My surreal Christmas in hospital with a dangerously ill child

Ever since my teens I’ve hated Christmas, but last year something happened which made me change my mind. On 20th December, my teenage son was struck down by bacterial meningitis. No rash, no stiff neck. He’d been off school the day before but we all thought it was just a nasty cold. By the evening he seemed to be on the mend. He wolfed down a huge supper and sat up on the sofa, watching TV, tormenting his little sister. In the small hours he started throwing up. He became incoherent, then unresponsive. By the time the ambulance arrived he was like a statue. By the morning he was in intensive care, unconscious, wired up to all sorts of weird machines.

Mercifully, he came round, quite suddenly, 24 hours later. I was by his bedside. I’d been awake for three days. He still wasn’t in the clear, not yet, but it seemed the worst was over. They moved him to his own room on the children’s ward. He had to remain in isolation (meningitis is infectious) but I was allowed to stay there with him (they’d dosed me up with antibiotics) and so the two of us bedded down together for the strangest Christmas of our lives.

This was our first Christmas in hospital, and it was utterly surreal. At the most perilous point in my son’s illness, when he was first admitted, my wife and I were briefed by a doctor wearing a pair of antlers (Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I presume). Looking back it seems ridiculous, but at the time we were too distraught to care. However, once my son had regained consciousness, the festive outfits that the medics wore (I recall a nurse dressed as an elf) became oddly reassuring. Their fancy-dress costumes felt like a precious link with the normal world outside.