Moving into 2024 has Peter Sherwood resolved to look on the bright side of life? Not exactly. But he has learnt how to be a patient patient [PHOTO COURTESY OF Pexels]
Moving into 2024 has Peter Sherwood resolved to look on the bright side of life? Not exactly. But he has learnt how to be a patient patient [PHOTO COURTESY OF Pexels]
Covid is not always accompanied by flu symptoms, it can be as full of surprises as a Thai escort service. I’d spent an hour in the gym (admiring abdominals of perfect definition), and next morning struggled to get out of bed. Enter an ambulance and hospital where I lay in a corridor like a spare Prince Harry before someone thought an X-ray might be handy. My finely honed body was declared magnificent as ever but missing the athletic part. This was a worry until a covid test, then bingo! The Thing had hacked my nervous system, plus the accompanying joy of pneumonia.
There followed isolation in a large, windowless room wearing pyjamas designed by the Prison Officer’s Union and made in a Karachi carpet factory. Leaving bed was prohibited; no pain, save the embarrassment of a diaper, but let’s not get into that. Too exhausted to be bored, the worst moments were relieved by the gift of hallucinations; sharp and clear and jolly, enough to save me from panic. Someone should package and sell it. I wrote like a madman, brilliantly funny stuff, all in my delusional head, but what the hell; it wasn’t depression.
Unhappily I retained taste and smell as I discovered with a shudder when lunch arrived, a disturbing heterogenous swill of unknown origin. But at least it was free, or so I thought, until I could not produce my ID card which was stolen days before – to make my year complete.
“Pay up, Sherwood!” yelled the Hospital Computer, “a photocopy of your ID card and police report won’t cut it.” The Machine began churning out bills totalling HK$80,000 that filled those parts of the bed where I wasn’t. Later some friends confronted the beast and got it slimmed down to a tidy HK$1,180, including the beige gruel and something reckoned to be congee, but I remain suspicious.
Nurses were efficient and if you’re looking for bedside manner or a little TLC, you’ll need to Google it. With the language barrier, ignorance (mine) was absolute, and when, unannounced, they wheeled in a medieval torture device I nearly… well, I said I wouldn’t get into that. It was a weighing machine and it hoisted me up like a side of beef. Confinement at home for 166 days on going to seven months on going is only tedious if you’re fit, otherwise you live the dream: bed all day and no work. And you find out who your friends are: some, for whom you did a lot when they were ill, are suddenly struck with retrograde amnesia.
While it took months before I could write something amusing, at least covid’s famed mind fog didn’t whack me, but how would I know; mine has always been a bit of a swamp. On the final day of hospital, a covid test was authorised before I could shamble out on my shiny HK$279 government crutches. Cleared to go, had I tested positive I would have had to stay, and was too spent and institutionalised to care. Covid can do that to you. It’s hard to celebrate being at home with muscular pain for months, although it must be said that as a rent payer you do get your money’s worth.
Peter Sherwood has lived in DB for 20+ years. The former head of an international public relations firm, he is the author of 15 books and has written around 400 satirical columns for the South China Morning Post.