I remember the exact moment I got sick. It was December 2007. I was at law school, an intense year of studying called the Legal Practice Course. I was due to commence my training contract the following autumn, and qualify as a solicitor, only, in the end, I didn’t, and I didn’t for a long time after that. I’m glad I didn’t know quite how long.
A distant acquaintance, somebody on my course, came in sick. Some strange flu, she said, that she couldn’t shake. A week later, I got it. The glands around my neck swelled up so much overnight that I couldn’t turn my head; they felt like rows and rows of peach stones under my jaw. I spent three weeks in bed, and was eventually diagnosed with glandular fever; an illness that would carve my life, at least for a while, into before and after.
For the next nine years, if anybody ever asked me my greatest regret - the thing I would go back and change, if I could - I would have said that. I would’ve stayed away from the girl who was ill, would never have become sick myself, and I wouldn’t have spent a full year in bed, a further two with patchy health, would have qualified as a lawyer at 24, not almost 30. But my answer is different, now.
Most people take a little while to return to full health following glandular fever, but - it felt like - nobody took as long as I did. It affected my spleen, my eyes, and my blood, but the most crushing part was the fatigue. I was bed bound for the entire of January through to August, which led to an eventual diagnosis of ME (also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). The doctors I saw said I would eventually get better, that my immune system had overextended itself clearing the virus and needed to replenish, but the progress was non-existent. I couldn’t sit up for more than a couple of minutes without getting woozy and hot, and I couldn’t walk at all.
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I developed strange systems for what, for a while, became my new normal: learning to put make up on lying down, one-handed, the other being used to hold a small mirror. Baking while lying down - my boyfriend, now my husband - brought the ingredients to me in a bowl to mix, then took them away again to put in the oven. Life took on a strange texture: granular, my days lived in small scale. The post arriving was a major event. I watched both episodes of Neighbours, every single day.
And I wrote a novel. This surprises some people, but, as 2008 progressed, the exhaustion left me, so long as I was lying down. And so I started to write, a women’s fiction novel called Three By The Sea, which was ultimately rejected by many agents, much later.
As the weather turned colder again, late in 2008, my health improved. I was able to sit up for half an hour, then an hour, then long enough to go out for a cup of coffee. I was able to walk for five minutes, then 10, then 15. I remember my first half-day out, standing at the bus stops gawping at the electronic timetables they had installed during my convalescence.
I moved into a flat next to law school, and finished my course, doing much of the work in bed, and I finished my novel, too.
I suffered many relapses during 2009, 2010 and 2011, and for a couple of years got every illness going, like a child. Each one felled me for many weeks more than was normal, and, sometimes, I pushed too hard trying to return to normal life, and ended up in bed again, those glands up like hard stones once more. I worked a patchwork of at-home jobs, tried temping a few times, too, but often relapsed. During one such period, off sick for several months - I was, unwittingly, a terrible employee - I sent that first novel off to agents. It got rejected by everybody. I started a second, though everyone around me thought I was crazy.
And so it wasn’t until 2011 that I started my training contract, and even then only part time, which added another year on. I eventually qualified at 29, embarrassed by my patchy health history, my age, by how I was using antibacterial hand gel years before it became de rigueur. It was in that same year that I eventually got an agent, though no publisher wanted the manuscript.
It took a further year, by which time I was a full-time lawyer, for me to sell a novel. I was working 50 hours a week in the office and 30 hours a week at home on my book. It wouldn’t be what my immunologist would have advised, but I didn’t want to give up. I had come too close and, anyway, I was driven by a very specific urge to have a Plan B, in case my health ever failed me so spectacularly again (it hasn’t).
It was winter once more when I got the call. The exact same sort of day that I caught glandular fever on. Bone cold, the trees sketched outlines outside the office. My agent called to say I had a two-book deal with Penguin. I had done it. I looked out onto the bleak landscape and couldn’t believe it, could almost feel my life turning on a dime, the way it sometimes does.
And so now, post-2016, my answer to the question of regrets would be different. I would no longer stop myself catching glandular fever, because I wouldn’t be a novelist without it, without that down time, with nothing to lose.
Later, much later, during the second lockdown, I wrote a novel about precisely this: if you could go back in time, and live your life over, what would you change, if you could? Wrong Place, Wrong Time, is a time loop thriller about a woman’s journey to stop her son committing murder, but it has its roots in what happened to me, the joint poisoned chalice and gift that was becoming so unwell in my twenties. I wouldn’t change it now. And even though my health is pretty much perfect these days, and I bookend each writing day with a two-mile dog walk, I do still favour writing from my bed.
Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister is published by Michael Joseph
