Troeltsch taken ill: the top-64 body reduced to Kleenex and pill-bottles
It came on as he was suiting up warmly for the B-squad's 0745h. drills. [...] Clotted Kleenex litter the floor around his bed's wastebasket. The bedside table is littered with both OTC and prescription expectorants and pertussives and analgesics and Vitamin-C megaspansules
Context
The illness hits at the exact seam of the regimen — "suiting up warmly for the B-squad's 0745h. drills" — and the athletic body collapses instantly into an invalid's inventory: clotted Kleenex, a pharmacopoeia of expectorants and analgesics on the bedside table. Illness is the regimen's shadow, the machine's constant liability; a body drilled to compete is a body one rhinovirus away from being just meat that leaks and aches.