I am on all fours on a hospital bed and the doctor has just put a needle into my buttock. It’s Christmas Eve 2013 and I had other plans; the doctor had other plans, too. But we are where we are. And that is bottom-to-face in A&E.
“Could you possibly close the curtain?” I ask, since my naked lower half is visible to most of the ward. Nobody seems very interested in me though, dealing with their own seasonal calamities such as they are (“I punched my front door” etc). Still, I’m keen to claw back some dignity. I feel like a piece of performance art on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.
The incident, as I think it’s best to call it, happened 24 hours earlier. It was a dark night in the car park of Clacket Lane services on the M25. My dad had offered to drive me from London to Brighton. He drove a van for work, which took him in and out of building sites, so he had plastic covers on the seats. I bought my dad a coffee and myself a mint tea and took them back to the van. As I sat down, I felt a seething pain in my lap. The paper cup of tea, that was filled to the brim with water which I scientifically estimated to be at about 800C, had spilled. I jerked because of the pain and it spilled some more. A pool of scalding hot water had now formed between my bottom and the plastic seat covers. I yelped, opened the van door and ran to the service station toilets where I ripped off my tights and literally sat in a sink full of cool water. “Were you that desperate?” asked one woman in the queue for the loos.
After five minutes or so, I decided I was fine, walked back to the van, and my dad and I continued the drive to Brighton. It was around the time we hit the M23 that I felt the welts forming. By the time I got to the pub to meet my friends, they were even bigger.
Some time after I fell asleep that night, the blisters formed. And they were unlike any blister I had seen: over an inch wide, filled with liquid on a red burn area that was roughly the size of a basketball.
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And that is how I ended up having my buttocks syringed on Christmas Eve and left with a dressing that looked not dissimilar to a nappy. “Try not to sit down,” the doctor advised. My dad, who had waited approximately eight hours in the hospital with me that day, took me home. Poor Dad.
On Christmas morning I found myself, for the second time in 24 hours, on all fours. This time it was my mum addressing my buttocks. She was a healthcare professional so it was down to her – despite my protestations that I could do it myself, before the realisation I absolutely could not – to change my dressings, which had to be done until the new year. Poor Mum.
I didn’t need to be told not to sit down – it was agony. I attempted a kind of sideways lie to watch TV and a kneeling position with a pillow. I had decided this was the year I’d finally read Jane Eyre and it was a great distraction. But really, I came to accept that all my heart desires at Christmas is the ability to sit on my bottom.
I have never bought a takeaway tea since. I wrote to the coffee shop chain at the service station and told them what had happened. They sent me a £5 voucher as an apology – which I could only spend in Clacket Lane services. Reader: I did not use it.
