Word limit

It’s a running joke among most people I know that I am always ill with something. It’s invariably fatal into the bargain; I’m not one of those common or garden people who has a headache or a bad stomach, I’m one of those rare people who has brain tumours or inoperable cancer. Actually I should correct that; I’m even rarer than that because I have all those things wrong with me but am still, for reasons which the medical fraternity simply cannot fathom, in the land of the living. In fact, Hypochondriacs Quarterly recently voted me Most Likely Not To Die which, I’m told, is considered quite an accolade.

Despite this I remain largely convinced that hypochondriacs are just poor unfortunates who get ill more often than most people. And I’m incredibly squeamish and sensitive about illnesses, too. If I watch somebody on television having a heart attack, I clutch my chest. If I hear someone complaining of feeling dizzy, the room spins. Strangely, if I happen to watch somebody on television inheriting a considerable amount of money from a distant relative they never knew they had, or romping with two women in a hot tub, the same thing never happens.

I’m sure there’s a very significant lesson to be learned from this but I can’t work out what it is. This might because I also have early onset Alzheimers.

The thing is, when it’s happening to you it’s not at all funny. I’m told it’s quite far from easy to live with either. “No, you’re not ill. No, you’re not going to die. Yes, it’s going to go away.” It sometimes amazes me that Kelly hasn’t recorded the whole spiel on a Dictaphone to play during those especially taxing moments. Maybe when she eventually leaves me she’ll record an MP3 of it before she goes, just after dividing up our CD collection and immediately before loading her gargantuan collection of handbags onto a waiting removal van with the engine running.

I’ve always been this way. As a teenager we had a medical encyclopaedia in the living room. Shortly after I discovered it, I started reading it much in the same way that you might flick through a film guide deciding what to watch next. My mother confiscated it about five minutes after I became convinced that I had meningitis, and it never reappeared. Nowadays, I have to get Kelly to do any research for me online, because it’s not safe for me to go on medical websites trying to self-diagnose. The internet is a place where you can find a bad review of practically anything in the world, and that includes your own life expectancy.

One thing is rendered especially complex by this, and that’s what happens when I am genuinely ill.

I’ve been struggling with RSI for the past two years and it doesn’t ever seem to get any better. I’ve been humiliated by a physiotherapist – well, asked to take my top off, but with my physique they amount to the same thing – I’ve been prodded by various doctors and nobody seems to have a clue what to do about it. Last week I sat in a corridor in the hospital watching people lurch past sporting the paraphernalia of genuine sickness; casts, wheelchairs, those odd bags of fluid hanging from a giant Zimmer frame. I felt ashamed not to be more obviously ill, despite having spent many happy hours in front of Kelly clutching my arms and doing my sad face that doesn’t work any more. Happy for me, anyway. Actually no – honestly, they weren’t even that.

Eventually, the specialist saw me. He had a distracted, academic air about him and looked at me as if I was just a tricky quadratic equation in a carefully chosen slogan t-shirt. But he couldn’t figure it out either. Said in his rich tones, you could almost imagine the words “We really don’t understand much about it” hammered onto the tablets as the Eleventh Commandment, so convincing was he. On one level I can identify with that - it’s always been an unofficial commandment of mine anyway – but I expected slightly more from a medical expert.

So now I have more tests, but nobody sounds particularly hopeful. And if they don’t work, the main thing the specialist was suggesting was acupuncture. When you find your doctor banging the drum for alternative treatments – well, it seems an awful lot like giving up to me. And in the meantime the act of typing some days just isn’t fun at all. It’s sadder than I can possibly describe; I love writing, and I don’t think I properly realised that for a long time. For years I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and now I have a vague idea circumstances are conspiring to make it more and more difficult. So if I’ve been writing less lately, or not responding to comments, that’s why.

And it makes me wonder, too: what would you type, if every word hurt?

If there were only so many words left in you, which ones would you say and which ones would you dispense with? Who would you tell your stories to, and your secrets? I don’t like to think of all the words I wasted, and the energy. The conversations I had with people I never really liked, the apologies that nobody was ever going to accept, the pointless, pointless one page summaries at work that I don't think anybody even read. Hopefully there’s still time for me. And for you too, because I'm not trying to tell you something you don't already know or end on a downer, but we should all think about this while we can.

We all only have so many words left in us, like it or not.