Cantankerous councillor

Last week, our Council meeting went on until past 1am. At each of the votes to extend the meeting, once we got past 10.30pm, I voted against. Due to work commitments and a Hearings Committee meeting that was held before the council meeting, I had not had any dinner and I put my tiredness (and admitted bad-temper by midnight) down to hunger. I don’t have a high waffle-threshold at any time and was not impressed with having to sit through all kinds of extraneous chatter about things that had no relevance to the order paper, but I should have realised that being so tired was the harbinger of becoming ill. I was genuinely concerned about staff who had been at work since 8am, still being at work at 1am, and having to return again only a matter of hours later. But, I have never before been so cranky about sitting at a council meeting for close enough to six hours.

As the week went on, I started feeling increasingly unwell. It is very unusual for me to feel tired and I generally have no problems with long hours and late nights. By Saturday, I was aching and exhausted from the moment I woke up. I attended the opening at Te Manawa (see my previous post) but by 6pm I just wanted to curl into a ball and sleep. Then the tingling started, followed by itching. On Sunday, blisters broke out and on Monday morning the doctor confirmed it - I have chicken pox!

I am not enjoying this at all. I can’t work, can’t think, and can’t get any rest from the constant itching. I am plastered with calamine lotion and doing everything the doctor recommended, but I am now away from council until I recover.

Some people have suggested to me that getting chicken pox as an adult is far worse than coming down with it in childhood. I have to wonder if they are right or if adults just forget how miserable it really is. Sure, there is more of me for the blasted things to cover, and I don’t have a Mummy coddling me and trying to cheer me up (fat chance of anything cheering me up right now!) however I am not convinced that adults are worse off. I understand that there is an outbreak of chicken pox around the city at the moment. I have no idea how I contracted it and I feel terrible that I have been out and about in public in the time before the spots broke out, when I was infectious. I guess that like most parents, its impossible to know if someone is infectious before there is any symptom of the illness. Well, I think my crankiness over the long council meeting was a symptom, but who could have guessed that after almost half a century, I could end up with what we all seem to think is a kids illness. If any of you have children who are suffering at the moment, let them know that there is one city councillor who has all the sympathy in the world for them and what they are going through.