Far from healthy, I dream of Albert, Mary and doughnuts!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Not fair. Absolutely not fair. I return from a splendid trip to London with a passenger inside me. The night before last it showed its thousands of faces by keeping me awake coughing and yesterday it unleashed the full force of its snotty fury, turning me into an explosive disaster of a man.

While a semi-reclusive life is helpful to my head, my lack of exposure to other people clearly isn’t good for my immune system.

On the heaving trains and thronging buses of London’s megatropolis, I rubbed shoulders in confined spaces; held onto escalator rails that had been touched by tens of thousands; breathed air on planes that recycled everyone’s assorted bugs every seven minutes.

I was unlikely to make it out intact.

When I was little my next door neighbour used to say: “You have to eat a bag of dirt before you die.”

As a child I never understood what she was on about. I used to worry that one day I’d come home from school to find my mother eating a bag of dirt, and then know she was about to die.

Thankfully I’m fairly robust and rarely suffer illness. In the 22 years that I’ve lived in Ireland I can only remember two occasions when I’ve had the ‘flu – and when I say ‘flu I mean the number that knocks you off your feet, wiping out your ability to function for several days, rather than that peculiarly Irish illness, so often offered as: “I had the ‘flu yesterday, but I’m fine now.”

No, you didn’t have the ‘flu. You had what I have now: a nasty cold and chesty cough that, while debilitating, in no way compares to the severity of influenza.

Back in 1994 I was living in Salthill when the Beijing ‘Flu was raging around the country. Alone in my home, I started to come over a bit dodgy in the late afternoon and by the time I went to bed I was delirious and incapable.

Sweat poured over my entire body (sorry if you’re having your tea!) and as I climbed into bed I noticed that the veins in my arms were swollen up like lengthy black puddings. The lymph glands in my armpits were – ouch! – tender, enlarged, and as I sit here now, I remember the very thought that went through my bewildered head.

“Oh. Infected blood, swollen glands. Looks like septicemia. If that infection makes it past my armpits I might die.”

With that, I ho-hummed and slid under the duvet, knowing there was no way I could make it to the phone to call for help.

So powerful was that fever, I was able to accept calmly that if I died, I died.

Influenza’s hellish combination of shivers and sweating stopped me from dropping off to sleep, so I picked up the book I was reading, which happened to be Robert Kee’s ‘Ireland – A History.’

After a couple of pages the fever swept through me like wavelets around pebbles at low tide. Neither asleep nor awake, I was lost wandering the mental prairies that stretch between dreams and hallucinations.

Those feverish visions from 20 years ago still send a chill through me now. Albert Reynolds climbing Vinegar Hill, scratching his bare hairy chest as he roars at the English invaders. Blood, limbs, heads and guts are splashed, slashed, severed and spilled on that Wexford battlefield.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.