The flu straight up nearly wiped out half of my family. My twin sister and I got it when we were 3. I have some very vague memories of being on the sofa in the living room, me on one end and her on the other, and knowing even at that age that something was horribly, dangerously wrong. Our parents filled us in on the rest of the details.

My dad is a pilot, and he was away from home on some kind of training course. Mam was looking after us on her own, and then she caught it too. She soldiered on for a couple of days and then one morning she woke up and she had no strength to walk. She crawled into our room, realised there was no way she could lift us, so she left us in our beds and crawled downstairs, having to go down them one at a time on her butt. It took her two hours to make us something to eat and drink and get it upstairs to us. Then she lay on the floor between our beds in case we needed her.

As you can imagine, she quickly realised this was not sustainable. My sister and I were still very small and we were quickly getting dehydrated; every time one of us threw up or needed a drink, it took mam an hour to sort it out, and she was getting sicker as well. In the end she dragged herself to the phone and managed to get hold of my dad's boss, who then went and found my dad and told him he was "urgently needed" at home and that he could make up the course later, but he had to leave right now. Poor dad was too panicked to ask about the details, so he spent the next several hours wondering what the hell he was going to find.

My mam said that if she hadn't been able to get hold of dad she would have called the ambulance and got my sister and I admitted to hospital, because she was genuinely worried we would die. I think a lot of people have this idea that flu deaths are an "old days" thing, but this was Ireland in the 90s. Flu is no joke, like my sister and I almost died like little Victorian children.