It’s okay, I’ve stopped the contagion by nailing up my front door and painting a big black cross
on it – it’s official, I have man flu.
Typical brain scan of a patient suffering from ‘Man-Flu’.
It started yesterday:
“I’m burning up,” I just about
managed to say.
“I’ll take your temperature,”
insisted Nurse Rachet,
“where’s the thermometer?”
“Hallway,” I said keeping my answers simple and concise to preserve what little energy and life-force I had left.
Nurse Rachet returned, shoved the thermometer in my mouth and after a couple of minutes declared:
“104? You are burning up. Why are you crying?”
“I just wished you’d have taken the thermometer out its wooden setting first,” I said wiping my streaming eye. “Along with the rest of the barometer too.” Apparently I will also be ‘Fair to Changeable’ with the possibility of ‘Rain’ later.
“We’d better get someone in,” assessed Nurse Rachet but it being a Saturday, the NHS weren’t available so a witchdoctor diagnosed me using Bohemian Rhapsody:
“Too late, my time has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Body’s aching all the time”
“Definitely ‘Man Flu’,” he proclaimed, crossed his heart and promptly walked away leaving me to die during the catarrh solo. I was sneezing and blowing my nose through tissues quicker than the rain forest could be cut down to make them. Disaster. I’d run out of tissues which meant we’d probably run out of rain forest. I’m sorry Mother Earth, it was all my fault.
I felt bad, not about the rain forest, I just felt bad – this was the worst man flu ever.
“Nurse… NURSE!!” I called but remembered she’d gone out with friends, on a shopping trip which would probably turn into drinks and maybe a meal – and then I remembered why I was feeling so faint, I hadn’t eaten. I was so starving I was hallucinating.
That’s when I noticed the Chief. The Chief had been on the ward long before I showed up, always sweeping and never saying nothing. He was standing by the door now, broom in hand watching me as if to oversee my passing from this cruel world.
“Could you get me something to eat?” I croaked in a voice not too dissimilar to Barry White.
The Chief did not move.
I stayed in bed. I was just lying here, I mean ‘laying’ here – I’m telling the truth, honest.
It’s just I felt so weak. Pathetic.
“Why are you talking to a coat hanging on the door?” asked Nurse Rachet, having returned. I could hear her friends downstairs.
“Uuuuuuuuuh,” I replied, or something similar.
“Get some sleep,” she insisted and left.
But that was difficult because I could hear laughter downstairs, the joy of the living. Here I was, forgotten, dismissed and feeling uncomfortable. Only the Chief understood, standing by the door with a pillow in his hand.
“This will make you feel better,” he said.
Start collecting replacement lungs now as you’re going to need them when the post viral cough kicks (them) in
Would party balloons be an adequate substitute?
Stay off the helium. It’s laughably addictive.
But it does help you hit those high notes