A Renovator’s Delight

After yesterday’s visit to the doctor, I have decided that I don’t need treatment. I need a restoration team.

Not one person with a stethoscope and a prescription pad. I need several tradespeople, scaffolding and one of those television programs where everyone walks around shaking their heads and saying, “This is much worse than we expected.”

I have been dieting. Not merely thinking about dieting while eating toast, either. I have actually been making an effort. I'm fasting for 17 hours a day, sometimes more. I have also started going to a strength class once a week, where I lift things, stretch things and discover muscles I had previously assumed were decorative.

Surely my body should be grateful.

It should be responding with renewed energy, improved strength and perhaps a slightly more streamlined silhouette. Instead, it continues to feel blah.

Not dramatically ill. Not interestingly unwell. Just blah—the physical equivalent of a grey cardigan.

This seems deeply unfair. If I am going to deny myself food I actually enjoy and voluntarily attend a class where someone tells me to do another ten repetitions, I expect results. I don’t necessarily need to emerge looking thirty years younger, but I would like to get out of a chair without making the sound of an elderly wardrobe being dragged across a floor.

Instead, I have liver scans to arrange, B12 injections to endure, Vitamin D to swallow and enough green mucus to supply a small special-effects department.

Apparently, my body is one of those old houses that looked perfectly charming from the street but once purchased, reveals rising damp, faulty plumbing and wiring installed by somebody’s uncle in 1974.

Every time the doctor investigates one thing, another problem appears behind it.

“While we’re here, we’ve noticed the foundations are shifting.”

Wonderful.

I am trying, though. I’m dieting. I’m strengthening. I’m taking the vitamins. I’m turning up to appointments. I am doing all the sensible things people tell you to do when you reach the age where your body starts issuing maintenance notices.

Perhaps the benefits are quietly happening somewhere I can’t see them. Maybe beneath the general blahness, my muscles are improving, my health is recovering and my body is slowly remembering how to behave.

Or perhaps I’m simply holding the whole structure together long enough for the next inspection.

Either way, I no longer want a makeover.

I want a full renovation, a generous budget and somebody else to manage the project.

Why Am I The Latest Restoration Project?

I went to the doctor today, which is always a mistake.

You can walk in feeling reasonably functional and walk out carrying several referrals, a list of vitamin deficiencies and the unsettling suspicion that your entire body has quietly resigned without bothering to tell you.

Apparently, I now need liver scans.

Nothing makes you feel quite as cheerful as hearing the words “liver scans.” I don’t know exactly what they’re looking for yet, but I assume my liver has finally lodged a formal complaint about the conditions under which it has been expected to operate.

Sheez! I only drink when someone comes to dinner these days. Probably stuffed it years ago when I used to guzzle...

Then there are the B12 injections.

I’m not entirely sure why I need those either, but evidently swallowing an ordinary vitamin is no longer sufficient. My body has reached the stage where nutrients must be injected directly into it because asking it to absorb them normally is apparently expecting too much.

Vitamin D also needs to be added to the list.

This seems particularly insulting. I live in Australia. We have so much sunlight that half the country spends its life trying not to get any on them. Yet somehow, despite living beneath a giant flaming ball in the sky, I have failed to collect enough Vitamin D.

And then there is the mucus.

I have become a mucus generator.

I don’t know where it is all coming from. There cannot possibly be this much spare space inside one human being. Yet my body continues producing great quantities of green sludge as though it has secured a government contract and must meet a monthly quota.

It is revolting.

I cough, blow my nose, clear my throat and briefly believe the supply must finally be exhausted. But no. Somewhere deep inside me, another shift starts work.

At this point, I don’t feel like a person. I feel like an ageing house discovered during a renovation. You pull up one floorboard and suddenly somebody is talking about damp, structural movement and whether the wiring is still legal.

Why is everything falling apart at once?

My brain has already required more repairs than most major highways. My legs have their own ideas about how walking should work. Now my liver wants professional photography, my vitamins have disappeared and my respiratory system is manufacturing industrial waste.

I went to the doctor with green mucus.

I came home as a restoration project.

My Greatest Literary Achievement Was Two Paragraphs About Mucus

I have written more than 500 blog posts, which means I have spent a significant portion of my life arranging words in the hope that somebody might read them.

And now, after all that effort, the internet has finally chosen my greatest literary achievement.

Sniffing.

It was two paragraphs long.

Apparently, I didn’t need talent, research or an opinion. I just needed mucus.

Apparently, Illness Is My New Content Strategy

Yesterday, I wrote a blog announcing that I was sick, my brain had stopped functioning and I was going back to bed.

Five thousand people read it.

This is slightly insulting.

I have written about politics, social media, ageing, technology, modern culture and the gradual collapse of civilisation. I have sat at this computer attempting to make intelligent observations, construct proper sentences and occasionally say something that might cause another human being to think.

Apparently, none of that was necessary.

All I had to do was become ill.

Five thousand people arrived to read about me lying under a doona, unable to follow the plot of a television program or remember where I had put my damned drink.

This may be the most successful professional decision my immune system has ever made.

Naturally, this creates a problem. If I recover, will the readers disappear? Am I now required to remain slightly unwell for the sake of engagement?

Perhaps tomorrow I will need to develop a rash.

By Wednesday, I could have a mysterious limp—although nobody who knows me would notice the difference. And on here, behind a computer, I can be whoever I want to be. Young. Beautiful. Possibly even able to walk in a straight line.

Because really, if you can be anyone you like online, who is going to deliberately choose old and ugly?

This is how the internet works now. You can spend hours researching an important subject and carefully developing an argument, only to have twelve people read it—three of whom are probably bots trying to sell you cryptocurrency.

Then you write, “I feel like crap and I’m going back to bed,” and suddenly you’re Tolstoy.

I suppose people responded because being sick is universal. Politics divides us. Social media infuriates us. But everyone understands lying in bed feeling dreadful, negotiating with themselves about whether they are sick enough to justify getting up for food.

It was honest, simple and required no specialist knowledge beyond having once possessed a human body that betrayed you.

Still, five thousand visitors is five thousand visitors. I am not complaining.

Actually, I am. Complaining is apparently excellent for traffic.

So, today’s health update is that I’m still sick, still tired and still incapable of producing anything profound—except weird, thick phlegm that makes me gag.

Based on yesterday’s numbers, this one should go viral.

Sniffing...

Hard to believe, yet it's the truth.

I still have this damned cold; albeit; down to a running nose that has me sipping and slurping back in. It's revolting. At least the 'everything is aching' part is over with.

It's rather amusing. Tuesday and Wednesday I wanted to die. Begged to whatever God just to give me blessed relief. Kill me now...

Now; I have to say, I'm rather glad they ignored me!