Esther McCarthy: Flu season has turned the bed into my admin bunker

Esther McCarthy. Picture: Emily Quinn

It has happened. The Nightmare Before Christmas. I have The Flu. Not a snotty sniffle. Not a bit of a dose.

The real deal, guys, the body-shutting-down, spirit-crushing lurgy that’s been flying around Cork faster than that rumour about the hurlers in the dressing room at the All-Ireland final.

I knew I was really sick when I realised I hadn’t eaten anything in two days. Nothing takes my appetite away. NOTHING.

I’ve had Delhi Belly in India and strains of stomach bugs in Ethiopia that made me do unspeakable things on the sides of roads, but I bravely ate through it all. I got malaria in Uganda and still managed to horse down my 1,500-2,000 calories a day.

I must really be sick, I marvelled on day three when I forced myself to eat some soup, then fainted on the floor of the bathroom that night when my diseased body decided it had to be expelled.

You really get to know yourself when you contemplate life, cheek against the cold tile of the bathroom. Profound thoughts come to you, like: “Jesus Christ, when is the last time someone mopped this floor?”

Who’s to blame? Did I get the flu vaccine this year? No. Do I know why? Also no. I normally do.

I cite seasonal chaos and my own idiotic optimism. With the amount of supplements I’ve been firing down my gob, you’d assume one of them would offer some kind of shield.

Is a virus intimidated by collagen? Or ashwagandha? Or brain-boosting mushrooms? Turns out, absolutely not.

When the middle kid got sick first, I Florence Nightingale’d the hell out of him. I just presumed my motherly love was stronger than any measly bug. 

Technically, it’s H3N2 subclade K. A catchy little name for a highly virulent, sneaky fecker of a virus mutating away like a gremlin after midnight at a pool party.

As I lie here sweating through pyjamas that technically now qualify as biohazard, my lovely friend is in Cork University Hospital with her elderly dad. It’s mayhem. Overcrowded wards. Staff running on fumes. Hours waiting on trolleys for basic care.

All the things we pretend aren’t happening until someone we love is living it. It puts my pity party into perspective. 

My suffering may be dramatic, but at least I’m miserable in my own bed with the good towels, regular Lemsip deliveries, and ok wifi.

Himself has had the good grace and the self-preservation to decamp to the bed in the attic.

I’m hoping sleeping amongst the boxes of Christmas decorations will motivate him to bring them down and, you know, decorate the entire house before I get better. But he’s playing a blinder.

It turns out the secret to productivity is being too weak to stand. It also makes you feel it is ok to be lounging in the bed, coughing up a lung, while the husband runs wrong downstairs with dinners, and drops, and collections, and work, and keeping the creatures alive, and picking me up off the bathroom floor, and don’t forget to finish installing the kitchen, huneybunny!

(Let me just say, once more with feeling, single parents are superhuman and deserve a national holiday and €20bn, and a guaranteed retirement villa on an island of their choice.)

I thought I was too busy to get sick, but the weird thing about being bedridden is that, once you accept defeat, the bed becomes a sort of command centre.

An admin bunker.

Turns out you can get a fair amount of bossing down from the comfort of your deathbed. I’m Whatsapping the kids jobs. They LOVE that.

I’ve cancelled everything — doctors’ appointments (the irony), school play dates, circuit class, a coffee meet up, Christmas nights out. 

The best part of all this is sending croaky voice notes that a) prove to the person you’re cancelling on that you really are sick, and b) getting all those lovely pitying “ooh, you sound awful!” texts back. 

It’s getting high on sympathy — or maybe I’ve had too many of those extra intensive Strepsils.

The kids adapt. Surprisingly quickly, actually. For example, my hovering near certain death doesn’t stop the older two getting their mid-skin fades done today, with the two little lines like equal marks on the back of their now baldy heads.

Life shrinks to the four feet around my bed, and it’s not the worst. There’s peace in the
surrender, even though there’s a little bit of a bang of the pandemic about the whole thing — but with more phlegm.

But — and here’s the dark cloud hanging over my duvet — the true terror is waiting to see if the other two sons AND husband will get it.

I can face down a nasty virus. I can nurse one kid, but H3N2 ain’t nothin’ compared to the natural disaster that is triple manflu.

If they go down, pray for us.