit. I also live with 9 people. Quiet and calm are pretty thin on the ground round my way.

I wasn’t surprised when my throat thickened and I got cold, bone-deep. My terrible confession: when I started feeling it, I thought, ‘thank Christ’. I know how terrible that is; how many people suffer horribly through sickness and how grateful I should be (am! honest!) for my usually rude health. But it was something I couldn’t argue with. Just. Stop.

So I stopped, inasmuch as I'm capable of stopping. I took a day and a half off work and stayed in bed, knitted, spent two hours on the phone to one of my truest friends, knitted, read, and watched 17 episodes of Green Wing. Come back, Mac, I love you.

When I attempted going back to work before my body had given its sage nod, I got my arse soundly kicked by it all over again (complete with a swollen face that made my eyes look like raisins on a clinically obese snowman), so ditched a weekend full of things I’d said I’d do.

I’ve never been so happy to be sick. Or so buoyed by feeling passable again.