While sitting in the doctor's waiting room, I picked up a gossip magazine with pictures of Madonna in fishnet stockings and hot pants. I hate Madonna. Not her music. Not her lifestyle. Not her fame. Not her wealth.  Not even her legs (mine are longer). I hate her because, you see, Madonna and I are the same age. And yet she has ankles.

Why? Does she have liposuction on them? Is she constantly dehydrated? Maybe that’s why she moved to Engalnd. It’s cold in England. Perhaps she still has ankles because she lives in a cold climate…

I have ankles in winter, too. Trouble is, I live in Central Australia where we only have two seasons – winter, which lasts about six weeks, and summer, which lasts for the rest of the year.

I am not sick. I have been tested for everything short of Mad Cow Disease. Turns out I’m fine. More than fine. I have the blood pressure and pulse rate of a teenage athlete. I have the cholesterol level you’d expect to find in a Buddhist monk. My internal organs are so healthy they squeak… except for my poor asthmatic, steroid-enhanced lungs. Ironically, my asthma seems to have improved markedly since my ankles started to swell. Go figure. Apparently, I can have nice ankles, or functioning lungs. My doctor suggested I go with the lungs option. Right after she gave me the refreshingly honest diagnosis: “I have no idea what’s causing your ankles to swell up like that, Jen.”

Which brings me to the ailments you won’t ever see in fiction unless you’re a bad dude or a secondary character that doesn’t matter to the plot.

People get wounded all the time in fiction, but rarely do they get sick unless it’s a terminal disease (because they have to die) or a convenient excuse for the heroine to be home from work that day, so she can open her door in her fluffy slippers and dressing gown to the cold, but brutally handsome property developer scoping out her street …

I mean, really, when was the last time you read about a major character with fluid retention? When did a hero ever sprain an ankle that took three months on crutches to heal (I’m not including plots where he's the football hero and she’s the perky, no-nonsense nurse hired to care for him, btw).

How come Aragorn never snapped a tendon? Does nobody in the future or the past ever pull a muscle? Does it not ache to be on your feet all day provided there’s someone around wearing a sword? Did knee cartilage function better in days of old?

What about acne? Give a character pimples and you are dooming then to only two possibilities: they are petty, evil and deserve their comeuppance, or they will discover Proactiv far enough into the plot for the object of their desire to notice their real beauty, after which they can proceed to the “happily every after” bit, without a zit in sight.

You’d think, based on this, I would champion the cause of realism in fiction, wouldn’t you?

Well, I don’t.

People don’t want their heroes and heroines to suffer from everyday ailments. We want to escape. If we want to experience the mundane, irritating things about life, we can just open our eyes and look around.  When we're being entertained, we want to be taken away from it all.

There is no fluid retention over the rainbow. That’s why we’re reading fiction (whatever the genre) in the first place.