Intense Raccooning

Original

This is very stupid but it’s genuinely what I think about every time I consider skipping dinner after work

In the hospital ward a consultant gastroenterologist appeared.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel,” I said, “very ill.”

This, apparently, was not the concise yet comprehensive answer that I had imagined it to be. He seemed to require something more. “Can you describe it?” he asked.

I couldn’t. That anguished, pressurised feeling – a sensation somewhere between burning and falling – that extended through my torso, my limbs, my entire body was by now so familiar to me, I was astonished that it didn’t have a name and that I didn’t know it. How could this be? I was, after all, a prize-winning novelist.

Frustrated I fell back on anger. Was the doctor stupid? Didn’t he know what “feeling very ill” meant?

In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf says, “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”.

At least I was in good company.

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt