6 August 2025

Ah, summer, the perfect time for a lung infection

It wasn’t as bad as my frozen shoulder, but I do have to avoid laughing.

Last week’s wasp sting took a while to go away, and in fact I fancy I can still feel a little bit of a histamine itch in my little finger where it got me. I had to put up with a fair amount of “but wasps contribute a great deal towards the environment” from friends, but they don’t even make jam like bees do, so I ignored them.

In the end something else much worse got me. My teacher friend regularly has a complete immune system collapse once term is over and spends the first week of the holidays poleaxed by flu; in a similar vein, I had just sent off the second set of book proofs when I was felled by searing pain. I had for some weeks been threatened by the suspicion that there was something horrible going on beneath the teeth in the back of my right jaw, upper and lower, but that was a feint: what was really going on was a lung infection.

I get these about once a year, sometimes twice. They are a legacy of childhood illness, and many years ago, when I had my first crippling bout, I was shown a CT scan of my right lung, with damaged areas shown as pinpricks of light. It looked strangely beautiful, like the night sky.

But the day before yesterday had nothing beautiful about it. At 2pm I sent off the proofs and turned in for a nap; by 2.30pm I woke up feeling as if I’d been stabbed. It got worse. To go back to my old friend, the Mankoski Pain Scale, this was pretty much an eight: “Physical activity severely limited. You can read and converse with effort.” I will draw a veil over the rest of the day, and the night, except to say that turning over in bed involved a great deal of mental preparation and gritting of the teeth. It wasn’t as bad as the frozen shoulder I’d had a couple of years before, but women I know who are in a position to compare both said that their frozen shoulders hurt more than childbirth.

So a sleepless night – the best thing about it being I was awake to call the surgery at eight in the morning to arrange a doctor’s appointment, albeit one I would not be able to attend in person. The call-back appointment was fine; the doctor understood why I couldn’t walk the quarter of the mile up the hill to be examined in person; he prescribed antibiotics and painkillers over the phone; he said I could pick them up from the chemist in an hour. “Or your representative,” he said. For a moment I had a vision of someone in a frog coat and tricorn blowing a trumpet and calling, “Oyez, oyez, hand over Mr Lezard’s meds,” or a lawyer with an attaché case and statement spectacles going down to the chemist and reading out a demand for amoxicillin and co-codamol in legalese. I then had a more poignant vision of someone I loved, and who loved me, nipping down the hill and saying her boyfriend was poorly.

It is only a two-minute walk to the chemist, but it took much longer. And that was downhill. I won’t even talk about uphill. (I thought of asking my friend N—, who lives not too far away, but she has long Covid and I just couldn’t.) Putting on socks was out of the question, but I was going to need shoes; I soon realised that tying up the laces was a non-starter. On with the Chelsea boots over bare feet. My local pharmacy is where the drug addicts go to pick up their methadone, and there were three of them there. One of them offered me his seat, which I was incredibly grateful for, because it took the staff about 15 minutes to prepare the drugs. I passed the time by reading a book on my phone with great effort.

The extraordinary thing is how much better I felt once I had a few pills inside me. We are now at a two on the pain index: “Minor annoyance – occasional strong twinges.” Psychosomatic? Maybe, but I remember that when I had my frozen shoulder, I could eat 30mg codeine tablets like they were Smarties and they didn’t touch the sides.

Earlier today – halfway through writing this, in fact – Ben rang me.

“N— says you have a serious chest infection,” he said.

“She’s right, but I’m feeling not nearly as rubbish today,” I replied.

“May I suggest,” he said with exasperated concern, “that you give up smoking?”

“I have hardly been smoking at all lately,” I said.

“Well, in that case, come to the gym with me.”

“Ben, please do not make me laugh – it is rather painful at the moment.” Ben has been trying to get me to go to the gym for about six years now, if not longer. He’s got to know me quite well, and vice versa, but he still persists. “I don’t have any shorts,” I would say, but that’s not really the only reason.

He drops the subject, and starts giving me a synopsis of the latest South Park trailer, which involves Satan and his boyfriend Donald Trump going to a fancy restaurant. I will spare you the details, for they are sordid.

“Ben, please don’t make me laugh,” I say.

[See also: Donald Trump, the king of Scotland]