The Christmas that went wrong: I had a massive abscess and spent my first ever night in hospital
It hadn’t been a vintage year. I was in the middle of a divorce and had turned 30 believing my life was over in the way only a 29-year-old could. Christmas was set to be a nice reprieve from the misery, spending a week with my family and eagerly awaiting the promise of a new year. I felt tentatively hopeful.
Ten days before the holiday, my throat began to hurt. “Tonsilitis!” the doctor said, giving me a prescription for antibiotics. The pain didn’t abate, even after a week, so I dutifully went back for another dose. The pain got worse. On Christmas Eve, with no GP surgeries open, my mum drove me to the local walk-in clinic. A doctor took one look in my mouth and said I had a quinsy (don’t Google this, for the love of God, but it’s basically a throat abscess) and told me to get to the nearest A&E as soon as possible.
At home, everyone was readying to go to the pub, dressed in their festive finery, while I was being driven an hour away to hospital, where I was told I would have to stay overnight. I was helped into a wheelchair, had an intravenous drip stuck in my arm and promptly burst into tears. My dad snapped a photo of me before he left, promising I would find it funny one day. I looked like a haunted doll.
I spent my first ever night in hospital on a ward surrounded by people wailing and coughing, tinsel wrapped around my IV stand (I couldn’t face wearing the paper party hat sported by many of the other patients). My family texted me jolly photos of everyone at the pub, raising a glass to me in an attempt not to leave me out, which didn’t help at all.
Unable to sleep, I went to the loo and dared to look in my mouth. I told you not to Google a quinsy, but I will tell you that mine covered the entirety of one side of my mouth, my body deciding to raise hell at the end of a terrible year. If I hadn’t been so disgusted, I would almost have been impressed.
For the rest of the evening, I gingerly ate a succession of small jelly pots and wallowed in self-pity. On Christmas Day, I was finally discharged. At home, I slept for the next few days and stayed in on New Year’s Eve, deciding it was better to see the year out as quietly as possible.
I found the photo my dad snapped recently – and he was right. It has taken me 10 years, but I laughed.
