Even Calpol lets us down in the face of our latest family plague

For the past few days my daughter has had blisters on her face, bleeding gums and a swollen tongue. She looks, in a word, horrid – like a badly made-up child in a plague drama. All she knows is that her teeth hurt and her chin itches, since we’ve kept her away from mirrors to ensure she doesn’t freak out more than is necessary.

My wife and I, after all, were doing enough freaking out for the three of us. At first we were told she might have strep, then HSV-1 – a type of herpes that causes cold sores – and possibly tonsillitis, too. Each of these tentative diagnoses came across five days’ worth of attempts to get any sort of medical attention at all, involving multiple doctors, two GPs, the kind folks at the NHS 111 helpline and one emergency dentist.

I don’t mean to complain, because I know that we are, in the grand scheme, a bafflingly lucky family. Our children have had few health issues, and the standard of care here in Walthamstow has always been excellent. It’s just that all such perspective evaporates when your three-year-old’s face and gums are bleeding for the fourth day in a row, and no one seems to agree why this is. Nothing, it turns out, tests my commitment to social democratic values like the sight of blood on my daughter’s teeth. That’s when I insist that the NHS should scramble fighter jets to whisk us to a secret mountain-top health clinic that’s just for diplomats, arms dealers and the children of people who write gently humorous parenting columns.

Instead, we queue and stew and try, over the course of an infinite weekend, to attract the attention of out-of-hours GPs. Soon her attitude to Calpol – always resistant – turns utterly implacable, and no amount of wrestling can induce her to take the stuff, even as her temperature returns and she lies beside us in glum, bloodied misery for hours on end. This is particularly frustrating given that Calpol is sweet, sticky and raspberry-flavoured. I presume its production involves a team of doctors in white coats and rubber shoes spending weeks making soluble paracetamol, before handing it over to Mr Kipling so he can make it taste like melted cakes.

Once we got possession of the antibiotics she needed for impetigo – her final diagnosis – our troubles really begin. The concoction we are provided – phenoxymethylpenicillin potassium solution – is just as pleasing to the palate as its name suggests. I dab some on my tongue and got notes of printer ink and tin foil, with an aftertaste that’s something like prime numbers soaked in Listerine. Funnelling 5ml of this into our daughter took an hour and, worse, it annihilated whatever small amount of trust in us remained. Knowing we’d have to get four doses of this horrible stuff down her throat each day, we realised we might have to consider non-oral alternatives to her other medicine.

The chemist is kind when I venture, bleary-eyed and smelling of regurgitated fruit syrup, to our local pharmacy, but stresses paracetamol suppositories are expensive. They don’t carry many of them, he tells me, since people in the UK don’t really go for anal medicine. “They love it in France,” he tells me, with a vigour that suggests the good people of France would take their dinners up their arses if the option were available. On seeing the bill, however, I can’t help thinking that even Gérard Depardieu, unbuckling his belt at the hint of a headache, would blanch at the thought of spending £3 per pellet. I, on the other hand, march back home happy to be £30 lighter.

My daughter takes to the procedure with some alarm, but expresses little fuss in the few seconds it demands. Soon she is pliable and affectionate. Administering the antibiotic remains an ordeal, but the lesions on her tongue and chin fade and her appetite returns. As I write this, a day later, her slowly healing face is balanced on my arm, enjoying the mild rollercoaster effect of the typing this very sentence requires.

I pick up my phone to take a selfie for her mum. “Daddy,” my daughter says, as I realise she’s seeing her plague-scarred mouth and chin for the first time in five days, “What’s happened to my face?”

Photograph by Getty Images