I swear I’ve got some super fast recovery from being ill gene.
Today’s ‘ ailment’ was over even faster than normal.
At 11am i started shivering… put a coat on and sat in front of a fan heater on full, for 4 hours.
Then I went to bed and was really cold until 4 o’clock.. at which point i suddenly felt ridiculously hot… for an hour.
Now I’m fine.

Even by my standards that was quick. Usually it’d be a good 12 hours of feeling rough.

About 5 years before my injury, i went to Africa to do a kayak race. About 3 days after I got back i started to feel really strange at work.
Two hours later and I felt really unwell.
I could tell it was serious and so I drove to the local hospital ( Ashford ). I was shivering really badly when I saw the doctor and he asked if I’d been abroad recently. I said yes, Africa, and did I have malaria?
He did some tests and said he thought not, but that i should go straight to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Chelsea.

I think I drove home, put a thick winter coat on ( it was July ) and then got a tube train into town, all the while feeling worse.
I found the department and went there. I didn’t have an appointment obviously.
By the time I got there, all I could do was give my name and that I was sent there, and I’d just been to Africa.
Then I put my hood up and lay on a row of seats.

Not sure how long I was there, but eventually a doctor called me in, took a history and took some blood. I stayed in his room while they did some blood analysis.
I remember him saying ‘ your blood protein tells is a measure of how much inflammation is in your body. I asked if it was ok, and he said no Its not, it’s off the scale. Normal was under 10 on their measure and mine was closer to a thousand.
He looked at me and said ‘ we don’t know how you are still conscious?’
He asked how I’d got to the hospital and I said on a tube, and walked the last half a mile. He said, you shouldn’t have been able to do that….

I asked what it was, and he said lots of people that come home from Africa come back with ‘ unspecified viruses’ and are really ill.
I looked it up some time later and it said loads of people get home and are dead shortly after.
We don’t have any resistance to exotic insect bites or water borne diseases, and there’s no treatment, so people just die.

I asked what would happen next and he said ‘ well there’s not anything we can do other than observe you and see what happens.
Given I wouldn’t have been at my most rational, I just said ‘ well I may as well just go home then?’
He said ‘ well if you want to, we can’t stop you’
Then he added’ but get a taxi, don’t walk ‘.

So go home I did, and was shivering for 2 days ( despite actually being extremely hot, before suddenly feeling hot and not long after being ok.

So I’m good at not dying of things that should quite possibly kill me.

My cycle crash should have killed me. I was supposed to die in Toulon Hospital… or at the very best become ‘ un vegetable’. Yes they still use those words in France, along with ‘ invalid parking ‘. Fair enough, I say.

And so even paralysis hasn’t stripped me of that resilience to ailments. Not sure if I’d manage a tropical virus anymore, but who knows.
Maybe i should go and get one.