March 29, 2017

Horse 2252 - I Am A Green Sludge Factory

Forgive me for being a little bit confused but isn't there some sort of unwritten rule that says that when men get even the slightest bit sniffy, they are allowed to claim the law of "Man Flu" and get all kinds of conspicuous attention and to get out of anything that they don't want to do? From what I've seen in popular culture, Man Flu is supposedly this melodramatic malaise in which you're supposed to get waited on hand and foot. It looks vastly different to those diseases that you see adverts for in America, which as far as I can tell come with running through the park with a puppy. Man Flu is also unlike the false advertising for certain lady parts complaints, which are always depicted having something to do with blue liquid and horseback riding, but in my experience as an observer, there is no blue liquid and instead of horseback riding there is grumpiness.
No, I'm afraid that I must have missed the check box on the order form for Man Flu because all that I've got is a head full of snot and a series of stabbing pains which are doing laps around the inside of my skull.

Humans are electro-biomechanical machines, which are liquid cooled, subject to self writing software updates and live in an environment of other similar electro-biomechanical machines. Speaking as one of them who is currently suffering an overabundance of liquid cooling, it makes me question the underlying systems. I seem to be issuing a large of green sludge and at the same time have broken a valve somewhere because the pressure in my head is awful and I am also dripping salty coolant from my olfactory appendage.
At the same time, the abundance of coolant in my head, has backed up most of the internal piping in my head and as a result, if I tilt my head in any given direction, that coolant will flood through the pipes in my head and create different pressures in different places. Also, because my olfactory system is being messed with, I'm currently experiencing a perpetual sensation that the whole world either smells like blood, burning plastic or nothing at all. It doesn't particularly help that because I now need spectacles in order to read things, I now have a pain through the bridge of my nose which I imagine would be similar to if you had drilled through it with a 6mm drill bit.

I like most people do not savour the experience of being sick. I suspect though that I might either have a greater tolerance for pain or perhaps a less well developed set of senses than most people which would mean that I don't feel it in the first place. I am already aware that I do not possess as good a sense of smell as Mrs Rollo, I'm technically unable to distinguish as many colours as other people due to red-green colour bilndness and I'm pretty sure that I don't have the emotional colour palette of most people. So when I get sick e feverish, my ability to care about the unpleasantness which I find myself in, might actually be because of some sort of technical issue to do with the hardware or software of the electro-biomechanical machine that I happen to inhabit. When I was at work yesterday, I felt as if my head would explode and classy the walls in a green viscous sludge but I didn't care that much and struggled on regardless.

There is the issue that I now appear to have an echidna that has taken residence in my throat and if not an echidna then a porcupine or a rodent which is very angry indeed. I feel as though something is perpetually scraping the inside of my throat with sharp objects and the amount of liquid which is leaking ever southwards can only be blood. About the only benefit to having a throat full of sharp objects is that I now don't have a voice like an eleven year old girl on a school field trip but now sound like the continuity announcer for BBC Radio 4; I fully expect to be reading the Shipping Forecast any minute now - Fisher, Dogger, North Utsire, South Utsire, poor, 996, falling slowly.
While I'm on the subject, why is it that the idioms are "as sick as a dog", "as sick as a parrot" and "sweating like a cow"? What is it about dogs, parrots and cows? Cows aren't known for being particularly sweaty; neither are dogs famous for their sicknesses, and citing parrots as the default measure of sickness sounds just plain wrong to me because it is canaries who are traditionally sent down coal mines as the standard official test for air quality. I imagine that in the Official Science Museum of France, that along with the standard metre and kilogram, there will also be an official canary which is appropriately labelled.

Throughout all of this, I feel like I'm being diddled out of something. If I were to take a day off of work, the only one who would suffer is me. I'd have to play at catch-up and that's no fun at all. Not even ibuprofen has done anything for me and I can't even enjoy a simple nap because I'd end up needing to breathe with my mouth open and that just perpetuates the unpleasantness. About the only thing which is available to me is to just keep calm and carry on and while that's more exciting than watching paint dry, it's less exciting than waiting for it to peel. Being sick is no party and to be perfectly honest, it's making me cross and I am sick of it.

1 comment:

Jo said...

take a concrete pill and harden up princess