On Sickness

it has been 0 days since we were last afflicted with a daycare bug

I see a video in which a comedian tells a crowded bar that his brother gets sick in an entirely different way now that he has kids. The camera pans back and forth between the comic, seated at a piano, nursing a drink in a short glass, and a row of patrons sitting along a high counter. They are shiny-cheeked and ruddy with health and with drink. Everyone is fully dressed and not one person wears sweatpants. I cannot see the patrons' feet, concealed as they are beneath the counter, but I imagine some might be wearing heels. They have bowls of fries, of battered calamari, of crispy, salted things that leave smears of grease on their mouths and turn the paper lining the serving bowls transparent; they have foamy-topped beers in tall glasses and twelve-dollar cocktails. The comic takes a sip of his drink and tells them the way his brother gets sick now borders on medieval. The counter ripples with laughter.

I laugh too, because I had, only that morning, told my neighbour, as I shuffled past him with my sleeping son in his buggy, that we were once again a House Of Plague, and he had said, 'surely not again?!' and then we had both laughed in a brittle sort of way because it'd only been a week or so since he and his wife had had to call off a planned gathering due to the illness of one of their own children.

Medieval's about right. Nasty and brutish, if not short-lived. I leave a trail of crumpled tissues in my wake. I cough so much my ribs ache. My throat is so sore I subsist on canned soup and bananas. Perhaps I should daub a red cross on the door. Perhaps I should daub one over my person. Begone!

In truth in the years since I left teaching I have allowed memory to be supplanted by an optimistic sort of cockiness about the strength of my immune system. It is true that I am generally a bit better at looking after myself these days. I drink water! I exercise regularly! I am in possession of a water flosser! But to permit myself to imagine – as I'll admit I have done – that my grown-up habits have supercharged my ability to fight off errant bugs is pure folly, and I should have known this, having only just lived through a global pandemic and the subsequent barrage of influenzas and respiratory infections that have followed in its wake. My mother – a former nurse and in possession of a robust constitution and a doggedly unflagging energy – tells me in a text message that she has fallen foul of another bug doing the rounds. She has been poorly enough to stay in bed, she says, which is alarming, because, as my mother would be the first to admit, she finds it very difficult indeed to sit when she could be doing (when she had Covid a couple of summers ago, I came upon her working diligently through an enormous pile of ironing in the kitchen, at which point she offered to make me a coffee, or a sandwich. I had to tell her I thought it was a good idea to go and rest. Eventually she did acquiesce and retired to the sofa in the living room, where she read Good Housekeeping and observed the progress of the neighbours' kitchen renovation through the window).

As soon as my son started at nursery, however, the illnesses began, each seemingly more tenacious than the last. Surely, I find myself saying, repeatedly, with growing levels of exasperation, surely we cannot be sick again. But inevitably, sick again we can be. Humbled by quite how horrid I find myself feeling, I remember now with more clarity the reality of my teaching career, in terms of healthy to cold-ridden ratios; there was, after all, a recurring chest infection I took to calling 'my annual consumption' on account of its brisk and predictable arrival amid the cold damp of the January term, and the weeks of night-sweats and hacking painfully into a handkerchief à la Victorian waif that ensued; there too the endless rounds of low-level head colds, feathery shreddings of tissue lining every pocket, an ever-chapped nose I'd try to placate with vaseline and a layer of concealer that flaked off by lunchtime. Quite simply: children are marvellous vectors of disease. Why is this door handle wet? I would cry, at intervals, across my classroom; I'd never really want to know the answer. In the years since I left teaching and began working for myself, in a makeshift office in our spare bedroom, accompanied only by two cats, it was easy to convince myself that my improved health was evidence of the benefits of what my GP refers to as healthy lifestyle choices, when the truth of the matter was that the only factor that mattered was my proximity (or lack thereof) to small children.

The issue of course is the distinct lack of down time caregivers possess; there is scant opportunity to take to one's bed and sleep off the worst of it when another person (or persons) is wholly or even partially reliant upon you. It compounds the whole thing. It's not that my illnesses are any nastier than they were years ago, despite what I might claim in moments of feverish misery. No: what makes it truly medieval these days is the slog factor, which is high when there is little chance of sloping off to bed as soon as the workday is done.

I console myself thus: how wonderfully strong my immune system shall become, once we weather this first year of nursery-attendance! The bugs will simply bounce off of us! We shall veritably brim with vim and vigour! I say this often, with the sort of wide smile and staccato intonation that mildly alarms my husband. Look: if it's not true (and I suspect it is not) then I do not want to know. We are in the trenches here. Allow me this brief hope, however deluded it may be.