’That’s rigors,’ observed my doctor as I sat, shaking, in her consulting room. Rigors, she explained, is an episode of shivering and feeling cold while your body temperature rises above normal. The fever then makes you overheat and you sweat profusely.
My temperature, it turned out, was 38°C and, more alarmingly, my heart rate was 126bpm. It was March 2021 and I had been ill for a week, with severe diarrhoea, nausea, headache, fever, fatigue and general malaise. But it wasn’t the first time; in 2020 I’d had several similar episodes of illness. That October, I’d had a raft of blood tests, all of which were normal. Then nothing. I’d been fine until the end of March 2021. We were in lockdown again and my family cajoled me into phoning…
