No problems with my liver, and my blood counts were absurdly good (697 T-cells – literally the highest number I've ever had, in fifteen or more years of testing them), so the weakness I've experienced (plus all the usual gastro problems) the past two or three days must all be 'transitional' side effects.
What's been interesting has been the extent to which I couldn't do anything – the tingling, woozy feeling that leaves you really unable to get up at all. It's sort of lovely in a weird way – you really can't pay any attention to anything, so, well, you just don't.
I've mentioned Byatt's Possession a couple of times; I remember thinking about illness and shock a lot while reading it – the major nineteenth century female character has an awful shock (this is before she's pregnant, I think) and needs to take some months to recover. It's a very different definition of illness, as well as stress or trauma, than we would use now: the idea that when something awful happens to you, you need a long stretch of time to get over it – without responsibilities, without anything but rest. A very eighteenth/nineteenth century attitude, and one that I'm sorry we've lost – I know that even after the worst things in my life, I've had to get back to work somehow, just to pay the rent of course.
Worse than having to work, though, was the separation of the psychological and the physical – this is the "it's all in your mind" mechanistic critique of illness. The idea that only when something is physically (i.e. mechanically) wrong with us do we need time off....
(PS: No, I don't look like the Ingrés. It's meant to be funny. No, really....)
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