Being ill sucks. I mean, really, it truly sucks. I’m rarely ill but when I am boy, do I know about it.

And so does everyone else in a two-mile radius. I can’t help it – I just don’t do illness well.

I can’t understand how anybody does. For me, it highlights our entrapment inside our constantly decaying bodies.

Yes, I really hate being ill.

Of course, I’m not alone – there are plenty of terrible patients like me who moan, and cry and feel generally sorry for ourselves while vaguely making life a little more miserable for everyone else around us.

We get others to take our pulse, just in case. We make friends feel our neck for swollen glands the moment we sneeze. We look up symptoms online and then spend the next six months in a state of mild panic because of what Google said. Last weekend, I was staying at a family member’s home. Typically, I’d been looking forward to this for weeks and just wanted a few days to chill out and wind down. However, my body had other plans and the day before I found myself dutifully asking a work colleague to feel my neck.

She – horrifyingly – confirmed that my glands did feel a little bit swollen, yes. Panic stations set in. I couldn’t be ill. I couldn’t stay with someone and end up in bed for the whole weekend.

I couldn’t possibly survive such a discomfort and live to tell the tale – worse, pictures of the event would have me looking pale, pasty and generally sorry for myself.

Then, during the gathering, a family member was rushed to hospital.

She’s in her 80s and has been in and out of the local hospital for months. She is – in fairness – fairly ‘far gone’ as many family members took it upon themselves to remind us. She has mainly lost her memory and her moments of lucidity are tempered with a deep depression. I have found myself thinking that it may actually be better this time if she went into hospital and didn’t come out again.

I say this not to be cruel but because I loathe being even slightly ill.

I hate depending on others to make me feel better and I feel a desperate sense of isolation and loneliness.

If I believed that much of the rest of my existence was going to be similar, I’d just want it to end.

Of course, given my moaning, I imagine most people around me would feel likewise.