Immunity

I'm getting sicker. Microplasma Pneumonia has made its way to my stomach, and I am now vomiting too. Which would be great news for my diet - if I had one, which I don't - and not such great news for my writing. It's terribly hard to concentrate when staying awake is tricky and you have to get up every few minutes to dry heave into a toilet.

So - desperately needing love and affection - I emailed my best friend for sympathy. She's known me for six years now - otherwise known as one kidney infection, one bout of bronchitis, two bouts of pneumonia (varying varieties), one bad heartbreak and two unpleasant heartbruises, three episodes of influenza, umpteen colds and a vast, vast amount of different intensities of hangover - and describes me to people I have never met as Holly Wan Smale. She didn't even know me back in the glandular fever days, and God forbid she had ever witnessed The Week of Insomnia that ended with a doctor prescribing horse tranquilisers.

Oh Hol, she emailed back. You need to take more turns about the garden and invest in a little dog. Look on the bright side, though. If you actually were an 18th century romantic heroine you'd definitely be dead by now.

It's true. I spend a large proportion of my time shuffling around this mortal coil with one foot on and one foot off; coughing, sleeping, sneezing, vomiting, semi-collapsing; white as a sheet, tinged with blue, wearing too much blusher; losing weight willynilly and then having to put it back on again as quickly as I can so I don't scare my parents. As far as health goes, I wasn't even at the back of the queue when it was being allocated; I was obviously off somewhere, smoking and pumping myself with poison from an intraveinous drip. Frankly I wish to God I was just a hypochondriac - prone to convincing myself of illness - but unfortunately it's usually the opposite: I deny it all until I start peeing blood or puking green or collapsing in the street or in a classroom and then they take me to hospital and test me and tell me I have something nasty and to go to bed. Again.

I seem to spend half of my life in bed, and not in a good way.

So, I have decided: something has to be done. I have had enough. I am sick of being sick; I am tired of being tired. I am absolutely fed up of having my life put on hold while I struggle through with half a working lung and swollen eyes and some kind of bacterium in my blood stream; of cancelling plans and nights out and chapters I am supposed to have completed in my book so that I can lie in a semi-comatose state on my bed and try and find the energy to pick a novel up and read half a page. I am so very, very bored of being sent back to bed.

Thus; tomorrow, I am going to start my new project: to build an Immune System. Not improve one, not develop one, not strengthen one. No: I need to start from scratch and just get one in the first place.

I know what all the rules are, obviously. Everybody knows what the rules are: they're ingrained in our culture, even if absolutely nobody listens to them. Drink lots of water, eat lots of fruit and vegetables, exercise, drink lemon water, take vitamin supplements, avoid coffee, sleep lots. All of which I have done, at one stage or another, and none of which have worked; probably because I do it for about three days and then decide that I'm bored and go and buy a cream cake instead.

The biggest one, though, apparently, is: be happy. Which seems like a bit of an paradox - telling me to exercise and avoid coffee and still be happy - and is also pretty damn hard when you're vomiting, but I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to give it all a shot. Tomorrow, I'm going to start running, and then - when I've finished running, about three minutes later - I'm going to fill myself up with water and vitamins and good stuff and see what happens. For as long as it takes.

Because I don't want to be an 18th century romantic heroine. I want to be the one writing about them.