The Plane Had No Markings

Or, a doctor's note

As a child I was a habitual illness-faker. Not just because I hated school—though I did hate school—but also because I loved being sick. I was terrible at the lying part of it—I was a pathetically wet and un-naughty child—but I liked the attention. I liked the sympathy. I liked the more or less unlimited reading and Atari 2600 .

In actual fact I was blessedly healthy child who never had a serious medical problem, and I doubt I would’ve enjoyed the real thing, at all. But as it was, sickness and injury had a kind of feverish romance to me. I used to linger over the bit at the beginning of Tintin and the Black Island when Tintin gets creased by a bullet (“only grazed a rib”) and is laid up in a massively comfortable-looking hospitable bed, wearing excellent Belgian pajamas:

Tintin is only ever certain

It’s over all too soon. I would’ve thought it would be a nice break from his usual routine, but Tintin is up and out of bed a few panels later, catching a train to a suspicious plane-crash site in Sussex, so fast that a startled nurse spills a bedpan on Snowy. I would’ve milked it for a week at least.

I felt the same way about Charlie Brown’s various stints in the hospital. The first one happens in his Safety Patrol arc, when he’s escorting people across the street in the pouring rain and gets hit by a car. Again, excellent hospital pajamas.

Another time he goes to the hospital after feeling woozy during a baseball game. After he’s released, Lucy invites him to kick a football and for once she doesn’t even pull the football away. (He misses the football anyway and kicks her in the hand. Then Lucy has to go to the hospital.)

I have now reached the age when I am living my childhood dream of having actual medical problems, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been updating this Substack. It’s a bummer, but there is still a tiny part of me that’s smug about the fact that for once I’m not lying. Even when I was in the ER, with the doctors and nurses flocking round me, pulling my shoes off and telling someone to push another bolus of something-something, just like on The Pitt, I was thinking, I can’t believe I’m not faking!¹

I’ve never read a better account of being sick than “On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about it. She’s especially good on that feeling of crossing the invisible line from well person to patient. “We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream.”

Probably Sontag says something important about it in Illness as Metaphor too but I’ve never gotten around to reading Sontag. Now would be a good time, but I don’t feel equal to Sontag. As a stick in a stream, I am reading Richard Osman. But I’ll get back to the battle shortly.

1. If you’re curious—I always am—I have a heart problem. Not a blockage, something that’s turning out to be hard to diagnose but is probably somewhere on the pericarditis spectrum. I.e. inflammation of the pericardium, which is the membrane around the heart.