Hello, hello.
It’s the first night of my family holiday in taiwan and im sitting on the bed in my airbnb and feeling sorry for myself because i cannot believe i am sick, sick as a dog, and despite the professed wonders of western medicine i am not getting better. I mean, it’s 2017, for goodness sake.
I’m not sure exactly what happened (doctor says stress, I say, tell me something new, my friend), but as I sat in the waiting room of the clinic i thought to myself: this has happened way too often this year. Once upon a time I remember saying that I never fall sick, but that no longer holds true, and the shock of that realisation is the shock of knowing that my body has betrayed me, disappointment and all.
I think that growing up, we (or perhaps I) make up many rules of the way the world works that we hold dear even as we age, and for me, those consist things like: Overseas money is not real money, You will always look nice on your birthday, and You will never fall sick/ fall down/ get your period whilst on holiday. Of course these rules have rapidly been proven wrong over the years, but none of them have come back to roundly slap me in the face as much as the last one: this year has seen me shivering with fever in Korea, recovering from food poisoning in San fran, etcetera. I dont know why I felt like I would be alright the minute I crossed from Singapore to Taipei, but illogic, i guess? Anyway. The fact is that a stress ulcer has paralysed half my face in pain and is sending shooting stabs of migraine up to my head every five seconds. Everything I eat hurts me, I had yoghurt the other day and some sneaky granola was hiding in it and lodged itself in my ulcer and caused me to blink back tears of what the actual damnation, and I did it all, okay, salt rubs and gargles and doctors and vitamin Cs and antibiotics and excuses. The doctor gave me a yam-flavored paste which tastes like my personal hell, and it was so disgusting that I actually googled it in hopes of reading reports of how its actually not that effective (aka, a reason for me to stop using it) but there are nothing but praises for it off the net. Which of course, serves only to make me grumpier, because thank you Oracort E for working for every single person in the world except me. Raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimised by western medicine, and all that.
Alrighty. I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself now and go to sleep. Seriously, being sick sucks, but can’t deny that it’s a teensy bit fun to get all angry at random medicinal structures. I mean, a twenty minute rant on Oracort E, seriously. My girlfriend was like, dont you have better things to do besides bitch about medicine? To which i was like, yknw, it’s december, let me be.
x
Jem