"I'm in hospital. . . don't panic!"

We did, of course. What else are you supposed to do when you get a call like that?

We’re talking here about a boy who has never spent a night in hospital.

Nineteen years and the biggest medical drama of his life thus far was a bump on the back of his head the size of a ping-pong ball when he was about 10 years old.

Now he was lying in a hospital bed having somehow managed to impale himself on metal railings at his students accommodation block.

The spike entered his wrist and penetrated about two inches into his hand when he slipped trying to climb out of an enclosed area after some moron set the fire alarm off by smoking.

It’s only now, five days on, that I’ve allowed myself to think about how serious that could have been.

A fraction to the left or perhaps an inch deeper and he could have severed a main artery and bled to death, locked inside a yard at the foot of a fire escape in his makeshift pyjamas -ie: tracksuit bottoms and a baggy T-shirt.

It didn’t bear thinking about. As it turned out, he suffered a minor loss of sensation in his hand and required an operation to repair some nerve damage.

He pleaded with us not to follow our instincts and drive for six hours to see him because that would have been “sad and embarrassing��? apparently.

That said, he was unusually chatty for a while. The sheer boredom of being holed up in a hospital for 48 hours meant he’d turn to anyone – even his parents – to help break the monotony.

We duly obliged, bombarding him with sympathetic texts and calls until he got wise – or just plain sick of our voices – and “forgot��? to recharge his phone for a while.

We caught him off-guard yesterday just long enough to establish that (a) his first day proper at university had gone well, (b) that his hand was feeling much better thanks and (c) no, he had not yet registered with a GP but he would do soon, so stop nagging.

Since then, all calls have thus far been redirected to voicemail. Which is reassuring.

After all, when your kids don’t return your calls and ignore your texts you know everything’s back to normal.