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SYDNEY SUN
HERALD
MAY 10th 1998
by Paul McDermott
So a sneeze is the closest thing to an orgasm? Thats cold comfort to a flu-stricken Paul McDermott
Sick, sick, sick. 'Tis the season for sickness, the season between seasons when sickness comes a'knocking. This is the time of year when you're most susceptible, the time you're weakest. A flu will strike now, before your body is accustomed to winter. While you still brave autumnal days in a singlet, still dress in your flimsy summer wardrobe, sickness will give you a head-high tackle, stuff your nose, choke your throat and pop your eyes out on to your cheeks.
Flu has never seemed a substantial enough word to me. Malignant tumour, cardiovascular meltdown, pulmonary failure: these are terms that have a certain weight and power. The flu sounds so depressingly domestic, so anaemic in comparison. It may be a point of pride, but there is nothing common about my colds. They are strikingly individual in the amount of suffering they can extract from me.
My head aches, my back aches, my muscles ache. It all aches. I have a dry throat, not only dry, but rasping. Then again, it's not so much a rasp, as a tickle. And not tickling so much, as a four bovver boys with steel-capped toes stomping on my windpipe with each breath.
I can't sit still. This bout of flu is the perfect opportunity to relax, but I feel there is something I must do. I yearn to be the sort of person who, when sentenced to the sick bed, gladly takes their punishment. The sort of person who makes a sanctuary between the sheets: fluffing up the pillows, drawing the doona around them, reading, watching Kerri-Anne or doing the crosswords. The victim who's content in their haven, as a healthy lackey brings them another steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup.
When you find them cocooned in their illness, they look happier and fitter than you. Surrounded by magazines, with half-drunk cups of tea and discarded pieces of toast, they're the masters of all they survey. The curtains are drawn and there is the odour of sickness. I would love to lie in bed for weeks on end, happily rearranging my bedsores. Just to have a sense of fulfilment at the end of the day. "Yesterday that boil was on my upper thigh, look at it now, Ma, look at it now!"
Fluids and semi-solids have two speeds leaving my nostrils: the 167kmh double-barrel shotgun of phlegm and the continual trickle. The trickle is more frustrating than any dripping tap. I need a little washer made of cartilage placed at the back of the frontal lobes.
But the trickle is nothing compared to the sneeze. The sneeze is the ultimate destroyer. The thing that annoys me most about the sneeze is not the physical demands it makes on the body, it's the compulsion of someone to mention its similarity to the orgasm. When I first heard this cliche at the age of 12, I prayed it wasn't true. How could the mystery of life, the petite mort, be the quivalent of a lung oyster splattered out of your nasal passage? It created in my mind a very clumsy notion of copulation.
Yet every time I'm in the grip of some frightening paroxysm, some idiot chimes in with "sneeze - closest thing to an orgasm". Now, I'm not judging their orgasms, but mine bear no similarity to a sneeze. Where is the overwhelming sense of failure? Where is the feeling of immense shame? Where is the wonderful loss of dignity with the sneeze?
When I began writing about this illness. I thought, because I was so well acquainted with it, I would spit it out in one swift, cathartic movement. It would burst from my body, a fine spray of ideas, soaking into the paper, spreading out into the community. It was my way of sharing my flu with everyone, and in a way I believed writing about it would cure me.
Three days later, I have discovered it has oozed out upon the page as a continuous draining trickle. So here I sit: my eyes are sore, my body is tired, my brian is numb and yet the strangest aspect is, in writing this, I have also lost my voice.
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