I’m late to this and it’s long but, a couple months ago just before covid hit the UK I was visiting my friend. I had a really wheezy sort of cough but thought it was just my asthma playing up. On the second night at hers though I got really ill. Chills, fever, my cough getting rapidly worse. I texted a different friend who was telling me her sister was being tested for covid back in our home city, for all the same symptoms as me. I started panicking because I had to travel back on a public transport the next day, with a toddler back home, so I called our emergency out of hours NHS line, and they said come in immediately.

We had just long gone to bed so I knew she’d because awake, and I went into my friends room and asked if she could drive me to the hospital. We got in the car and the whole drive there was so frosty. She didn’t speak. The nurse triaged me pretty much immediately, then the DR. We must’ve been in and out in about 15 minutes (blessed Glasgow hospitals). They gave me antibiotics for a chest infection and steroid tablets and we left. The drive home was equally frosty, and so I started talking and apologising and this bitch just said “I hope you’re not contagious.”

Why is this a big deal? Because I walked through a fucking blizzard in Berlin for her, to sit in a German hospital for 5 hours, where she had admitted herself, because this bitch though a bruise on her leg was a blood clot. You could tell the doctors thought we were literal idiots. I never said anything though, I never said I was salty we wasted a night of our holiday because she’s an idiot. She’s very sheltered because she’s not had any hospital experiences in her life, and it’s always been hard for me to bite my tongue when she’s playing the hypochondriac because I have had multiple visits due to asthma, appendix and nearly dying in childbirth. Since having to go in recently when visiting her, I’ve had to go back again because the “infection” or whatever it was got heaps worse and I got pleurisy. It was shit to go through with the panic of covid because as everyone now knows, it obliterates your respiratory system and your chances of survival are really low if it’s already compromised.

Since last year, she’s been admitting herself to hospital for a gluten intolerance. I don’t think anyone can deny being GF a huge lifestyle overhaul and massive inconvenience but she genuinely, genuinely believed it was like cancer. She made an instagram with her diagnosis date and everything, with pictures of her in hospital. When covid hit China she was immediately panicking, obsessing, because she is convinced she’s in a high risk category, being gluten free. Never mind my fucking asthma though, right.

I’ve never said anything about it though. It wasn’t my place, apart from the fact I thought she was slowly becoming more and more self absorbed, it wasn’t impacting me an awful lot aside from being irritating because we live apart now. It’s become her whole personality trait, her wedding planning too, but what do good friends do? Listen, advise, be there. And that night I actually just needed my friend to be my friend, and support me as I have her, and she didn’t....I packed up the next morning and peaced out. Never texted her and guess what, 2 months later and she hasn’t texted me.