Stricken and awestruck
9 December 2009
Falling ill is the best way to find out who your friends are
One recent Sunday morning I awoke to find myself covered in red spots.
This not being usual for me - even after Saturday night - I hailed a taxi to the nearest hospital. Within a few minutes, a heavily-gowned doctor gave me my diagnosis: chicken pox. That's right, a fully grown adult, struck down with a children's malady.
They say that childhood diseases are worse in adults - and they're right. Within 36 hours, I was covered from head to toe in red, angry pox. I was, of course, placed under quarantine: for ten days I was a walking, talking, biological superweapon, the bane of unvaccinated five year-olds throughout Sydney.
Or I would have been, if I could have left my flat.
But I was quite crook (look at my Flickr stream
under for the whole, ugly truth), and anyway, I didn't want to infect my neighborhood. But I needed to eat. I needed medicines. I needed odd errands run at strange hours. How could I do any of that, confined to bed and
restricted to my flat? I am single and live alone - I didn't have any of the normal resources that children or couples can count on. Help!
Fortunately, friends came to the rescue. My friend Nicola - who has never had chicken pox - dropped daily food and chemist's packages outside my door, knocked, than ran back to the elevator before I opened my door and broke the cordon sanitaire.
My mate John - who did have chicken pox as a child - brought me some fluffy new pillows. (He leapt back a meter when I answered my door and he caught full view of my poxy visage.) There's only so much you can ask of your friends - they were brilliant, and amazing, but they have lives and jobs and can't tend to your every need.
Friends like that are the inner ring of a social network (along with your immediate family). Beyond that core, you might expect casual friends or acquaintances to cheer you up with a joke or some conversation (very important when you can't actually go out and see people).
Amazingly, people I barely knew - perhaps I'd met them once at a party, or had a brief Twitter interchange with them - stepped forward to volunteer their help. One of them, Jenna, became my angel, repeatedly running to the chemist's with late-night prescriptions written by in-call doctors. I barely knew this woman, yet she brought me my antibiotics and the lotion I bathed in when the itching became so intense I wanted to jump out of my skin. Rod, who works just down the street from my flat, fetched my mail from the lobby of my building. Unbidden, these folks came to my aid.
All of this tells me that there are hidden strengths - and undercover angels - in any social network. Connections that seem tenuous might, in times of need, prove to be the most enduring. And you can't know that in advance. Only in adversity do the true stars begin to shine. #
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