Illness, ailments and treatments seem to be on my mind recently. I remember when I was young, being fascinated by illness and symptoms. Being a very healthy child, I never had cause to need doctors or hospitals but I was acutely aware of the attention afforded to those who were unwell and needed treatment. So my earliest memory of ‘help seeking behaviour’ was as a six or seven year old asking for Andrews’ Liver Salts because I didn’t feel very well. In actual fact I felt fine but I loved the effect the Salts had on the water, changing it, as if by magic, from its still, clear, flavourless form into a fizzy cloudy, metallic flavoured pop. Next memory, a few years later, is of all the care and attention given to my sister because she’s got hair lice and she needs mum to soak her hair in vinegar and then carefully scour her scalp literally with a fine tooth comb to peel off the lice egg nits at the root of each hair. She’d be there for what seemed like hours and I so wanted to have lice and nits so that I could be meticulously groomed too! I asked what a nit looked like and I was told that it was a tiny white thing not much bigger than a grain of sugar. I asked my mum to check my hair for lice because I was feeling itchy. No joy. Head was completely clear. So I go to the kitchen, take a teaspoon of sugar and rub it into my hair. Thought that would do the trick but sadly for me -and probably to the exasperation of my mum –it didn’t quite look like the real thing and I would never get to experience the prolonged extended intimacy of a fine tooth comb grooming!
My only other memories of illness were, a few odd cuts requiring stitches, a broken arm requiring a plaster cast and a spell of Glandular Fever in my early 20s which then set me up for a 20-odd year period of kind-of feeling under the weather –fatigued and congested but determined not to let it get the better of me, determined to fight it and keep the struggle to myself. It’s only in recent years, however, that I’ve been getting ‘old persons things’ going wrong with me. Like, for instance, a grumbling, aching back that flares up every 6 months or so, like a painful elbow sustained playing tennis which, developed into a repetitive strain injury, like a painful knee and thigh, courtesy of collapsing foot arches. From being episodic things that you get treatment for and recover from, the pains merge and ultimately become constant traveling companions. Each day there is a different constellation of pains to be managed and fretted over. And with each new twist there is always the concern maybe this is the beginning of the end, the warning sign of the onset of some dreadful terminal illness!
I’ve noticed that a preoccupation with aches, pains and illness can quite easily occupy a substantial part of my conscious thought and this can quite effectively block a clear perception of the world on a moment-by-moment basis.
So my advice for this week would be, firstly, start to do the work on coming to terms with your mortality as soon as you can. There’s a lot of work involved. Don’t leave it ‘til you’re old! Too many grown-ups are caught up, preoccupied throughout their lives with a fear of death. Secondly try to spot the transition from youthful health to aged degenerative discomfort but don’t let your worries about aches and pains spoil your appreciation of life which is just too short to squander.
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