I don’t mean seasick, although boats are obviously popular sites for that malady as well. No, I just mean plain-old, stuffed-up, head-achey, nose-drippy sick. Which I have been, for the past week.
When we were in high school, some friends of mine dubbed this sort of illness “The Mongolian Death Flu.” It’s the one where you start to sound like Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” and fluids begin to emerge from every bodily orifice in prodigious quantities that no earthly box of Kleenex can hope to keep up with. This sort of cold laughs off common medications, reducing NyQuil to a quivering, half-hearted fraction of an hour of relief so shallow that it seems like a hallucination. As you lay prone on the settee waiting for death to take you, hallucinations may be your best form of relief, in fact.
I usually get this once every couple of years but this is the first time it has struck while I have been living aboard. As miserable as it always is, being on the boat has magnified the suffering immensely.
For starters, it’s just not possible to go lay someplace and pass out until you either recover or pass away. As long as there is more than one person aboard, the ineluctable Laws of The Sea dictate that wherever you are, is someplace that eventually they will need to be. So rather than rest in peace, I am forced to slump about the cabin, muttering ungraciously, as my wife finds necessities located in lockers beneath or behind my current berth.
All that hidden storage works against me in other ways, too. Should I need rapid access to medications, toilet paper, or more Kleenex, I am flat out of luck… it’s all stowed with varying degrees of inaccessibility, each little puzzle exacerbated by my diminished mental capacity and badly reduced dexterity.
Dexterity is also in play when it comes to something so simple as moving about the cabin. Balance is a great necessity for graceful movement in an always-moving structure with unpredictable and curving decks, and sinuses clogged to overflowing with green slime badly inhibit proper functioning in the inner ear. As if that weren’t bad enough, all the cold medications add their own flavors of loopy, causing me to crash about wildly during any ambulation requiring more than three steps.
If this were all taking place on one level, that would be one thing, but there are also ladders to be negotiated, lifelines to be crossed, and berths to climb into. I like to think I am pretty flexible for my age, but with every muscle aching and my head pounding, it is now utter agony to clamber out the companionway without first removing (and then replacing; it’s cold out now!) every single hatch board. After doing that, I have to rest in the cockpit (in the cold) for a good five minutes to recover before I dare to attempt to step over the lifelines and onto the dock. And god forbid it’s been raining and made things slick along the way!
Oh, being on the boat like this is not entirely without its advantages. I’m always close to the head, for example, and should I succumb to the attraction of an early exit, I can always throw myself overboard into the sweet, compelling throes of hypothermia. So far, though, the thought of having to negotiate the companionway ladder again to get out there has been keeping me alive.