The doctors hadn’t seen such a bad case. But I don’t blame my mother for not having me vaccinated

I was watching a film with my boyfriend, Marty, one Saturday night last April when I felt an itchy rash on my neck. Then I started getting a dry cough, like a cat coughing up a furball. Marty Googled “dry cough” and “rash” and measles came up. But I didn’t have white spots in my mouth, which are common with measles, so we didn’t think anything of it. “You’ve got measles!” Marty joked. We laughed about it.

Mum is a nurse and, in the mid-80s, when I was due to have the measles vaccine, parents often didn’t take it up. This was before the MMR vaccine – and before the discredited doctor, Andrew Wakefield, wrongly linked it to autism – but even then, some parents worried about side-effects. The thalidomide scandal was still fresh in people’s minds. I was aware I hadn’t been vaccinated, but never thought in a million years I would catch measles; it wasn’t even on my radar.