That Feeling… Part 1

What is pain? A recent bout of seasonal fever got me thinking about the antithesis of a healthy mind. For over 120 hours I battled the existence of unscrupulous non-living, cloning foreign matter that had somehow managed its way inside me. Virals! The doctor had causally dismissed me with a prescription to follow over the next five days. Apparently it could not be killed. And, its miraculous existence was beyond redemption.
Now pain is satanic enough. When wedded with fever, it becomes demoniac, which needs to be dealt with the fiercest, most detailed exorcism to flush it out of the system. In my case I was promptly handed over a strip of paracetamol tablets.
But, fever has its indigenous growth cycle. It is more like an obsession that grows on you, dwells and finally takes over completely to the end where it wrings your mind out of the last reserves of sanity and plunges you headlong into the abyss of hopelessness and piety. The first two days, my resolve to beat the intruder was supreme and bordered on arrogance of the millions of years of evolution that I had inherited from my tail-swinging forefathers. My attitude towards the virus was casual at best. I was the gladiator. They were the minions.
I ignored the ache that had started to swell around by ankles, my feet and my knees, dismissing it as a momentary offshoot of the battle with the virus. By then, the Paracetamol was working diligently with the WBCs, to prevent what was over the next few days, to be a total takeover. I treated the nagging, feeling of a cat's paw clawing the insides of my throat with a disdain. The occasional heaving of the chest was deliberately ignored. Man was supreme. There was no way a measly half-dead organism was going to change the status-quo.
Then, came the fever. It just seemed to have come out of nowhere and lodge inside me like a cabin crew which was to drive my body over the next few days. The thing about fever is that it introduces you to insomnia. The fever wouldn’t allow me to sleep as it radiated slowly and painfully from the forehead down to the eyes making them warm and moist. All my efforts to find solace in some wayward dream or even forced thinking were washed away with the chronic throbbing that would knock me out me out of my resolve like Tyson stomping on a featherweight.
My lips, though, responded differently. They became parched, dry and needed regular intervention of the lip balm to prevent my tongue from smothering over them or my teeth from digging into them to weed out the dry flakes of dead flesh.
The first conscious assimilation of pain comes in as a tireless wave of a throbbing attack. It is everywhere. It pervades. Takes over the very fabric of our thinking. Mauls it and scars it.
I remember trying to focus. But my mind would drift into the place exactly where it was hurting me the most. There seemed to be no escape. Every effort at digression, every conscious attempt at diversion is hacked into by a vicious programming loop where the victim is brought back to the moment of pain which he attempted to escape in the first place. It seems like a loaded train on an inevitable collision course.