When I got home last night I felt decidedly queasy but I rationalised it by saying to myself that I’ve been running a gruelling schedule so it was probably just exhaustion.

I felt so grotty by 10pm that I took myself off to bed.

Then something weird happened. Between 10pm and 3am, some malevolent creature pulled out my entire digestive tract, sandpapered it all with course sandpaper, then returned it to its rightful place but in the wrong order.

At 3am, I woke up frozen to the core, shivering and feeling terrible. I forced myself out of bed and into the bathroom, where my body literally exploded. Since then I’ve only ventured from my bed for long enough to run back to the bathroom for another explosion. Mind you, I’ve been across the hall now more times than I can count so even though I’ve not been far, I’ve moved about a bit.

The pain in my lower abdomen has been excruciating so while my body is exploding, I am crying as if my heart will break and huge hot tears are falling down, splashing over my body and the bathroom floor. I’ve gone from my bed, where my sleep has been broken by the next wave of pain, to the bathroom until the pain and the extreme bodily functions have subsided, then back to bed for another short bout of sleep. The ferocity of these bouts has calmed but with nothing but water and my own insides inside me, they have taken on a much more sinister tone, that decency prevents me from describing.

I know how horrible it is to hear the soundtrack of this kind of splatter movie so I have been careful to close our bedroom door each time I’ve been up but my little girl, my Rosie, has had other ideas. She has headbutted open the bedroom door so my anguish has been relayed to David in a noisy cacophony of sound.

On the first occasion, I climbed back into bed alongside DM and he shoved me away, telling me I was as hot as a furnace…..how come I was so cold then? I had to put on a teeshirt so my shoulders were not frozen and shaking, breaking my own golden rule about bedtime. He had to wrap me around in the duvet to be able to dampen the heat and give me the cuddle that I needed so badly.

He’s been wonderfully kind though, despite being kept awake all night and has pandered to my every need, not that I’ve had many of them, I can’t eat with my insides like this so all I’ve asked of him is his help with my photo, which he gladly gave. I had the shot in my mind’s eye and I asked him to put my camera on the tripod and while I described what I wanted, he framed up my composition so all I had to do was reach out and press the timer-release shutter. He’d taken on board my wishes so well that it took just one frame to get the shot I wanted. Bless his heart. My only ‘better if’ is that I’d have preferred not to show the world the cracks in my dry feet but I’m not going back for another go.

I know we’ve all debated long and loud about whose photo a photo is, but I’m claiming it because it’s what was in my imagination and I pressed the shutter. I know a few others have done better ‘feet poking out from the duvet’ shots but I think I did really well just to take this photo and write the story of my day. In the 25 months of writing this blog, I've still not ever missed a day.

I don’t know from where I got this gastric bug/food poisoning. It may have been the bug that incapacitated DM last weekend but if so this has been an extreme version, maybe because my body’s natural defences have been so low because of this gruelling schedule of mine. It may equally have been something I ate. I just don’t know. All I can say is that I wish with a passion that I was feeling better.

David was flashing around his expensive glass last year and I was looking at car wrecks the previous year