And the biggi..?19 2 22 (10+8+8) 3 blogs in one 25 2 2
It came onto me during the week of 1st April in the
year I was 62 and that year it would transpire I was arguably to become one of
its biggest April Fools..?
In those days my wife and I would go for an evening
walk together and the first thing I did when I left the house was light up a
cigarette, which was a habit I complimented myself in controlling to the extent
I no longer smoked at work, but only for "pleasure" having argued with myself many years before, that
if I was going to damage my health smoking I should do it in my own free time,
when I delayed the habit until 5 pm.
Well on the evening of the 4th April I complained
to my wife that the elasticated cuffs of my out-of-doors sports' blouse felt
restrictive round my wrists, as we were walking round the town along our usual
route, to the extent that afterwards we called round in the car to our nearest
Accident and Emergency Dept., of our nearest hospital, for them to take a look
at me, when they performed a series of tests and declared they could find
nothing untoward, perhaps I had strained myself doing too much raking in the
garden they suggested? and leaving me to wrestle with the notion perhaps I was becoming a hypochondriac?
But two night later after a party with one of my
wife's cousins who happened to be working on a house refurbishment in our town
I awoke in the small hours, at precisely 4:35 am I calculated later with the
most serious chest pains I had ever experienced, which remained unabated
whichever way I turned on my bed. Fortunately my wife heard my cries and ‘phoned
for an ambulance which arrived she said later, within about 5 or 10 minutes,
when the two guys manning it took me the 20 minute journey to the same hospital
I had visited two nights before.
My wife followed in her car when she smoked what was
to be her last cigarette also, she told me later...
Well I guess you can all guess the rest. By the
time my wife, who thankfully had trained as a State Registered Nurse and Community Sister in her
youth, arrived at the hospital I was already hooked up to the clot-busting
medication that I was given, to allay the worst effects of blogged coronary
arteries, when I began to feel a relief from the pain associated with my heart
not getting the oxygenated blood so essential for its normal function.
This is my third and final blog in this series to
do with how we are able to injure our bodies without at the time being aware of
the damage we are doing.
My story if anything is atypical given my family
history on my father’s side when his father died when he was only 8 years old,
and who never knew his paternal grandfather because he too died around the age
of 50 as also did my father’s sister. And when there is a good chance smoking
was a factor in all but my aunt’s early death.
I was exceedingly fortunate that though my myocardial
infarction wasn’t a small one according to the doctor on the intensive care
ward where I spent the rest of the night of the 6th April that year, that modern medicine had improved so much during the
course of my life-time to the extent my heart was able to recover fully with the
clot-busting medication administered in good time, and when later my quality of
life was further improved with bypass surgery, not to mention the ease with I was now able to quite smoking.
The prelude to a major mishap..? 19 2 18
Aged 47 then I had let Bob down and took time off
work although I hadn’t equalled his record of 20 years without a day off but,
nay bother… I was walking more than ever and owing to the hilly area in which
we lived and the fact we had a dog called Cassidy I was regularly walking the
dog for an hour of an evening which over a year around this hilly course, plus
the summer holidays with my wife when we would journey to Scotland for bigger
hills, one year I calculated I had climbed the equivalent of 5 Mt. Everest’s, say
145.000 ft or 44 240 metres. I’d started walking in my early 20’s and at first
had left off cycling in favour of rock-climbing until age 28 when I became a
father for the first time, and reflected I no longer needed to prove I could
scale rock faces and take unreasonable risks with my life anymore…
But as a young hitchhiker travelling round a good
part of Europe, at least 10 countries, I had fallen into the awful though
fashionable habit of buying cigarettes to share with the people who offered me
lifts, and in the process had become hooked on the tobacco weed, when I
promised myself if I could ever stop smoking I would start running as a new
form of exercise. As a young man I had also started cross-country skiing to the
extent that when we moved to Scandinavia to live to begin with during the
schools' skiing holiday week, the third week of February each year, we would take
off for a week’s cross country skiing.
Stopping smoking was something I finally did in the
spring of 1991 when I dutifully started running, quite often with another
English guy Ian who was accustomed to running marathons and in no time at all I
was running maybe 25 km, say 15 miles a week. But then I got a condition which
the doctor on duty that day, dressed like an athletics coach in track suit,
diagnosed as shin splints, advising me to rest up for 6 weeks when he predicted
the problem would be cured, when I could resume running again, which I did.
In the following spring for skiing holiday my wife
and I journeyed forth for a second break in Ylä-Valtimo in Eastern Finland, just north of the famed
Koli quartzite hill, which rises to 347 metres or 1138 ft above sea level.
On the 3rd or 4th day skiing
the muscle at the front of my right lower leg exploded which when I finally got
a proper diagnosis some considerable time later was said to be "Compartment
Syndrome" which means the muscle had grown too quickly for the sack containing
it to grow commensurately quickly to accommodate it, and when the only relief was to
let the muscle return to its former size (as far as this is possible) and to
avoid forms of exercise: running, cycling, cross-country skiing and swimming that
exacerbated the condition, so I understood from the surgeon who told me he could
perform an operation but could not guarantee the problem would be cured.
Thereafter I rested up and instead of going on the
hills that coming summer we hired a 29 ft yacht on Scotland’s Caledonian Canal. The
high point of which with my wife, A-E our younger son P and his wife J, was
sailing on a starboard tack with all sails of our Bermuda-rigged boat hoisted as we swept along into Loch Ness. There followed some years of sailing holidays, when we bought
our own yacht, a small Hallberg Rassy 24 ft Misil ll, until I sold her in 2012
when neither of our sons wished to take over, but when we had introduced our 4 grandchildren to the joys of sailing.
And little by little we got back to climbing
mountains, an activity I had started before all the others, and so I have to
think all the muscles were already in place not to disturb my Compartment Syndrome
condition but the bigger mishap was still to strike but which now must await
another blog. Have a good day everyone..?
Accident prone would you agree? 19 2 15
When I first became a Manager aged 35 I got this close colleague Bob,
54, who was the company Sales Development Manager, and we had much to do
together, but only after a few meetings he remarked: "The next day I have
off will be my first" and that after working for the company for 20 years
already? Well never a person to shirk hard work I took it into my
head that I wouldn't be taking time off either. After 12 years however I came
down with this peculiar sensation in my ears that sounds sounded different in
one ear compared to the other, so off I went to see an Ears, Throat and Nose
Specialist, a Mr Anderson.
Well Mr Anderson conducted an examination and when he came to my nose he told me "The septum of your nose looks like a double decker bus has driven over it, at some time, and that could explain your problem of hearing noise with a slight delay in one ear compared to the other" That is to say I had some congestion in my sinuses. He then proposed an operation to correct the problem to allow me to breath again through both nostrils, adding that it may not cure your hearing problem but that it will feel like a 10 ton weight has been lifted from your shoulders, when you will be able to breath normally again...
So he booked me time in the local hospital when I became a patient for a few days with other guys in similar predicaments, and as predicted I felt a new man after it all, and when the problem with my hearing cleared up too.
Of course being a boy growing up I had had other accidents
aside from getting my nose broken a few times through fighting in the school
yard with first one boy and then another. Like there was the time I burned one
of my eyes with a fragment of hot metal whilst working a piece of wrought iron
on the anvil with a hammer whilst making the framework for a stool I had
designed, aged 14 or 15.
On another occasion I damaged the nerves in my left
leg, maybe aged 16, above the knee when I took a downhill bend at speed on my
push-bike flying over the handlebars when a rock or something on my bike struck
my leg to the extent that for the rest of my life if I took a sharp rap to the
area of the injury I would get a severe pain for a few seconds to tell me the
nerves were never going to repair.
The next time I damaged nerves was when I took a
job doing 11 hour nights when I thought I could go without sleep for 1 and ½
days a week for 2 months, aged 22 or 23, so I could conclude my H.N.C.
Chemistry course by taking the 3 chemistry exams in the beginning of May, when
increasingly I would involuntarily fall asleep whenever tired, and which took
many years to be able to go without sleep if ever again…
Another time during a weekend, aged 34, after maybe
drinking too much beer I fell asleep in the chair in which I was sitting, with
one arm crooked over its back, only to wake in the small hours unable to lift
my left hand. When I took it to see a doctor in our Group Practice, he was
delighted to have seen his first case of “Saturday Night Palsy” after spending many
years in general practise, telling me I had damaged the radial nerve, which
would recover at the rate of a centimetre a day so that after a month I was
able to raise my hand to a horizontal position once more.
During all of these instances apart from being
hospitalized to have my nose operated on I cannot recall taking any time of
work: if I had a cold which from time to time I would get, I never dreamed of
taking off-sickness leave but so far I have only recalled my life to age 47.
Perhaps next time I’ll tell you about a few more boyish (?) mishaps along one’s
journey through life, but only if you liked this one, hahaha!!?
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