As a sometime member of the Prozac Nation, I’ve had more than my fair share of brushes with the dark side, but I’ve recently had an experience that knocked my mental state beyond even the reach of the little green pills.

I had flu. No one knows if it was of the swine variety because, as everyone knows, no doctor will let you near them if you have even the hint of a temperature and a bit of a cough. But in a phone conversation, my doctor concluded that I fitted ‘the criteria for treatment’, quarantined me for five days and instructed me to find a ‘flu friend’ to collect my Tamiflu prescription.

The fact is, no one wants to be your friend if you’ve got suspected swine flu. It’s the modern equivalent of the Black Death – if I’d been a) allowed and b) able to go out, I fully expect to have been made to ring a bell and shout “Unclean” every five paces. Plenty of people volunteered to do things for me, but only if those things didn’t involve coming any closer to my house (which one wag volunteered to paint with a big red cross) than the garden wall. And who can blame them? I wouldn’t choose to put myself in the path of a virus that makes you feel like you’re being trampled by a herd of wildebeest and simultaneously kicked in the kidneys, doused with successive buckets of freezing cold and boiling hot water while coughing to the point of throwing up. But my partner is made of stern stuff and duly risked her own health to help mine. Grateful though I was, I could SO have done without the remedy.

What, I ask, is the point of taking something that only professes it may lessen your symptoms a little and reduce the length of time for which you suffer by ONE DAY? And in the process of this magical cure, it makes you feel even worse than the virus – vomiting, stomach cramps, breathing difficulties, headaches…

But rough as I felt physically, the real killer was the lack of human contact. Five days without even a reassuring hug feels like a very long time. God was I miserable! I’m rubbish at being ill at the best of times, but at least if I have the comfort of another human being it takes the edge off it. When you’re stuck in solitary your mind inevitably wanders down bleak routes and sleepless nights only make everything seem blacker.

It wasn’t long before my sense of humour failed miserably. If one more person had  mentioned ‘oinkment’ or targeted my inbox (at least one virus-friendly means of communication) with the hilarious news that they had tried to phone me “but only got crackling”, I’m pretty certain I would have found the strength to rise from my sickbed and purchase a pickaxe.

As if five days staring at the same four walls wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t miraculously cured on the sixth. In fact, it took three full weeks before I actually started feeling ‘normal’ again. And almost worse than feeling so bad you can’t do anything but lie in bed, is feeling ill enough not to be able to do anything but not well enough to not feel bored. Even I can only take so much Hallmark Channel before wanting to electrocute the cast of Diagnosis Murder and actively seek out and slow-torture the ‘creative’ minds behind any of those JML gadget ads. I still haven’t fully grasped the magnitude of Facebook so that distraction was pretty shortlived, and The Daily Mash isn’t quite prolific enough to keep me going for more than an hour – and anyway, it hurt to laugh.

I couldn’t even find comfort in food – flu doesn’t do much for the appetite. And to everyone who thinks it’s worth getting it just to lose half a stone – it really isn’t. But I did get acquainted with several varieties of chicken soup – yes, I really bought into that cliché in a big way.

Still, on the bright side, I now know I’m never going to be a candidate for a reality TV show about being marooned on a desert island with only a palm tree for company. Happy though I may be with my own company when I choose it, enforced solitude when I’m feeling like crap anyway feels like a really unfair punishment. I really wished I knew someone else in the same boat so we could at least snuggle up together and take some comfort in each other’s hacking coughs.

So I’m bitter. But hey, the experts tell me now I’ve had it once, I won’t get it again. Which means I’m your ideal flu friend for when you come down with the plague.