Maybe because we became so accustomed to being vigilant about Covid symptoms, about washing our hands, about hearing on the daily press conferences messages related to our health. This is a different way of doing sickness than pre-pandemic. “I’m 24 hours in … and my main question is how in god’s name does my body create so much mucus?” tweeted one friend, forcing me to imagine the large volume of his mucus pouring from his body.Īnother friend pleaded: “People who have had Covid and lost taste/smell how long did it take to get it back? Just wondering the range on how long I could be in for.”īeing sick is, of course, banal – there’s nothing more boring than someone telling you about their cold in great detail.īut after two years of no winter flu season, it has somehow been transformed into what feels like a new experience – novel, like the coronavirus promised to be. On Twitter the conversation continues, as people treat the platform like a giant WebMD. How is it today? Better or worse? Where’s your cough at? Can you smell anything yet? Have you got food? Can you get meals, because I’m too sick to bring you anything – but I can recommend this really good food app. I didn’t even know that was a thing! It’s crazy how much everyone is getting sick, all of the time – everyone!”Īll day in bed, I am texting others who are in bed, who are all texting others in bed – and we’re comparing. One sick friend (a friend who had been sick for many weeks) told me: “I know four people who have had foot and mouth in the last six months – and none of them have children. Friends are reporting new symptoms, things they’ve never experienced before when ill – like hallucinations, like stuff streaming from their eyes, like no sense of taste or smell, like a swollen tongue. The unpredictability is dialled up this year. It can trick you into thinking you are getting better, that you are in the last days of it, when suddenly one day you wake up and you are so much worse. That’s the thing about sickness, it’s unpredictable almost moment to moment. Is the sickness growing? What form is it taking? What is the consistency of my phlegm? What are my lymph nodes trying to tell me? Will the ride be gnarly and or will it be mild and soporific? Will it be one of those sicknesses where you sleep a lot, or will it be one where you can’t sleep at all? Will my ears start to ache? Will I google “head transplant”? Or will it go away overnight if I go to bed at 6pm? This flu season feels more like a communal event I keep a watch on my symptoms as I did once with a sourdough starter in 2020, during my year of perfect health. Anyway, the cough was descending, like a pit worker going into a mucoid mine … Today my cough started deepening, moving further down into my lungs (hang on, where are my lungs? Just above the belly button?). It’s mostly sick but I can still buy my own groceries, which is the metric of whether you are sick or not – can you shop for your own chicken soup? The sick wonder with dread if they have the extended mix of the sickness, the long version: The Sickness – Uncut? They wonder if this is now them, forever.Īs for me, after two years of no winter flu, I am hovering between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. People are getting Covid twice, or recovering from Covid, then getting some other sickness pretty much straight away, or they are not recovering their sickness is lingering into days of double digits (one person I know has been sick for 54 days!).