It's not fun being ill anymore
I used to love skiving off school for a week. Although conventionally shy and never the girl with hairbrush in hand, belting out Beyonce lyrics at pre-drinks, I excelled in the dramatic field when it came to feigning sickness. I would flounder from sofa to sofa, quivering with the unidentifiable flu and moaning softly every so often for the full effect. If anyone asked me if I was feeling well enough to return to school for the afternoon, I would just peer out from under the covers with quivering eyelids to communicate what a ludicrous idea that was. By Friday lunchtime I would have miraculously recovered and be fit and ready for any year 7 sleepovers or play dates gracing the weekend.
Unfortunately long term bouts of sickness and setting up semi permanent residence on the couch are no longer feasible. Life seems slightly more exciting than continuous episodes of Home & Away, or Antiques Roadshow (god bless daytime television). There’s also the matter of A Levels, and general life. So, come Sunday night I was fairly perturbed to be feeling ill. By Monday this had worsened, and I decided to take myself off to A&E since there was a murmured mention of appendix pain being isolated solely to the right of the stomach. I’ve been to A&E twice before and it’s always hideously exciting, sat on a squeaky plastic chair getting to ogle various degrees of fascinating injuries in the waiting room. On the first occasion, I snapped a glowstick and got an interesting amount of glow in the dark liquid in my eye (being quite young, I still can’t fully remember if I did this on purpose, to see if my eyes would glow in the dark, or if it was an honest mistake).
On the second occasion I slit open my finger on a tin of cat food and the sight of flesh made me a little weak at the knees. This time I did have to drive myself, the true early stages of committed adulting starting to arise. However no one was fully pleased to see me as I wasn’t in any way near expiry. I got a tap on the wrist for taking the wrong sort of medication, asked pleasantly what I had eaten for lunch, reminded to drink enough water and take some fresh exercise. All and well I spent the rest of the evening under the covers bemoaning life and scrolling instagram continuously, hoping I would sleep off my pain. The next day followed suit, and come the following I dropped back in to the doctors to have some bloods taken.I suppose I’m every doctors worst nightmare – before coming into your office I have scrolled WebMD thoroughly, and diagnosed myself with at least 5 possible illnesses, alongside covering all varying degrees of treatment and efficiency.
My best true diagnosis to date was coming in to tell the doctor I had moo-co-co-lees. She looked at me a little perplexed, until I showed her my lips whereby I was left a little red faced when told that my pronunciation from online readings didn’t quite fit mew-co-seals, or rather mucoceles.
Anyway feeling considerably better after my GP visit I duly headed to the gym haven the next day, necked my preworkout and set about my deadlifts to receive a call stating that I may indeed have appendicitis. This mixed with a questionable amount of caffeine was indeed an interesting combination. Followed by my third doctors visit to the week, I was sat pleasantly in the waiting room when a nurse came, smiling cheerfully and attempted to insert a canula into my arm as routine procedure. This wasn’t quite what I had expected, having been told by my GP that it would just be a quick scan to make sure it wasn’t appendicitis (the quick scan turned out also to be not quite so quick, as there was a flurried explanation of cameras going into all sorts of holes).
As it turned out I don’t have appendicitis (curse you WebMD), quite thankfully as I was nowhere near as sick as the poor people in the ward. I also avoided both scan and canula and left with only a slightly sore vein from another blood test.Either way, I’m certainly quite thankful not to be plagued with appendicitis or anything more serious and have learned a lesson as not to glue myself to online self diagnoses at the slight ache or ailment.
(Once a hypochondriac always a hypochondriac).