On the flip side

Did we learn nothing from Contagion? Did we learn nothing from the pandemic?

It’s been driving me absolutely bonkers to see people sneeze and cough into their hands then touch buttons, handles, railings, escalators …

I keep wanting to yell “elbow!” at them.

Elbow! Elbow!

I thought things would be better in Japan, but there weren’t. So much sneezing and coughing into the air, onto people, into hands …

Hiji! Hiji!

My immune system didn’t stand a chance.

I can’t think too much about what happened next or I will get very upset about it.

I have been sick for the past 10 days. So, while my blog posts have been perky, the reality has been not quite so chirpy.

I started writing this blog post last Friday evening as I sat sweaty and miserable at Taipei Airport. The sweaty bit wasn’t a fever – Taipei’s relative humidity averages 82 per cent annually and the government has mandated that air-con must remain above 23C in most establishments in a bid to reduce energy consumption.

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself at that point as I had already been feeling sick, sweaty and miserable for five days, ever since our cruise ship arrived at the Japanese subtropical island of Taketomi.

I woke up that morning feeling slightly woozy with a scratch throat and prayed I was imagining it.

But no, I had a lurgy that really knocked me for a six.

As I was on an expensive expedition cruise in the Japanese sub-tropical islands, I dragged myself out of bed each day, took Nurofen and sneezed into a snorkelling mask – fortunately my own personal one – while staring glassy-eyed at tropical fishies.

The first sign my immune system was going bung was just before the cruise when my lip split in three places and all the skin started peeling off it in sheets.

I put it down to an allergy to something, but the events that followed make me wonder if it was related.

My throat issues never progressed beyond the initial tickle, there was a lot of sneezing and not a lot of coughing. Strangely the coughing fits usually timed themselves to when I was in confined spaces – lifts, taxis, trains, coffee shops …

My head and chest would almost explode from keeping my mouth shut as I tried to internalise them.

I even started vomiting one night during the cruise, though DD put it down to me drowning my sorrows with complimentary cocktails on the ship.

That seemed highly unlikely as I am a booze news writer who never pukes after functions, no matter how wild.

Earlier this week I started throwing up again, on day bloody eight of the misery with no complimentary cocktails to blame.

It feels like I will be sick forever.

DD is blaming it on stress from work. I argued with him at first that I didn’t get sick until the second week of the holiday. But upon reflection, the first week of the holiday was pretty hectic. I didn’t actually slow down until the second week and then I went under.

While it reduced my enjoyment of expedition excursions, it also put a dampener on our social interactions, as we ate alone and kept to ourselves from the moment I developed symptoms.

We realised as the days went on that part of the fun of cruising comes from meeting new people, so we really regret missing out on that.

The moral to the story is that I need to slow down … and people need to cough into their damn elbows!

Song of the day: Simon & Garfunkel “Feelin Groovy”