Things I learned being sick

This is just a short post to say that I was really, really sick last week.  I got back from the Alps in the middle of the night on Saturday, 27 June and spent Sunday blogging and getting ready to go back into work.

I went into work on Monday, although I was starting to feel a little queasy.  By the end of the day, I was feeling rotten and I left on time and drove home quickly, just wanting to collapse on the sofa.  When I got in, it was if my body recognised that I was in a safe place and it let go.  Spectacularly.

Uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting sounds hilarious until it’s you who has to experience trying to position one end over the toilet bowl and the other over the sink.  Especially if your bathroom is not designed with that in mind.

It’s also not fun when you finally climb gasping off the bathroom floor and follow the trail of destruction back down the stairs to wherever you were when it started and proceed to try and clean it all up.

And the temperature that comes with it all is the worst thing of all.  I hate the brain fog and tunnel vision I get when my temperature goes up.  I hate the ultra-vivid dreams that keep waking me up and I hate the paranoia that I get when I’m awake.

Anyway, I managed to salvage some experiences from it.  This is what I learned:

• Lying down on your side for long periods of time is really bad for your shoulders.  I injured my left shoulder about two months ago and I had done a lot of rehab before I went on holiday.  While I was away, I did even more and I felt like I had really turned a corner.  Having spent five days lying on it all scrunched up, I think I have gone backwards.
• Eating protein is a really bad idea when you are trying to see whether your body can stomach any food again.  Much as I advocate a paleo diet, I found that dry toast was the only thing that my body would countenance eating after five days of nothing.
• Boiled or bottled water was the only thing I could consume without repercussions.  This has made me seriously question the logic of drinking tap water going forward.  There must be something in it that my body doesn’t like if it couldn’t stomach it while I was sick.  However, the financial impact of that choice is so significant that I don’t think there is anything I can do about it.  Sometimes I hate living in the UK, where everything is so expensive.
• NHS Direct is quite a useful place to look if you are concerned about what ailment you may have.  A brief look and you can reassure yourself that you aren’t going to die (immediately).  Beats wating hours in a germ-filled room packed with screaming babies and warring toddlers to be told to go home, take paracetamol and sleep with the window open.  Now if they could dispense sick notes, that would be perfect.
• Magazines have got really expensive all of a sudden.  The last time I bought a magazine, it was probably Men’s Health and it was £3.00 (I tend to use the internet for fitness and health reading these days).  This weekend, intending to spend some time recuperating on the sofa, I bought Empire (a UK film magazine) at the local supermarket in the village for £4.00.  I cannot believe that inflation has risen by 33.3% since the last time I bought a magazine and I can’t believe that everyone who was earning £30k back then is earning £40k now.  Maybe the internet has hit their circulation so much that they’ve had to escalate their prices.
• Always have an emergency box of key items in the house for in case you get sick.  You will be so much happier if you do this and you don’t have to phone around ten friends trying to find someone to go to the supermarket for you while you are chained to the toilet.  I would include ibruprofen and paracetamol, bottled water, dioralyte and maybe some flu medication, I don’t know.

Anyway.  I hope none of you are sick and if you are then you definitely have my sympathy.