By Johnny Sandelson
For the first time, I have had a good night’s sleep. Until now my mind has been stuck rigidly on UK time, but my body was having to exist within Singapore hospital hours.
For the last 12 days. I’d finally fallen asleep at 4am, after having dealt with work emails and messages from London.
Obviously, I had to avoid phone calls as it would disturb Charles. He had told me early on that it was fine since he was a deep sleeper, but it didn’t seem right to be pacing on the phone at 3am instructing solicitors about how to deal with increasingly contorted, and oblique business problems, created by a massive commercial global heart attack.
I am woken at 8am with breakfast in the form of fishy porridge in a plastic bowl. Fortunately, dishes arrive in airtight containers so the smell doesn’t permeate our small confines.
Next, nurses arrive for the daily nasal intrusion, the Covid-19 test. The testing device comes in the form of a skinny, but very long swab, imagine a massively extended earbud. It is inserted deep into my nasal passage. It’s a very uncomfortable process.
In my past I have been happy enough to allow many things into my precious nasal cavity. There’s no telling what they might discover down in that dark reservoir of mucus. Is it possible that a tiny white spec from the last millennium be found resting in the deep?
I have an unproven theory that some people might be able to retain the tiniest memory of this virus well into their late middle age. Charles and I might be living together for many years.
As usual, the nose swabs are sent to the lab, and at 9am the following morning we are casually informed that we are positive. Indeed there's such a nonchalant manner In which they confirm our status, that it’s now difficult to believe that we could test any other way.
I don’t like these medical tests, indeed I don’t like any tests. I become all tense and flustered. Afterwards I draw my curtains and curl into a ball, and fall again into a deep sleep for a few hours. It’s as much the tests, as it is the lack of choice, and the painful jetlag.
By the time I awake, the lunch plastic boxes are now piled on top of the still pristine breakfast containers.
By now I feel vibrant, and fully engaged in the world. It’s 3pm Singapore time, London is deep asleep, and there’s peace in my world.
No further fear of medical devices, no work emails. But we are left with our creative and energetic minds. I do my daily writing which provides me with a vital link to the world which increasingly is looking and sounding like a true life disaster movie. The hints of warlike conditions in Italian hospitals, morgues overwhelmed, this truly has become a global catastrophe.
But now we have hatched an escape plan – a way to beat the system.
My sister, an artist and cartoonist, until today the unlikeliest source of science, sends a video explaining that Covid-19 can’t withstand heat, and the video offers various methods of how to kill it stone dead.
All we would need to do is be in a sauna for 10 minutes, and all traces would be eradicated. Sadly, Singapore hospitals provide a range of temperature controls, but nothing which will recreate a Napalm effect.
The video informs us that the best transfer of high temperature to the nose would be a hairdryer. We would have to force hot air through a channel up our nostrils. I’m slightly nervous. Charles is enthusiastic and will take the lead – afterall he has been in here five days longer than me, so is probably prepared for a greater risk profile.
So when the ‘drop’, from Raffles arrives, whilst we are naturally delighted about the coffee and pillow, we are slightly disheartened that the request for the hairdryer has been ignored.
Yet, as we are resourceful men, we have a kettle, and for heat transfer, we now have silver spoons. From experience I’m kind of content with the idea of snorting water, it brings on nostalgia for my ‘using’ days. I’m not sure how well received it will be in my Narcotic Anonymous meetings! So we spend the next few hours, hiding behind our yellow curtains, in effect snorting very hot water. Water is leaking out all over, at one point I think I’m drowning, like a new form of torture.
Nothing could be a more bizarre sight than two middle-aged men pouring spoonfuls of near boiling water into our nostrils. Whilst Gwyneth Paltrow may have taken the lead on vaginal cleansing, we were leading the way as nasal navigators.
We now wait with great expectations for the following day’s results. We are not packing our bags, but we are openly talking about our future dinner plans.
So there is disappointment when we receive the same nonchalant test result. One hour later the doctor arrives for our daily consultation.
Whilst we avert our gaze from our kettle, (imagine a scene in a prison movie....a guard enters a cell, prisoners avoid looking at the covered floor escape hatch).
We ask our friendly doctor casually if there happens to be any truth to the rumours that heat could eradicate this virus from our system.
‘For instance doctor,’ I ask ‘if there was a medical device for the infusion of hot water into the nasal cavity?’ He looks at us in a slightly bewildered manner and says: ‘It would have the effect of perhaps causing extreme damage to your nasal lining, but it would not have any impact on the integrity of the cell samples.’
His words are delivered in such a clinical and logical manner that we now both can afford to look again at the kettle. From now on this was a device simply designed to encourage the infusion of tea from the bags into our fine bone China cups.
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