The Cold That Would Not Leave My Bones After I Was Well Again

The illness that overstayed its welcome

I got sick in the middle of a Highveld winter, the kind of cold that settles into Johannesburg in July and makes you forget the year has any warm months in it at all. It started as a chest cold, the sort of thing I had shrugged off a hundred times before. I was fifty three and had always thought of myself as strong. I gardened. I walked. I carried my own shopping up the stairs without a second thought. So when the cough would not clear, I told myself it was nothing, and I kept going to work and kept ignoring the tightness that was building in my chest like a fist slowly closing.

By the time I finally sat in a doctor's rooms, breathing had become a job I had to concentrate on. Pneumonia, she said, in both lungs. I remember being almost offended by the word. Pneumonia was something that happened to very old people or very small babies, not to a woman who still thought of herself as being in the middle of her life. But the X ray did not care what I thought. There were the shadows, plain as anything, sitting in my lungs like uninvited guests who had moved in and unpacked their bags.

The acute part passed, as these things do, with antibiotics and rest and my daughter phoning me every evening to make sure I had eaten. What nobody warned me about was the tail of it. The long, dragging tail. The doctors kept telling me I was recovered, that the infection was gone, that my lungs were clear. And I believed them, because the scans said so. But my body had not read the scans.

A cold that lived under my skin

Here is the thing I struggled to explain to people who asked how I was doing. I was not sick anymore. I could tell them that honestly. And yet I was not well either, not in the way I understood wellness. The clearest way I can put it is that I was cold. Not cold like you feel when you forget a jersey. Cold from the inside. A cold that seemed to live somewhere underneath my skin, in the actual bones, in the deep parts of me that no amount of blankets could reach.

I would sit in front of the heater in the evenings with a hot water bottle on my lap and a blanket over my shoulders, and my hands would still feel like they belonged to someone else, someone who had been left out in the rain. My feet were the worst. I took to wearing bed socks in the middle of the day. My husband would put his hand on my back and pull it away and say, you are freezing, why are you always freezing, and I had no answer for him except that I was.

And the aching. My whole body ached in a low, constant, tired way, like I had run a race I could not remember entering. It was in my shoulders and my hips and along my spine. Some mornings getting out of bed felt like negotiating with a body that had aged twenty years while I slept. I went back to the doctor twice, convinced something had been missed, some second illness hiding behind the first. The bloods came back fine. Everything came back fine. You have been very ill, she told me gently, and your body is still finding its way back. Be patient with it.

Patience has never been my strong suit. And it is a hard thing to be patient with a body that feels like it has locked you out.

The trip, and the room that changed my mind

That September, my sister insisted I come with her to a lodge near the Drakensberg. She had booked it months before, before I got sick, and she was not going to let me talk my way out of it. I went mostly to stop her nagging, and I packed as though I were going to the Antarctic. Thermal vests. Two dressing gowns. More socks than any reasonable person owns.

The lodge had a small sauna. I had never used one in my life and had no intention of starting. To me the whole idea seemed like something for gym people, for the sort of person who enjoys punishing themselves. But on the second evening my sister more or less marched me into it, and because I was too tired to argue, I sat down on the wooden bench and let her close the door.

I cannot fully describe what happened in my body over the next fifteen minutes. The heat did not sit on my skin the way the heater at home did, the way a hot bath did, warming the surface and leaving the core untouched. It went in. It reached the places I had been unable to reach for the better part of a year. I felt my shoulders come down from around my ears. I felt my hands, my actual hands, my own hands, growing warm from the inside as though someone had finally turned a light on in a room that had been dark for months. I sat there and, to my great embarrassment, I started to cry, quietly, so my sister would not see. It was the first time since the pneumonia that my body felt loose, and warm, and like it was mine again.

Coming home and daring to think about it

I could not stop thinking about that little wooden room the whole way home. And once I was back in the cold house, with the cold creeping back into my bones within a day or two, the thought turned into something more stubborn. What if I could have that at home. Not as a luxury, not as a spa indulgence, but as a kind of medicine for a body that had forgotten how to be warm.

I want to be honest that I did not leap at it. I am not a leaping sort of person, and the practical objections lined up immediately. The cost. The space. What would we even do with the corner of the spare room, or the end of the garage. Was this a sensible thing for a woman recovering from an illness to spend money on, or was it the sort of self indulgent nonsense I would have scolded a friend for. I went back and forth for weeks. I made lists. I priced things and then closed the laptop and told myself to forget the whole idea.

But the cold did not forget me, so I did not forget it either. I started reading in the evenings, carefully, the way I research everything. I learned more than I ever expected to about saunas, about the difference between the traditional ones that heat the air and the infrared ones that warm your body more directly, which mattered to me because it was that deep, in the bones warmth I was chasing. I read about sizes, about the small units meant for one or two people that could fit into the kind of modest space we actually had.

Working out what would actually fit

The space problem turned out to be less of a problem than I had feared. Once I let go of the idea that a sauna had to be some grand thing, I could see that a small cabin in the corner of the spare room, where an old wardrobe and a broken exercise bike had been gathering dust, was entirely possible. My husband, who had watched me shiver through an entire year, was quietly on my side by this point, though he pretended to worry about the electricity.

I spoke to a few different sauna suppliers here in South Africa, mostly by email at first because I wanted to think things over without a salesperson breathing down my neck. What surprised me was how patient most of them were with my endless questions about power, about ventilation, about whether the wooden floor of the spare room could take it. I was not an easy customer. I asked the same things three times. I wanted to understand every rand I was about to spend.

Eventually I settled on a compact unit, a modest thing, nothing showy. When it came to the fitting, I was glad I had not tried to be clever and do it all myself, because there was more to consider than I had realised, with the wiring and the placement and making sure everything was done properly and safely. The people who handled the sauna installations came out, looked at my sad little corner with its dust and its broken bike, and treated it as a perfectly reasonable place to put such a thing, which did wonders for my confidence.

What it has given back to me

It has been a few months now. I use it two or three evenings a week, in the quiet after supper. I sit on the warm wood with my eyes closed and I feel the heat go in, right in, to the places that had stayed cold for so long. The ache in my shoulders loosens. My hands warm from the inside. I come out feeling like my body and I are on speaking terms again.

I do not want to overstate it. It did not cure me. Time and patience did most of that work, the way my doctor said they would. But it gave me a small daily place to be warm and to be gentle with myself, and after a year of feeling locked out of my own body, that has been worth every bit of the deliberating I did to get here. Sometimes caring for yourself looks like a warm little room in the corner of the house, and the quiet decision that you are allowed to have it.