The strangled half-scream I emitted as we all helped ourselves to turkey and trimmings let the entire family know that something was very wrong indeed. The pain was searing, like the heat of a thousand suns concentrated on to a single centimetre of skin. “You need to go to A&E,” said my mum, a retired nurse. My heart sank. The A&E department of Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital was the last place on Earth you would want to find yourself on Christmas Day, of all days.
It was 2006 and, as my wife drove me to hospital, I slumped in the passenger seat in hideous pain, feeling ravenously hungry and intensely sorry for myself. It had all started two weeks earlier when my wife had delivered the news I had been dreading since becoming a father. “It’s finally happened,” she said gravely. “Lydia’s got chickenpox.”
To most people, this wouldn’t be headline news. But I wasn’t most people. Somehow, I had managed to reach the age of 36 without succumbing to it, which would have been great were it not for a conversation I had had with a friend, coincidentally, a few weeks earlier about having chickenpox as an adult. “It’s the absolute worst,” she said. “Even worse than childbirth – and that’s saying something.” I had grimaced as she described raging temperatures, pustules like volcanoes and scabs like saucers.
Convinced she had been exaggerating, I had Googled it and discovered she was telling the truth. Adult chickenpox, with potential complications of encephalitis and toxic shock syndrome, was, it seemed, just a notch down from the plague – all the more so if you had an underlying health condition such as asthma. As I did.
While my wife held the fort with our ill toddler and six-week-old baby, now also sporting the dreaded pox, I had whizzed over to the doctor’s and demanded a dose of the antiviral medication I had read about online. “You’d need to already have chickenpox, which you don’t,” he said. “My suggestion is that you keep away from your children while they’re infectious and hope for the best.”
So, heartbreakingly, that is what I did. I self-quarantined in my study, while my wife (who had had the illness as a child) applied calamine lotion to our babies and ran up and downstairs making sure we were all fed and watered. Three days later, however, I woke up feeling hot, achy and with a scattering of tell-tale spots on my stomach. This was it: the beginning of the end.
Thankfully, my wife managed to get me an emergency GP appointment, which secured me the antivirals for which I was now eligible. Calamity avoided. Or so I thought. What I didn’t realise was that multiple trips to numerous healthcare outlets had exposed me to norovirus, or the “winter vomiting bug”. For three days, I could hold nothing down, the slightest movement resulting in a whole-body convulsion like something out of The Exorcist. I vomited so violently that I lost my voice.
But though horrific, this too passed; mercifully, the rest of the family escaped it. By the time Christmas Day arrived, we were all recovered enough to head to my mum’s to join the rest of the family for Christmas dinner. Sure, the kids were still scabby, my wife looked as if she hadn’t slept for three years and I couldn’t speak, but we were there and that was what mattered. Then came the gravy.
Why anyone would microwave a jug of Bisto for five minutes is a mystery to me, but that is my mother for you. I had taken the jug, brimful of the scalding substance, from her. Maybe my limbs were weak due to my many trials, or perhaps it was a momentary lapse in concentration, but somehow it tilted and some of the liquid spilt, burning through the skin on my left hand with the power of Christmas dinner napalm.
In the end, my fears about A&E were not realised. The tinsel-clad nurses were in the mood for a laugh and the wait to see a doctor was short. In no time at all, my wounds were wrapped up and, clutching my industrial-strength painkillers, I made it back home just in time to enjoy the remains of my dinner – albeit without the gravy.
Mike Gayle is the author of All The Lonely People, Half a World Away and A Song of Me and You. His new novel, Hope Street, will be published in February 2025
