Sniffling and capitalism
Last week I was at the football watching my niece and a woman arrived, a mother of one of the footballers. She was kind, a nursery teacher, and she very generously introduced herself so as to make me feel welcome, when I was a clear newbie to both football, and young person sports, and indeed to this kind of social setting entirely. I mean I was fairly sure of which goal our team was aiming to score in but here I am still trying to understand how offside has so little to do with being off or to the side.
The lady I interacted with was unwell, she was so full of cold it was running out of her face. Of course her being out with a cold isn’t unreasonable and I understand that the world can’t come to a halt every time someone sneezes. But my immune system is suppressed and at times compromised and while I donned a mask as soon as this woman’s little red nose snuffled it’s way in my direction, even though we were outside, it still drew into sharp focus how different she and I had become.
Let’s talk about MS and colds.
Colds to most people are annoying. To people with MS colds trigger relapses in 14-26% of infections and the research is clear that they’re also associated directly with worsening disability in the long term. In short, while to this woman her cold was an inconvenience, to people with MS a cold means brain damage.
So the world has become a very different place to me than it once was. Covid restrictions have ended and at least in my experience people don’t even test when they’re symptomatic. When someone immunosuppressed shows any symptoms they have to test to ensure they can start antivirals promptly before the virus has a chance to overwhelm them.
Our capitalist culture even makes people proud of their ability to work through their illness. When we’re sick and we come into work we’re the stalwart warrior, putting our own needs aside for the good of our colleagues, for the good of the company. Capitalism tends to value the breadth of people’s shoulders, their productivity, and so when people prioritise productivity over their own well-being it is implicitly rewarded. That culture has an insidious influence and before I became chronically unwell I’d come into work when I felt sick, valiantly striving against the odds, I was brave, I stuck at it when things were hard, I was taking one for the team…
…when in reality I was giving one to the team.
A culture that comes into work when unwell, that doesn’t test for Covid, that sees colds and flu as an inconvenience rather than the threat to the vulnerable it clearly is, is not a culture in which people like me can participate. But not participating is corrosive to mental health.
This, in academic circles, is known as a clusterfuck, a bollock buffet, a shitspread.
The only way to participate is to wear the masks recommended by my MS team, the ffp3 masks that form an airtight seal around your nose and mouth, the ones with metal in them, that carve grooves in your face so when you take it off you look like you’re about to tell people to witness you while you spray chrome all over your face and dive headfirst out of the nearest vehicle.
But these beefy ass masks aren’t easy to speak through, and I find myself contributing less when wearing them. They’re also not a perfect barrier against infection and when I’m confronted with someone clearly unwell they feel like a paper shield against a vaulted spear.
Just as well I look so damn good in a mask.
So when this kind woman came over to say ‘hi’ a bunch of things happened inside me. First I was polite and I tried not to react immediately or emotionally. When the sniffler extended a hand to shake I instinctively took it, then returned my hand to my cane, realising quickly that now both would need to be sanitised. The woman told me that her voice was raspy because she had been shouting but as soon as I saw her red nose and habitual wiping I knew she was undersaucing the hotdog.
So I… uh… overreacted. I saw this kind lady snuffle. I put my hands in the air, waved them from side to side, made a warbling gargling kind of cry, and rapidly sidestepped off the field like a startled crab.
Ok I made my excuses, took a step back, put on my mask, and made a new acquaintance feel weird.
But I felt so counter to expectations that I might as well have transformed into an otter, squeaked the first few lines of Ode to a Nightingale, and burst in a shower of anxious confetti.
The world might have moved on and people might like very much to go back to their illusion of immortality. But there are those of us who hear the sound of fate’s dice hitting the table all too clearly. To us there is no moving on. Each little cough, however well people think they have hidden it, is as loud to us as it was to everyone for a blissfully and terribly validating moment as Covid was so close in everyone’s minds. It is as an alarm, as clear and compelling as any siren, crying out for us to flee.
And yet here I am, shaking the hands of an unwell woman, in a world that sees my precautions as an overreaction. In a world that requires my precaution because the world offers none.
So I understand the context in which this kind woman was spluttering over her drink. To her it is simply a Saturday. To me all I can hear are the parts of me, shaking me by the shoulders and shouting…