Yes, it has been ages. Let’s get on shall we. Right, so I
had pancreatitis over Christmas 2018 and was hospitalised. Now I can’t drink
alcohol anymore or eat most of the delicious food that was, unbeknownst to me, destroying
my innards. Which blows, but I look better in tighter t-shirts now and don’t
feel dreadful half of my waking life, so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts. Three
months sat at home really makes you appreciate having to get up and go somewhere
(like work) and I’ve also joined a gym, so on the downside I have become
everything I hate. In other news, my dad died, which is more the thrust of this
post. It’s not been a banner year. It’s going to be interesting to see how entertaining
I can make this one, based on the less than hilarious subject matter.
His heart and connected arteries were the main culprits.
They’d had enough and that was that. And so it was that I found him at his
place, just a fragile shell of the strong, passionate, occasionally too grumpy,
excellent roast dinner making, let’s-have-a-good-old-moan-about-the-world-and-everything-in-it
man that I’d loved and learned from for thirty seven and a half years. It was
utter bullshit if I’m honest. It’s still utter, utter bullshit. This isn’t
going to be about grief, processing loss or how it can sometimes be difficult
to have public emotions as a man though. I’ll save those subjects for when I’ve
got a bit more strength and don’t feel the need to slather my raw feelings with
the soothing balm of funny. Hearts though, are weird and funny things. I am now
aware of a family history of pretty rubbish hearts, and because I’m a rational,
grown up man, I’m convinced that mine will explode imminently.
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| Boring, illustrative stock image. |
I’ve had the tests now and, apparently, I only have a 1.8%
chance of having a heart attack in the next ten years. I don’t smoke anymore,
and I live a remarkably healthy life now, but that’s still a chance, right? While
I was fretting about the mere weeks I definitely had left, I visited a friend
and mentioned that the tests had revealed that I had a very low resting heartbeat.
“Oh, that’s a good thing,” he reassured me, before following up with the
markedly less encouraging, “because hearts only have a limited number of beats
before they give up”. I pictured my heart with a countdown timer, a visual
reminder of its built-in obsolescence. As if it were a bomb or a politician’s
promise. Or an Apple product. Naturally, this played on my mind for a while. I
walked slowly, avoided exhilarating computer games and TV shows and consciously
didn’t think about boobies, all to avoid an increase in the thumps in my chest
thus extending my time on this increasingly bizarre planet. Alright, fine. I
still thought about boobies.
After a day or two of this I had an epiphany. Everything has
a limited number of uses. Every body part, object, thought even. Your knees
will eventually crumble. The indestructible Kenwood Chef isn’t either of those
things. After several months of Brexit related thoughts, it’s increasingly
difficult to repeat the self-flagellation. Everything has a shelf life. Even
shelves. A cursory google reveals that most of us will manage less than four
billion beats in our lives. Pussies. But also, that you don’t die because you
run out of heartbeats – you run out of heartbeats because you die. Which seems
really fucking obvious and not at all worthy of a top result in a Google search.
Sure, hearts repair themselves pretty darn slowly, so eventually they all go
bye-bye, but not because they’ve boom-boomed a certain number of times. So the
way my friend put that limited heart beats thing to me was basically nonsense
and everything just breaks in the end. Oddly reassuring.
The good news then, for you lot, is that my heart won’t be
detonating as soon as I thought, so I’ll be able to write more of these things.
The bad news is that my heart won’t be detonating as soon as I thought, so I
will be writing more of these things. I’ve had a hard year, humour me.
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