SCABs

I am sick. Tonsillitis. By @zoejessicad

By Zoe Jessica Dawson

 

I am sick. Tonsillitis.

 

I have booked a doctors appointment for this afternoon but I did not need the doctor to diagnose tonsillitis. Because I am often sick. Specifically, my throat is often sick, “recurrent” tonsillitis, they say. As a result, I have a checklist for confident self-diagnosis: first the little white dots flower all over my tonsils, second they swell up to fill my mouth, third comes a headache, fourth my temperature begins to rise and then finally, strangely arriving only after 1-4 have been completed, symptom 5: an actual sore throat.

 

The first little white dot appeared on Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning, there was a small flock. I gargled with salt. I gargled with aspirin. I was not going to get sick. Wednesday evening I was struggling to swallow around the golf balls. Lemsip, Sudafed, Nurofen – I tried to convince myself it was just a cold. “Freshers flu.” Easily fixed and in no way threatening to the course. Thursday I felt a little better. It was just a headache. A temperature, but nothing off the charts. I was confident. Cocky, some would say. I went to Cream, I gargled with free red wine. I thought ‘the only thing that’s going to bother me come tomorrow is a gentle hangover.’ I was wrong.

 

See, I’d ignored symptoms 1-4. Dismissed them as symptoms 1-4 of a common cold. So when I woke up this morning unable to breathe around the pain in my throat, I felt affronted. Despite years of feeling tonsillitis unfold in exactly the way described above, somehow I’d expected something else. Because in some strange way, I’d expected my throat to know that I was at SCA now. So I couldn’t get tonsillitis. It just wasn’t on.

 

When I was at school (school school), getting really sick multiple times a year was great. I would stay at home, I’d snuggle into my mum’s bed, I’d have soup and ham sandwiches made with white bread so soft I could squidge them flat in my fingers and I’d spend a few days separate from the reality of maths tests and hockey and bitchy girls. The pain was a small price to pay for a vacation from the perils of school life.

 

But now, I’m at SCA. At SCA, every day is not another day of maths tests and hockey and ‘get back in your biscuit tin, ginger.’ Every day is inspiring masterclasses with incredible mentors, new briefs new challenges new friends new industry insights and networks and MORE. It genuinely feels like every day is unmissable. A squishy sandwich is not on par with even one syllable of advice from Mike. (Mike, that’s a compliment and a half.) When you miss one day, you miss thousands of syllables, hundreds of words, tens of insights. Being ill blocks your brain, and I need to be a sponge to all this knowledge, not a snotty tissue.

 

Anyway, my throat didn’t get the memo and this (slightly useless, fever-fuelled) SCAB was written from bed. See you on Monday, folks.

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