PU #248 - STREAM(ING NOSE) OF CONSCIOUSNESS - Dispatches From My Sick-Bed
The title might be a bit over-dramatic. I’m not in my sick-bed. I’m sat at my desk just feeling a little rough. Wednesday night I was driving to my improv show (I do improv - Box of Frogs. We’re at the Edinburgh Fringe this August and play 1000 Trades in Birmingham the second Wednesday of every month. Get tickets now!) and I sneezed. No big deal. Except that this sneeze lingered. My nose remained runny the rest of the journey. Walking into the venue, I coughed. Warming up for the show, I noticed my voice was a little scratchy. I spoke a bit and noticed it had gone from scratchy to sore. Oh well — the show must go on! And it did. We were great, and thanks to adrenalin I was able to swallow and speak. But the throat remained sore the whole drive home. It kept me up that night and at some point in the early hours of the morning I realised that speaking had become difficult. The idea of standing in front of a classroom of Year 9s and trying to make myself heard was too much to bear. I was also shattered from the sleepless night. So I called in sick, hoping a day of voice rest would sort me out by Friday. But by Thursday night the soreness had become the choked and burning tickle of a fully-fledged illness. My head ached, and when I went to bed coughs kept waking me from a thin sleep. It seemed unlikely I would go in on Friday either, and, after the tenth moment of waking and hacking, I didn’t. I still had no strength in my voice, and now I felt generally run down and lousy after two nights without sleep.
Why am I saying all this? Well I guess because on some level the decision to call in sick to work is a philosophical one. There is the epistemic element: how do I know that I am too ill to complete a day’s work? (After all, there are other times where I have gone to work not at 100% and struggled through the day). How do I know that the soreness in my throat is the start of something medical and not just voice-strain from too much improv? What made that initial sneeze in the car ring an alarm bell in the way that other sneezes wouldn’t? And, of course, as a teacher, do I know how to effectively translate the lessons I had planned for that day into something comparable that can be done as a cover lesson, without a subject specialist in the room? Do I know that my absence will not impact my students’ education that much?
This brings us to the ethical element. Is it right to call in sick when I’m sick or should I go in anyway if my absence will impact too many people? My view on that is always and absolutely yes — it is always right to call in sick when you need to and take a day or two off work to get better. Firstly, you won’t get better working through something when your body is telling you to stop. If you’re ill to the point that taking the day off feels necessary enough to consider it, then that’s already a compelling enough reason to do it. The body knows best. When you woke up with that nagging headache and knew you could work through it, there was no inner debate about taking a day off. if today’s ache or pain leads to a different inner monologue, listen. Secondly, going to work sick is selfish, and puts everyone else you work with at risk of infection. I’m 100% sure I picked up whatever I’m suffering with at work (and could tell you exactly the snotty colleague who shouldn’t have been in who gave it to me). The short-term personal gain of going in and getting some task done that you don’t want to put off ignores the long-term loss that ultimately comes from so many people eventually going off ill as your silly bug does its unnecessary rounds in the aftermath of your bad decision. Third, so long as it’s legitimate illness, you don’t owe your job your health. Jobs take enough from us. They will use us and spit us out without a second thought for our welfare if the economic circumstances demand it. Your personal sacrifices over the years will not be compensated or buy you any favours, so do not make them unless you are doing it for yourself. Unions and labour movements have fought for our right for paid sick days without recriminations and there is a reason that fight was fought. This is why they exist. Use them.
But being ill also raises questions about the nature of reality. After all, here I am mooching around my home and unbound by the demands of my job for the day. Were this the weekend or a holiday, this would be a lovely situation. But the filter of illness steals all joy from the circumstance. Lying in bed long past the usual alarm feels like a sign of infirmity rather than indulgence. A book on the couch feels like a chore rather than a luxury as the distraction of coughing and snorting makes it hard to concentrate on narrative. Trying to watch some TV instead reminds you of childhood illnesses and a day off school back when there was someone there to care for you as you spluttered away; the house feels empty as all the well people enjoy their regular day at work. Eating is good. This illness hasn’t stolen my appetite. But not planning on being home for these lunches there is nothing in and a trip to the shops feels too onerous, so you just heat up some stodge from the freezer or guzzle a Pot Noodle, adding to the general sense of unhealth. There’s still work you could be doing on your laptop that doesn’t require you to speak, and you’re not completely incapacitated so better now when you’re supposed to be working than leaving it all until the weekend, but as soon as you log on you feel a sense of somehow wasting the day off work by working. Yet as you put the laptop away and try to sleep a little instead, incomplete tasks and things you could be doing keep you awake as they skip through your fevered head. You drift through your house and the whole place feels uncanny — so this is what it’s like when we’re not here? A glimpse into Berkeley’s denial of unperceived existence — this is what God exists to hold together?
Even the cat seems unsure of how to interact with me. He appreciates the company and jumps on my lap and up onto my shoulder as I tried to catch a doze on the sofa, but also paws at me suspiciously. You’re not usually here, mate. What’s going on?
Our cat is another cause of medical unease. Four weeks ago to the day I write this, we were called by the vets after asking that he comes in for more tests following some troubling bloods. They told us he was in terminal kidney failure and would likely not last the weekend. Despite being on fluids for 48 hours his bloods were getting worse. We could come and pick him up for a few “sofa days” (as they called them) before the inevitable. It’s now been a month and he’s still here. Those first days we worried as he refused to take his renal meds and laughed as he woke us multiple times a night as we allowed him the luxury of sleeping in the same room as us. Then a week had passed and we were shattered from the lack of sleep. He still wasn’t taking the meds and it looked like we’d have to add some more cat food and litter to the next grocery shop (previous to that we had assumed we’d not get through the supplies we already had). We went back to closing the bedroom door at night. Now, when I wake up, I go and find him expecting every morning to find him dead, no longer breathing. But no. Every morning so far, miraculously, he’s still there, happy and eager for breakfast, renal failure be-damned. And he’s still not taking the meds.
Meanwhile I have a human friend in the final stages of palliative care as they await their end from cancer. When the cat was first given his death sentence, this friend was still living independently and hoping to meet me for a coffee one day soon. I couldn’t have imagined at the time that the cat might actually outlive him, but that’s the way it looks right now. Reality once again upended by the filter of illness: instead of coffee I got an email from his wife telling me he was deteriorating rapidly and ended up going home that day to my cat who should have been dead.
Speaking of the way the filter of illness can distort reality, last Friday we babysat my niece. It took me a while, sitting there on the sofa with this five year old and my wife watching Disney’s Hercules before I figured out what was feeling so strange. It was the sofa. Since December, my sister had been receiving treatment for breast cancer. As the chemotherapy knocked her out, it was easier to set up a bed in the lounge downstairs than have her struggle upstairs and down again several times a day. The chemo now finished, it was the first time in 2026 that the lounge felt like a lounge again and not a sickroom. It felt strange because it, at last, felt normal. The filter of illness had been removed.
Forget taking a day off work. My sister’s whole life has changed since her diagnosis. A fitness instructor with a physically demanding job, surgery, chemo, and radiotherapy has made it impossible for her to work while getting her treatment. Her workplace has been fantastically supportive, but it’s been a massive adjustment for her to be without that weekly routine for so many months. Again: take away the cancer and tell her last summer she’s going to be able to spend half a year at home without ever having to do the lengthy commute to work and she would probably light up at the idea. Add back in the grim reality of the cancer and the break from work loses its sheen. Days of doing nothing are robbed of their luxuriance by the physical reality of suffering the side effects of treatment. These days she dreams of one day being able to get back to work.
It certainly puts my sore throat and sniffles into perspective.
And so, slightly delirious and trapped inside the filter of illness, I sat down at my computer to write with no real plan. A stream of consciousness as my eyes and nose streamed merrily away. If, that is, consciousness is even a thing?
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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