“Going Sick”

By one of our Post-Office V.A.D.’s

I began by having the shivers: I had them when I walked down corridors, I had them equally when I sat in the safe seclusion of the post office. I decided gloomily that they were certainly “ushering in” something – were, in short, as the Home Nursing Manual would express it, the “invasion of the symptoms.” The only point was, the symptoms of what?

As soon as I got home I took my temperature with the instrument supplied to me at the Home Nursing Class. It comes down if the hand holding it is banged smartly against one’s knee, and takes about a quarter of an hour to register. It cost me sevenpence. On this occasion it struggled up to 100.2. I announced this result to the family: those who had not read the Manual were suitably impressed; those who had, remarked that that was only a slight fever. As a matter of fact, when it attained the altitude of 101 the Manual continued to maintain that it was still slight.

Personally I did not feel that there was anything slight about it, and I wished the doctor summoned. The symptoms were now developing along the correct lines for influenza, but the Manual suggested this cheerful thought: “In its early stages the symptoms of smallpox are singularly like those of influenza – pains in the back and limbs, headache, etc.”

The doctor said it was “flu,” but as to when I should return to the post office he was less explicit. He suggested that I might require a medical certificate, and produced a book of little forms, one of which he tore out and filled up. I received this document with awe, never having had such a thing before. It made me feel what a very solemn thing it is to be in regular employment. The additional excitement of applying for Sickness Benefit under the Insurance Act was denied me, as, after much controversy and a voluminous correspondence, I had obtained exemption.

In this I scored greatly over a young friend whom we will call Clarence. Long before the Act was thought of he claimed and obtained a lodger’s vote on the ground that he paid his father 10s. a week for his room – this 10s., as a matter of fact, his obliging parent promptly returned. Upon the passing of the Act, Clarence claimed exemption on the ground that he was dependent upon his father for board and lodging. The Insurance Commissioners asked various personal questions, and retorted curtly, “Amount of earnings incompatible with a state of dependence,” which was a polite way of saying that if Clarence was not self-supporting – well, he ought to be. What was even more incompatible were the two statements of Clarence, since one cannot be both a lodger and dependent for lodging. Hence it followed that he dared no longer vote, neither did he escape insurance. I who have no vote, felt no regrets at so well-deserved a disenfranchisement.

However, this story has nothing to do with my illness, the outstanding feature of which continued to be a deplorable lack of harmony between it and the Manual – I felt so much worse that the latter said I was. I tumbled and tossed, tried on the left side, on the right side, on my back: had a lot of pillows, had no pillows: accumulated bed-clothes and bottles, and then threw them away again. I did not want to read, nor to write, not to sew anything: neither was I in the least sleepy. I remembered the night nurse had once told me how men would ask her the time, and how sorry she was to have to tell them it was perhaps only eleven, when she knew how wearily the hours were dragging by to them.

“Heavens,” I thought, “if I make all this fuss, and am bored nearly stiff, by a potty little illness like this, what should I do if I were like some of the men in the 3rd London!” And I remembered how Florence Nightingale had spoken of that “long and silent fortitude,” that “unalterable patience, simplicity, and good strength – the voiceless strength to suffer and be still,” which are as wonderful in our own wounded today as they were in those who filled her monstrous hospital with its “four miles of beds.”

H. M. Nightingale