After sharing my latest ailments with anyone patient enough to listen, I received a well-educated guess of a diagnosis, where my mouthful of sores is concerned.

I actually received the same diagnosis from two separate individuals, which means it is almost certainly correct and just one step away from being as accurate as Dr Google.

… seriously, Dr Google is a fraud, whose false advice has almost certainly led to the deaths of more people than Dr Shipman. My diagnosis was made by individuals with a medical background, although for the best care, you can’t beat your own GP in the first instance.

Disclaimer over. I would have felt awful had one of my dwindling blog readers consulted Dr Google as a result of my tongue-in-cheek recommendation and died as a result! I don’t think he’s even registered with the General Medical Council.

Back to me…

The educated diagnosis was that my mouth was full of thrush. Fucking hell, thrush? I’d rather have foot and mouth.

My fear of thrush dates back to my school days, when a kid who I’ll just call Billy Big Bollocks claimed to be sleeping with lots of girls and had finally caught a Sexually Transmitted Infection… thrush.

While most self-respecting members of society would be mortified at the simple suggestion they may be carrying something nasty on their private parts and desperate to keep it a secret, the likes of Billy were a tad different…

He would treat his ‘positive’ result as if it was a military honour. Social media didn’t exist in the days BBB and I attended school, but if it did, his good news would be all over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bebo, MySpace, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and TikTok.

While we all believed Billy’s stories at the times, they were almost certainly all fabricated. Think Jay from The Inbetweeners.

More importantly, how on earth had I contracted an STI? There was more chance of me sprouting wings and flying to Spain.

I took to Google (I know, I know…) to find out if thrush is really an STI, or just a really sore mouth which shares its name with a small bird.

The news is good…

Thrush is not classed as a sexually transmitted infection (STI), but it can be triggered by sex and sometimes passed on through sex. Thrush is caused by a fungus called candida that is normally harmless. Thrush tends to grow in warm, moist conditions and develops if the balance of bacteria changes.

It sounds horrible, but at least it’s not an infection passed between careless, horny teenagers.