Sandscript Off Sick

If you are lucky enough to mostly enjoy good health it comes as a shock when your body lets you down. When you pull a muscle in your back, ‘do’ something to your knee or you are struck down with a stomach upset so dire you think you have Ebola, life as you know it ceases. Lying in a darkened room with a massive headache or trying to open a tin of food when you have got your arm in plaster is guaranteed to make you feel a part of the disabled community. Suddenly, walking the dog, getting the shopping or the planned trip to the theatre you were so looking forward to become as unachievable as climbing Mount Everest.
A builder with a broken leg, an actor who’s lost his voice, might envy writers and imagine them lying recumbent in comfort, still able to put pen to paper like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We might just feel like scribbling in a note book on the same lap tray we are now using for meals, if we are lucky enough not to live alone, lovers, relatives or house mates now forced into the role of carer; but actually sitting at a computer is impossible.
A whole summer weekend with three local festivals to choose from, the garden in full bloom and the beach hut calling, was lost to me when I had raging toothache. There are some conditions that are not going to go away by themselves and a dental abscess is one of them. Whatever pain or medical disaster one has, we are all likely to feel that IT is much worse than anything else one could have, but in the case of toothache I think it is up there along with children’s earache, migraines and cystitis! Suddenly Ibuprofen is your best friend.
Those of us generally healthy can retreat, abandon normal tasks and take it easy till we feel back to normal and can catch up with life. Being off sick is a mere glimpse of what life must be like for the chronically ill who have to battle on regardless. Authors like to think our books offer some distraction for the ill or injured. A friend who read the first manuscript of my longest novel said it kept her going through a long bout of winter 'flu, but another friend said her elderly mother read to take her mind off her pains; no wonder it later transpired she was very confused over the plot of my novel!