THE FIRST MONTH of the year can be a tough one for many, but nothing will stop your 2015 momentum like a proper bout of winter illness.
What can you do, though? You’ve just got to ride out the inevitable stages of it all – and they go a little something like this:
1. The feeling that something’s not quite right
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Just a scratch in the back of the throat. Nothing? Just push through it and you’ll wake up 100% tomorrow.
2. Entering denial
“It’s nothing. It’s just the cold weather. I always shiver uncontrollably like this. I’ll be grand.”
3. Accepting you’re sick and stocking up on so much medication
When you enter the pharmacy and stock-pile all items that say “Max Strength” or its equivalent. This will get you through it, surely?
4. Facing the fact that a trip to the doctor needs to happen
When the over-the-counter stuff doesn’t work, you begrudgingly take a trip to the doctor. This, of course, should have been done at the very start but you knew best.
5. Crawling back to the pharmacy with a sense of shame
Returning to the exact same pharmacy to retrieve your precious antibiotics. Just keep your head down and hope they don’t recognise you from the day before.
6. Making that nervous call into work
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That fateful phone call into work. You are very, very ill but you still feel the need to sell it a little. You don’t want them thinking you are pulling a sickie. The nerves, though.
7. Doubting the medication
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These are tested and proven drugs, but if it’s not working within the first three days you start doubting the validity of Western medicine as a whole. You can’t help but think that your self-prescribed dosage of Lemsip and dry toast would have pulled you through better.
8. Figuring out what you can eat
Starting out conservative with the classic combination of dry toast and flat 7UP begins to leave your palette a little underwhelmed. You get to the point that you feel you are ready for the big step up to home-cooked meals. Now, to actually do it.
9. Prematurely predicting your return to health
You are lying in bed for hours on end and you start to get really confident things are finally better. Great! Until you get up to perform the most mundane task and it hits you all over again. Things are easier in bed.
10. At last, you start to see a light at the end of the tunnel
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You have made yet another awkward call into the office to confirm your continued incapacity. But every morning you wake up, things are getting a little better. Western medicine, we never doubted you!
11. Getting back to normality and it feels so good
The ordeal is finally over. You can return to normal life. 2015 lies ahead of you and everything seems that much brighter. Sure, you can’t stay in bed all day and watch stuff on your laptop, but you would trade all that just to feel better again.
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