Last week, I felt really poorly
and unwell. It started last Sunday evening, and all though Monday morning and
early afternoon I had a tickly cough and my sneezing was beginning to be on a
par with a young Donna Griffiths (the Guinness Book of Records has Donna
sneezing for some 978 days nonstop at the rate of one sneeze per minute). Packing
my suitcase in the hotel room that afternoon, I went through every tissue in
the bedroom and half a roll of toilet paper to stem what felt like a constant
streaming nose. I bought another load of tissues which were quickly used up on
the 40 minute journey to the airport.
The thought of spending six and a
half hours on a plane with a summer cold didn’t fill me with great joy.
Thankfully J had managed to get fast-track clearance through security, but as
soon as I was through, it was off to the toilet to get more toilet roll, and
then on to the duty free to purchase some more tissues. I bought the entire
stock (which was only four packets) and went to have something to eat and
drink. By the time I was boarding the plane I was down to three packets. Even
though I was feeling miserable, my heart did go out for all the passengers
seated around me. A sneeze can contain up to 40,000 droplets of infectious
material. The general consensus is that when we sneeze, the average sneeze
travels at around 100mph (compared to an ordinary standing breath speed of around
five mph).
It was a long and uncomfortable
journey back. The next few days my cold got worse, and eventually found its way
to my chest which, as I write this blog, is where it appears to have taken up
residence. I suspected that my cold was caused by the cold virus, enterovirus,
which is usually the summer time virus. The virus caused all the usual symptom;
streaming nose, sore throat, headache and so on, but what surprised me most was
that all my energy disappeared. Everything became a real effort to do. Having
done so well with the #NHS1000Miles challenge since January, my daily walks
were a real struggle and twice I failed even to get my 10,000 steps a day
in.
I didn’t have much enthusiasm for
social media and so didn’t communicate with my friends in the #earlyrisersclub
on Twitter for a few days. I had no appetite, or the wherewithal to go
shopping. So cooking (something I usually love doing) became a chore. However,
in my best Brian Dolan mode, I did get out of bed and got dressed (not that I have
worn PJs for years) and just pottered around. Whilst the logical side of my
brain told me it was purely a summer cold and if I just took fluids and
paracetamol then sooner or later it would disappear as quickly as it had come. When
I was a child, my mother often talked about a cold taking three days to
develop, followed by three days of full blown symptoms, before a final three
days in which it would recede.
What my logical brain didn’t tell
me, however, was how lonely I felt not doing the things I usually did each day,
not meeting those people I usually met on my walks, or whilst shopping and so
on. It is a difficult feeling to describe, but I felt very alone and lonely. As
regular readers of this blog will know, I am now retired so don’t meet folk every
day at work, and many days I am perfectly happy with my own company. So it was
perplexing and unsettling as to why I felt so lonely. Perhaps it was because
those choices I usually exercised every day were either not possible to do or I
had no ‘get up and go’ to even consider them.
Yesterday, thankfully, I did
start to feel a little better and sat outside with a glass of wine and thought
about the plight of others who, day after day, may experience a sense of total
and crushing loneliness.
This is a loneliness not brought
about by an inconsequential summer cold, but for other reasons that might not
be so self-limiting. A loneliness caused by isolation, inability to leave the
house, perhaps having nowhere to go or with no purpose in mind. Disability, older
age, and chronic illnesses can also contribute to people experiencing
loneliness. Research commissioned by the Co-Op (which co-incidentally had its
birthplace in Rochdale) and the British Red Cross reveals that over nine
million people in the UK, across all adult ages are either ‘always’ or ‘often’ lonely.
Age UK estimate that there are 1.2.million chronically lonely people in the UK.
Some 500,000 older people go at least five or six days a week without seeing or
speaking with anyone at all. There are 2.2 million people aged over 75 who live
alone in the UK. 63% of adults aged 50
or over who have lost a loved one, through death or divorce, report feeling
lonely some of the time or often. It is not just older people who experience
loneliness. Action for Children found that 43% of 17-to 25-year olds had
experienced problems with loneliness.
Of course, loneliness is not just
something experienced purely at an emotional level. There is much research that
shows if you lack social connections, your risk factor of an early death is the
same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; lonely people are more likely to suffer
from dementia, heart disease and depression; and overall, loneliness is likely
to increase your risk of death by 29%. Thankfully, my sense of loneliness is, I
am sure, just a temporary thing, but if there is no blog posted this time next
Sunday, fear the worst…
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