Mark Wignall | Pain, aches, and persistent coughs

I was 22 years old and still living with my parents. It was a terrible Sunday afternoon. I had come home with aches in just about muscle group. At the arrival in the doctor’s office, the pain disappeared. I was most confused. So I turned back.

Back home, my mother called the doctor. Of course they knew each other quite well. The doctor told my mother to return to her office. pronto. There I was given an intramuscular injection and a set of capsules, thought to be antibiotics.

This time around, my lady who was in the Middle East had caught by then, what we knew as, ‘the flu’. Based on how she described it, it was most painful. On the plane, she was bent up and trying to maintain a place where pain was absent.

But then came much more. One of my grandchildren got it. Then my ex-wife. Then my ex-wife’s mother, my ex-wife’s brother. They all had it. By that time, I was in bed. As for me, all across my shoulders and in my lower back was pain. I took to bed. Warm chicken gruel, mint tea. Sometimes black coffee.

I was not sure what it was but this much I knew. Pain, major discomfort, walking as if one was on the verge of toppling over were being experienced. At times, way into the night, there were cold sweats.

At 22 years old, my mother was at home at the time when I needed her most. And probably because I really needed her.

Comprehensive Prostate Formula in addition to Everymans Multivitamin 55+. Lucky me. One each. At the time, it was known as the English Flu. A few years before, in the late 1960s a most viral influenza called the Hong Kong Flu did the rounds and, for a while, I painfully contracted it.

For the last two weeks, I have been in bed where the flu at one stage had driven me to bed and deep under a comforter. As I slowly ‘came back to life’ and hit the road, that is, make back the old alliances, conveniently some of my street side vendors have begun to claim that it is white rum and energy drink that have brought them back from the dark side or the flu. Conveniently.

PAINFUL SHINGLES

I was in the middle of a disease called shingles when I was 33. It was my friend Pinkie who explained it to me without the science. “Wiggly, look like you a rotten.”

One late evening in 1983 ,I found myself in the backyard of a sweet nurse lady in Port Royal. As she examined my shingles she asked for perfect stillness. Then she heated some needles and applied them to the watery bumps which were somehow settled around my side. In two weeks, my outward show of shingles had disappeared.

It was called pink eye or conjunctivitis. In plain language, it was a nasty disease. Because of its contagious nature, it was arranged that I move out of the house and resettle in a small hotel room. Notwithstanding that, two members of my family contracted the disgusting condition.

I didn’t want to explain too much to those who were asking where I was, why did I walk the way I did, and how soon I would get better. My ex-wife’s mother is in her 90s. She uses a wheelchair. In the last few days, I have been taking an excessive amount of garlic and ginger. Let me admit that I hate the concoction.

So I do not like to walk and hobble. Ever since I was younger, I have followed my father, his gait, that is. He walks briskly, so do I. I walk briskly, so do my sons. So I really hate being bothered.

But I have to weigh the cost of being cooped in like 30 hens, gazing at the rain and waiting, peeping out, and saying the dawn must come.

STOP STEALING DI GANJA

It is not the first set-up for a robbery. Allow the young cops to shake down the small seller of the weed. But, some are seeing it. That it is small and petty, one grab.

It has happened before. $5,000; the weekend before that, $8,000 in the latest hit. When are they going to stop? His cop friend is no longer among us so he feels strung up. But, unfortunately, the younger cops they, too, have their appetites and they only grow fat around the middle.

One would think that, with the flu trying to give the people an ease, a little break, a thought and some moments of peace, then the dirty cops would play good for a while.

In the wake of monster Melissa, many petty traders in weed were looking forward to a little bounceback out of the storm. The unique chemical makeup of the rain immediately after the storm would present a rich topsoil ready to punch a new and, naturally feed down to the first needed 18 inches or so in ganja farming.

But the dirty cops are out and about and, where one would expect to breathe, that doesn’t happen.

There is more throttling than breathing. Next week: Venezuelan Tar.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.