The strangled half-scream I emitted as all of us helped ourselves to turkey and trimmings let your complete household know that one thing was very mistaken certainly. The ache was searing, like the warmth of a thousand suns targeting to a single centimetre of pores and skin. “You should go to A&E,” stated my mum, a retired nurse. My coronary heart sank. The A&E division of Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital was the final place on Earth you’d need to end up on Christmas Day, of all days.
It was 2006 and, as my spouse drove me to hospital, I slumped within the passenger seat in hideous ache, feeling ravenously hungry and intensely sorry for myself. It had all began two weeks earlier when my spouse had delivered the information I had been dreading since changing into a father. “It’s lastly occurred,” she stated gravely. “Lydia’s acquired chickenpox.”
To most individuals, this wouldn’t be headline information. However I wasn’t most individuals. Someway, I had managed to succeed in the age of 36 with out succumbing to it, which might have been nice have been it not for a dialog I had had with a good friend, coincidentally, a couple of weeks earlier about having chickenpox as an grownup. “It’s absolutely the worst,” she stated. “Even worse than childbirth – and that’s saying one thing.” I had grimaced as she described raging temperatures, pustules like volcanoes and scabs like saucers.
Satisfied she had been exaggerating, I had Googled it and found she was telling the reality. Grownup chickenpox, with potential issues of encephalitis and poisonous shock syndrome, was, it appeared, only a notch down from the plague – all of the extra so for those who had an underlying well being situation akin to bronchial asthma. As I did.
Whereas my spouse held the fort with our sick toddler and six-week-old child, now additionally sporting the dreaded pox, I had whizzed over to the physician’s and demanded a dose of the antiviral remedy I had examine on-line. “You’d have to have already got chickenpox, which you don’t,” he stated. “My suggestion is that you simply stay away from your kids whereas they’re infectious and hope for one of the best.”
So, heartbreakingly, that’s what I did. I self-quarantined in my research, whereas my spouse (who had had the sickness as a toddler) utilized calamine lotion to our infants and ran up and downstairs ensuring we have been all fed and watered. Three days later, nonetheless, I wakened feeling scorching, achy and with a scattering of tell-tale spots on my abdomen. This was it: the start of the tip.
Fortunately, my spouse managed to get me an emergency GP appointment, which secured me the antivirals for which I used to be now eligible. Calamity averted. Or so I thought. What I didn’t realise was that a number of journeys to quite a few healthcare shops had uncovered me to norovirus, or the “winter vomiting bug”. For 3 days, I may maintain nothing down, the slightest motion leading to a whole-body convulsion like one thing out of The Exorcist. I vomited so violently that I misplaced my voice.
However although horrific, this too handed; mercifully, the remainder of the household escaped it. By the point Christmas Day arrived, we have been all recovered sufficient to go to my mum’s to hitch the remainder of the household for Christmas dinner. Certain, the children have been nonetheless scabby, my spouse regarded as if she hadn’t slept for 3 years and I couldn’t converse, however we have been there and that was what mattered. Then got here the gravy.
Why anybody would microwave a jug of Bisto for 5 minutes is a thriller to me, however that’s my mom for you. I had taken the jug, brimful of the scalding substance, from her. Perhaps my limbs have been weak on account of my many trials, or maybe it was a momentary lapse in focus, however in some way it tilted and a number of the liquid spilt, burning by the pores and skin on my left hand with the ability of Christmas dinner napalm.
Ultimately, my fears about A&E weren’t realised. The tinsel-clad nurses have been within the temper for fun and the wait to see a physician was quick. Very quickly in any respect, my wounds have been wrapped up and, clutching my industrial-strength painkillers, I made it again residence simply in time to benefit from the stays of my dinner – albeit with out the gravy.
Mike Gayle is the writer of All The Lonely Individuals, Half a World Away and A Tune of Me and You. His new novel, Hope Road, might be revealed in February 2025
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