It’s every parent’s worst nightmare when their baby gets ill and needs to go to hospital. Pretty much the only thing that can make an already worrying time more stressful is if this happens when you’re on a foreign holiday in a far-off country.

Well, that’s exactly what happened to us, and we were lucky that one little piece of organisation saved us from a big bill to boot.

We took off this September for Cyprus for our baby’s first holiday abroad. He’s still under two, so we wanted to take advantage of the ‘free flights for under twos’ rule while we still could, and travel in the cheaper out-of-school-holidays time, again while we still could. Hey, we are from Yorkshire after all.

We spent weeks preparing for and worrying about the flight. It’s five hours from Leeds Bradford to Paphos, the scorching hot Greek Cypriot old town where we chose to holiday. Will he scream the whole way there, drawing glares from the rest of the fed up passengers? Will he try to wriggle free and pull on all the emergency handles?

The flight was fine – he was good as gold, had a bit of milk, watched a few nursery rhymes and slept almost all the way there.

Cyprus is great too – it’s very hot, clocking in at 35C without a cloud in the sky when we arrived, and it’s a very dry heat. Naturally we had to keep baby in the shade, slather him with sun cream and take aircon-cooled taxis for longer distances.

Even doing all this, we were very worried when on day two, baby developed a fever. He suddenly became hot and irritable after a short trip to the pool, and he didn’t cool down when we brought him back in. Concerned it was heat stroke, we took off to the medical centre at our resort, where we were given Ibuprofen and told it could be due to the heat or a small infection.

Unfortunately, his fever came roaring back a few hours later and his skin was red and dry. Alarmed, I called 112, the EU version of 999, where they advised us to bring him into Paphos General Hospital. Here, they confirmed it was laryngitis, a viral throat infection, and he then had to stay two long, awful nights in hospital while they gave him a cannula, monitored his temperature and gave him medicine. Our dream holiday was in tatters.

Thankfully, he pulled through just fine after a couple of sleepy days and his fever went down and the throat infection eased.

His health is obviously the most important thing and we would have spent whatever we needed to to get him sorted – but thankfully, we didn’t have to.

I’m usually pretty slapdash when it comes to holidays. In my younger days I’d go backpacking in Barcelona youth hostels with no insurance. I’d book random flights in Norwegian just to save a few Euros. But this time, baby’s first holiday, I tried to do everything by the book – and thank goodness.

I went onto the NHS Global Health Insurance Card website about six weeks before we travelled, and took out three GHIC cards, one for me (my first one ever, shamefully), my wife and our son.

This literally took five minutes, but it probably saved us thousands of pounds in hospital treatment costs in Cyprus, which is a member of the EHIC (and, post-Brexit, GHIC) scheme in the EU. When we were admitted, I simply showed the card to reception, who took the number and that was it. All the treatment was free.

If you’re going abroad – with or without a baby – I can’t recommend strongly enough going and sorting out a GHIC. It might not save your holiday, but at least it’ll save your bank balance.