Taking a sicky

Taking a Sicky

I’m off sick.

I find that a hard thing to say. I guess I’m still in denial.

You see, being off sick presents me with a complicated set of problems. It all goes back to my school days. Lying in bed feeling a little iffy, knowing that a hand on the brow and a small lie was all that lay between me and a whole day of freedom from that alien and inexplicable process known as education. So I used to ham it up, get a day off, and some little piece of me used to feel awful.

Conditioning, as Vidal Sassoon will tell you, is a deep and powerful thing. So now, decades later, I find myself at home, in a bathrobe, unshaven, undeniably under the weather, feeling guilty.

I toyed with the idea of going in today. Packing myself in to the railway carriage, sneezing, filling my hankey with a variety of grossly organic effluvia not out of place in a close-up in the last Aliens film, watching my fellow commuters shy away and feeling about as welcome as a rat fancier in Black Death country.

What is it? What happened to me that I feel I really should make my shivering, sweating way to work, and sit at my desk and send up regular plumes of shredded paper hankey and virus particles? Do my workmates really want me there, crumpled at my keyboard, making noises like a wildebeest having difficulty clearing its throat, or would they rather I was adult about the whole thing, admitted my frailty, admitted my expendability, and just did the decent, sensible, considerate thing and stayed the hell away?

If only it were that simple. If only there was a machine, a sickometer, that I could wave over myself, or insert somewhere, that would have a simple, unambiguous display. “Bing!” it would say. “Bing!”, and a small illuminated panel would declare “You are too sick to go in today. Stay at home and look after yourself. Don’t feel guilty. Really.” And I would be able to phone in and say “I can’t come in today, my sickometer went ‘Bing!”, and I wouldn’t feel like a drug smuggler trying to breeze gaily through the Green Channel with eight kilos of heroin stuffed in my underpants.

What is it about phoning in sick? Why do I feel that the person who takes the call is wincing and hand waving wildly, gazing at the handset in disbelief at the huge fraud I am clearly trying to pull-off? Why do my friends and workmates take on alter-egos of Kafkaesque starkness when my shaking hand reaches for the phone, and I try to get my story straight, and massage the tone of my voice to reflect the balance between sickness and tolerant martyrdom that I consider essential to the success of any bunking off operation, valid or otherwise?

I’m nearly thirty, for heaven’s sake! How many more years will I go on like this? I feel a bit ill and the uneasiness starts. How ill do I feel? Should I go in anyway? What if I go all the way in and feel so lousy I just have to go home again? If I go in, do I seem committed and in control, or just a jerk who is unable to take an obvious decision not to become the office branch of Germs’R’Us? So I lie around at home and feel ill and guilty.

And then, after a day or two, I start to feel better, and the whole process starts again. How much better? Better enough to go in, despite the ‘tiger bringing up a hairball’ impressions I’m still forced to do by the globes of phlegm playing like boisterous puppies in my trachea? Or should I stay off one more day, to make sure I’m really better?

One more day. That’s the most frightening part. If I say yes to this day being one more day off, where does it end? Will I ever, in fact, go back to work? Will I enter a spiral of illness and inactivity that ends with my being found a dried out, papery mannequin, crackly fingers having to be prised off the TV remote control, fit only to be crumbled into a paper bag for later examination by some cheese sandwich eating pathologist?

It makes me realise the value of having a mother.

Who decided I was too sick to go in to school?  Mum.
Who decided I was better enough to go again?  Mum.
Who made the phone call or wrote the sicknote that absolved me from all blame or suspicion of laziness?  Mum.

I never realised how wonderful having a mother was, until I started having to take responsibility for myself. But I suppose that’s the point.

I’m starting to feel a little better. I wonder if my Mum would like a new house-plant?

27 February 1995, would you believe.