I feel awful. Hot and cold and shivery. Dizzy and sick and wobbly and like everything is happening to me all at once.

‘What happened?’ I squint and Mum lets go of my hand for a moment to put my sunglasses on. Even though the curtains are closed and my earplugs are in and I’m out of the scratchy sheets and into the silk ones, it still feels like I’m on a merry-go-round at full speed.

‘One spoon-drop too many, we think. But then your blood pressure got dangerously low and that’s a new one, so we called the emergency doctor out.’

I look at her, dark now through the glasses. And I don’t need to ask her why she’s been crying, because I know what would’ve happened. It’s happened before.

The doctor would’ve wanted to take me to hospital. And hospitals were a good place to be when I was seven and I fell out of a tree, breaking my collarbone. Back then, they did an X-ray, showed me the lightning bolt in my milk-white bones and sent me away in a sling until it mended. And although it felt like the worst pain at the time, I would take a thousand collarbone breaks if all they had to do to fix the Illness was take an X-ray, see the crack and promise it’ll be healed in six to eight weeks.

But that’s not what hospitals do now, because the Illness is a shadowy beast. It hides in X-rays and shows up as a slightly unusual shape in an MRI. So your parents spend a lot of money they don’t really have getting doctors to keep looking, looking, until they tell you that you don’t have the thing you thought perhaps you did. Then they’ll do blood tests and colonoscopies and endoscopies and biopsies, and, whenever anything comes up ‘abnormal’, you’re happy – because you think you’ve finally found its hiding place. But then it’ll turn out just to be the Illness’s tail. Or the footprints it leaves behind.

But the doctors keep you in, anyway, to monitor you. And when you don’t get any better, they start asking different questions. Questions about what could be going on in your head to mean that you’re not well. Questions to Mum and Dad about why they’re allowing their daughter to sit in bed all day. And those are the questions that take spoons from parents, too.

I squeeze Mum’s hand tighter.

I didn’t get taken to hospital this time at least. Mum and Dad must have said something and the doctor must have listened.