Dr Solomon admits her first thought when she finds out her husband is ill is, “How is this going to affect me?”

And Dr Peake echoes her self-involved despair. Muted concern is about all either of them can muster. 

As Dr Solomon explains, their profession “makes you less cuddly because you see real illness. It takes a little bit more to get you interested or excited.”

“We’re Florence Nightingale at work,” she adds. 

“Yep, we’re far kinder to our patients than we are to each other,” says Dr Peake. 

With jobs they can hardly call in sick to, they also take a hard line on themselves. Last summer, Dr Solomon pushed an illness to the brink, when she was eventually hospitalised with pneumonia and sepsis. Dr Peake barely visited.

It’s quite an achievement to Nurse Ratched yourself. 

Spare a thought for their three children who receive little sympathy when bugs rampage. 

“They see friends having a week off school and going to the doctors when they have a cold,” says Dr Peake. “And we send them to school with a syringe of Calpol in their lunch box and say ‘crack on’.

“I think sometimes our children would like a little more from us,” admits Dr Solomon.

Her father was a doctor too, and took a similar line. She believes her father’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge her minor illnesses has rubbed off. 

The nurture argument does seem to influence our approach to sickness. A colleague says she was put off by her mother’s hypochondria, and has gone vehemently the other way. While my parents hardly Munchausened me, they did always take my expressions of illness seriously.

At the height of my flu, unable to really do anything, I selfishly phoned my mother on video phone and just propped it up and made her virtually mop my brow. 

I find myself confessing to Russell that I just want to be looked after, like I was as a child. 

Immediately Russell makes the point that when we were young, the range of our needs were quite small. 

“The only reason our parents work out what we need is because there are only two or three things to choose from, but the message we get unconsciously is: if you really love me you’ll know what I need.”

Assuming you were lucky enough to have had a positive childhood, one where you got a kiss on the knee to make it better, it’s easy to see why you might spend the rest of your life craving that feeling again.

Move forward a few decades and we project the same on to our relationships as adults. “We assume that our partner is going to know what we feel and need. And of course it’s a busted flush because they don’t,” says Russell.