I’m Not Feeling Well (Serves One) (Jeremy)

Ingredients:
One Person, lots of medical equipment that goes “beep”, a virus (although some bacteria will do if you’ve run out), a bottle of pills, nearby toilet and lots of daytime television

Preparation time:
Three Weeks

This, young chefs, is one of my favourite recipes and I would dearly like to share it with you. We don’t tend to bring it out all that often, due to the lengthy preparation time, but when we do, it certainly causes a stir with both the taster and the whole family! When administered properly, the taster will subsequently progress to a diet of water, air and The Bold and the Beautiful. WARNING: Ingestion may cause health issues, resulting in symptoms such as nausea, pain, death and gastrolyte addiction.

METHOD

Day One: Preferably taking care not to contaminate others, infect yourself with virus. (Bacteria is a little more difficult here as you do have to actually consume it). Totter around for a while, waiting for virus to take hold. In order to maximize introduction of virus to best effect, place yourself in a public, formal and embarassing situation. (I would recommend national television). Hold on tight! You’re in for a rough ride!

Day Three: Purchase a Public Toilet Map Of Melbourne and quite possibly some softer toilet paper and a few good books. When on the bus or in some non-toilet accessible situation, keep your concentration by repeating an anagram to yourself. (My personal favourite is Sit Quietly Under Incredible Relentless Tension, but you can make your own up). Make sure to miss intermittent days of University attendance throughout this period in order to jeapordise (sp?) studies.
Day Five: Feel better. Must just be food poisoning.
Day Seven: Feel worse. Spend half-an-hour of dinner at girlfriend’s ensconsed in the bathroom (see post “Sick, sick sick”). Maybe it’s not food poisoning.

Day Ten: After a restless night spent with stomach in knots, decide that Enough Is Really Quite Enough and march straight down to the very friendly local GP at Melbourne University, who says that You Probably Have Giardia (a not unreasonable diagnosis as I did get it in China) and Here’s A Prescription for some tinidazole, and in the meantime you should carry out an Extremely Embarassing Pathology Test. Text parental unit as to the results of said visit to GP. This will lead to two very ironic text messages throughout the day; one is unrepeatable here and the other reads, “Got your drugs Jem, love Mum, xx”. There is a first time for everything.

Day Twelve: Quite obviously the Tinidazole didn’t work. Go back to GP to find out exactly what went wrong. The GP really doesn’t have any idea either, so it’s now down to the dreaded b-word; Blood Test.

Here it is necessary to add your own twist to the recipe. I would personally recommend almost vomiting on the tram after eating a lollipop, but you can put your own twist in here if you like. Idealistically this should end in a trip to the Emergency department of the hospital. (Allow four hours waiting in Emergency Department for Incubation).

From here it is difficult to continue in the same vein without some level of monotony… so I’ll just quickly run through what else happened instead. Basically put, I went back to the hospital on Monday (Day Fifteen), to have (after another four-hour wait) a drip run through me, some more blood taken and an ultrasound done – with no abnormalities, thanks be. The queue in the Emergency department runs in a number of sections; Really, Really Urgent (ie Ambulances), Really Quite Urgent, and Not Really Urgent At All, and I, not having vomited or passed out, was therefore lumped straight into the third category, and I can safely confirm that I have never felt such hatred towards infirm old ladies with fainting fits before in my life. Despite the (necessary) wait, might I add that as soon as I got in there, the staff in the department were exceptional, fast and thorough, and they did their best to hurry me through the department.

The rest of the week was something of a monotonous, depressing blur; I was down to eating a few bananas and a small, small bowl of rice a day and as a consequence, I had absolutely no energy to speak of whatsoever. Basically put, I lowered myself to the level of lying on the couch all day watching midday television. This is somewhat embarassing to admit in an open public forum, but I became a Dr Phil addict. Dr.Phil tends to work on the Supernanny principle; that it’s always comforting to know that, out there in the world, there are always going to people far more incapable and utterly stupid than yourself. (In fact, most of them seem to be in politics). I even slipped to the point whereas I watched – in dribs and drabs – Dukes of Hazzard. If that movie was any worse it would be a suspected cause of brain cancer.

Although it wasn’t exactly life-threatening, I can’t help but to tell you just how depressing that week was. I couldn’t smile – didn’t have the energy, even if I wanted to – and all I could do was just sit there. I wasn’t up to socialising at all but I did start to feel lonely – which of course came around in a nice vicious circle because the last thing I felt like was having company. It took until Saturday, just over a week later, till I started to feel a little better, and able to communicate and walk and talk like a real human being again. Normally being such a buzzing, active person, I couldn’t help but to try and tell you what a horrible experience it was to be so… infirm, dependant and useless. Anyway, I came back to Uni for the first time last week (to be greeted, naturally, with more work than will be humanly possible over the next month or so) and I’m still not %100; caffeine seems to make it flair up again for some reason or the other; we think it’s probably a stomach ulcer. Oh well – I’ll find out for sure when I have the gastroscopy next Thursday.

Don’t work too hard –

jez

ps- Soph, Kim, thanks for your support during that tough week. Really, you guys, you’re both magic, it was truly invaluable.