The fear of illness haunts me after dark

Little Lotus went to visit her friend in the maternity hospital recently and found her crying in the corner of the room. She had received stitches to bind a wound after the delivery, and the nurses wanted her to take a shower, but she refused. So they got cross with her.

She was terrified because, where she comes from, it would be wrong to take a shower after giving birth. It would be more hygienic to bathe in hot water and ginger roots. But the nurses didn’t understand or just didn’t listen, and the woman became distressed.

Fortunately, I haven’t been in hospital for a long time. And when I’m in the full of my health I can’t believe I was ever sick. Although when I was sick, I didn’t believe I would ever recover.

The fear of illness still haunts me after dark. It’s like finding Dracula in the house. The room thickens with shadow and he appears in the corner, approaches the bed, and leans over me.

He was there on Sunday night, watching me with red eyes. “Where are all the real people?” I wondered. “They’re gone away,” he said. It was 3am. “There’s only you and me now,” he sneered.

After that visitation, I slept a little with my tonsils hanging out, and my mind swimming through nightmares of fire, but mostly I lay buried under the duvet, obsessing about my self: that sad bag of neurotic emotion that psychiatrists call the Ego.

Sometimes I lie awake for hours flailing myself with accusations. I get up and stare into the mirror as if I was looking at an enemy. I feel Dracula’s teeth all over my body.

But I know the trick is to be patient; to keep my cool when the vampire of depression slips in between the sheets. And I try to be patient as the night unfolds, as the nightmares open and close.

There are many people who suffer from chronic depression and others who live with lifelong illness, and I feel ashamed even to mention my own mild melancholy when I think of their courage and cheerfulness and their determination to live full lives without complaint. So when I can’t sleep at night I sometimes think of them and wish them well.

And I also feel deeply grateful that I have recovered my physical health. To me the world seems normal again. I no longer measure out my time between one hospital appointment and another. And for most of the day, Dracula is elsewhere.

I am left unhindered again, to enjoy the morning sunlight on the budding apple trees, the glistening silver lake, and the footsteps of the beloved on the corridor. I am free to walk about the world without pain, which I suppose is the most enormous freedom of all; it is the immeasurable miracle of just being alive.

Last Saturday, the sun shone in Mullingar for a few hours. Outside the fruit and vegetable shop, the greengrocer was stacking boxes of tomatoes. He said: “I’ve a cold all week and I can’t shake it off, but isn’t it a beautiful day?”

As they say in Cavan, he was lepping out of his skin with good humour.

In Red Earth, the restaurant next door, the head chef was on his mid-morning break, sitting in the corner and watching his customers enjoying their food.

“It’s great to see the place full,” he said, smiling.

And then I saw the General, sitting alone in another corner with his legs crossed, his chest puffed out like a pigeon and a look of horror on his face.

I said: “Is there something wrong with your croissant?”

“No,” he replied, “but I’m dreaming so much about wedding dresses recently that I think I’m turning into a woman.”

There are some men who could turn into women without much alteration, but the General is not one of them. It would be easier to turn a rhinoceros into a butterfly than transform the General into anything remotely feminine. In fact, he’s so masculine that he sometimes refuses to cut the hairs in his nostrils or tidy his eyebrows.

I tell him that some men in the gym shave their armpits nowadays and God knows what else to please their women folk. The thought of men doing anything to their bodies in order to please women is the closest thing to Armageddon that the General can imagine. “It’s becoming a very sick world,” he whispers.

I suppose we’re all terrified of something.