London - An illness with a most improbable name has been infecting the Candy children over the past two weeks.
If ever there was a virus that does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s “slapped cheek”.
At one point it looked as if three of the four of them had spent a ridiculously long time peering over the edge of a fiery volcano. It was so comical I nearly snapped a picture for this year’s Christmas card.
This hybrid of mild flu and eczema is contagious, but difficult to take seriously - especially when you have hosted a thousand similar rashes, as we have.
By the time the redness appears, the culprit - parvovirus B19 - has long departed, but the rash still looks disturbing. It seemed as if the checkout girl in our local supermarket wanted to press some sort of panic button when I walked in with fuchsia-tinted Mabel.
The four-year-old had reached peak redness, having passed the jolly farmer lookalike stage and moved swiftly on to infected extra from the pandemic movie Outbreak.
Almost every parent who’s been through this will tell you that the worse the child looks, the better they are feeling. And after a few days cooped up inside and off school, you finally have to take them out - much to the alarm of the non-parenting public.
It’s the same with chickenpox. By the time the sticky blisters appear, the children are on the road to recovery. But you have to disguise them on the streets in case the outside world thinks a rabid zombie killer toddler is on the loose.
There is, after all, a limit to the number of days you can stay at home as a working mom. If I added up all the hours I have sat in doctors’ waiting rooms, only to be told my little one could happily have attended school with that rash, I could have lived an entire other life - or at least got to the bottom of our endless washing basket.
And I have found there is little empathy for working moms, who are always on a knife-edge of guilt, wondering if we can get the rash past the school receptionist and thus avoid being fired for too much time off work.
The Law of Sod dictates that illness always comes during a spectacularly crucial, make-or-break working week.
Just as that once-a-year, non-negotiable meeting you have with the most important person in your workplace always turns out to be the same afternoon as the school play, football match or your toddler’s birthday, so rashes pop up when you can least afford to stay home.
Giving them ridiculous names doesn’t help.
During much of last week, Mr Candy and I were on slapped cheek duty, alternately minding the three poorly girls and moving everything we could, work-wise, to this week.
With the young patients better at last, Mr Candy set off for a work trip at 4am on Tuesday.
I got up at 6am to get the school run going, knowing I had the most important day of my working week ahead of me. Plus, I had a last-minute/almost forgotten papier mache globe to decorate with my nine-year-old for his homework.
It was all under control until I heard a little voice yell ‘What the hell!’ from the bathroom.
My son appeared with a bizarre, spidery red rash covering his cheeks.
We all took a step away from him in unison.
He said he felt fine, he had no temperature and no other symptoms, so we got ready for school as the “shall I, shan’t I” question hung in the air.
I decided to go for it given his sprightly demeanour and my fear of missing this particular work day.
But the school receptionist was more wary and insisted we head to the GP.
Two doctors and some medical Googling later, we had a new ailment to add to our list.
Its Latin name is so long I forgot it as soon as the doctor said it, but, apparently, all the handstands my son had done in his gymnastics class the night before had burst most of the tiny blood capillaries in his face.
It takes a week to fade and is often caused by forgetting to breathe while upside down (a mistake we all make, no doubt).
We renamed the ailment, in the spirit of slapped cheek, and the next day, Henry gleefully told his teacher that his face looked like it was on fire due to “upside-down-it is”.
Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.