Under the Knife

The present Mrs Hayward would have it that my frequent trips to see my GP would imply that I’m a raging hypochondriac. This isn’t entirely true, however having a healthy regard for any signs of malaise does set me apart from the stoicism of some men who would prefer to wait until their leg drops off before looking to see if they have a plaster.

I, on the other hand, assume that every ache, pain, cough or sneeze is a sign that the Grim Reaper is about to point his bony finger in my direction and so I get myself off down the quacks' to make good use of my national insurance contributions. Combined with some medical insurance at work, which means I occasionally bypass the National Health Service to attend hospitals with bowls of fruit in reception, means that my health needs are well catered for.

The combination of all these kindly medical providers came in very useful a couple of months ago when I was struck down in the middle of the night with what I concluded must surely be a heart attack of some kind.

To make sure of this self-diagnosis I got up, paced about to distract myself from the abominable pain, and held on for about an hour to see if I died or not. When the hour was up and I found myself to still be residing in the land of the living I rang 111. They concurred that my symptoms were a trifle odd and decided to send a paramedic to me, which sent me into a further paroxysm of panic. I had assumed they’d just tell me to take an aspirin and stop bothering them but within minutes a paramedic was in our lounge and had wired me up to some beeping machinery.

His results were inconclusive but he seemed fascinated by my slow heartbeat, despite my assurances that this was a natural phenomenon which had been commented on before by medical professionals and had been put down to my obvious athletic prowess.

He decided that I should be taken to the Accident & Emergency department for further tests and so he packed me into an ambulance car, whilst I apologised profusely for wasting his time with what was probably only a bad bout of indigestion, and driven at speed to Peterborough with the present Mrs Hayward trying to keep pace behind us in her little Fiat 500.

At the hospital I was prodded, poked, stabbed, scanned and mauled until they decided I wasn’t about to expire, despite the heart machine suggesting that I was flat lining on more than one occasion, and came to the unexpected conclusion that I was suffering from gall stones. Until that point I had no idea what a gall stone was.

In short (and from memory) they can be found, perhaps unsurprisingly, within the gall bladder. The gall bladder is an organ attached to your liver that stores the bile that secretes from the liver which is then released and helps to aid digestion when you eat. Sometimes, if the bile hangs around too long the cholesterol within the bile crystallises into jagged stones. Most of the time these stones cause no problems but if they move or create an infection they generate a remarkable amount of pain and, if they get stuck in a tube somewhere, they can kill you. See, I told you I was ill.

I came within a cat’s whisker of having the gall bladder whipped out there and then but the Doctor overseeing my general wellbeing refrained on this occasion and sent me home with a good dose of morphine and some pain killers that could fell a horse.

The pain failed to subside for a couple of weeks and after further prodding and scanning I found myself in front of a surgeon who suggested that, given the problems I’d had that it was time that my gall bladder and I had an amicable separation.

He assured me that once recovered from surgery I would be able to live a perfectly normal life, no strange tics or funny walks, and my diet, which since ‘the incident’ had mostly consisted of water, lettuce and dust, could also return to ‘business as usual’ with the usual caveat of ‘everything in moderation’.

He explained that the gall bladder is a useless part of our anatomy and, like the appendix and most of our intestines, are products of a bygone age when food was scarce, fire was a distant dream, men hunted mammoths with spears and Bruce Forsyth was still in short trousers. In essence, he was telling me that I had not evolved since the age of the cavemen which is fair enough I think. Just don’t expect me to wrestle a sabre-toothed tiger to the ground or fashion rudimentary tools out of flint any time soon.

So, this Saturday, I will be heading to a hospital to bid farewell to my gall bladder and its resident stones. I am being upgraded to a 21st century body, more efficient and slightly lighter. I don’t necessarily recommend this route as an alternative to conventional weight loss but when life gives you lemons and all that.

Frankly I’m terrified of actual surgery and a night in a hospital is going to be a new experience for me. I’m hoping it’s going to be like ‘Only When I Laugh’ or ‘Carry on Doctor’ and if it isn’t I will be sorely disappointed. Well, I’ll certainly be sore, regardless of the whole affair.

I have however prepared by buying some old fashioned pyjamas that button up at the front and am developing my Sid James-style earthy laugh for whenever a nurse bends over or a Doctor inadvertently puts his foot in a bed pan. Wish me luck.

Ooooh, Matron!

The Middle Ages

Turning 40 a couple of months ago was a life changing moment. It’s not a big deal for most people, and I had the good fortune to see how many of my friends who shared the birth year of 1974 were handling it. For most it seemed to have passed off without incident, some made plaintive ‘where’s the time gone?’ messages on social media, and some seemed to be in the throes of a full-on mid-life crisis. My reaction was somewhere in the middle of the latter two.

In essence I realise now that I was passing through the stages of the Kubler-Ross model, otherwise known as the ‘five stages of grief’. The stages are (in this order) denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

To be fair, I was in denial for an impossibly long time. Friends and associates joked about my forthcoming birthday for a good few months beforehand and I, on the face of it laughed it off. After all, it was just a joke, I couldn’t really be 40 could I? I still feel about, oh what, 21 on a good day? 24 maybe, at an absolute push. My looks have barely changed. Yes, there’s the odd grey hair and my skin isn’t quite as youthful as it once was, but essentially I’m still as fresh as a daisy aren’t I?

This abject inability to be stoic and accepting in the face of incontrovertible evidence was challenged to the maximum a few days before my birthday when some work colleagues decided, as it was the last day we’d all be in the office before I descended into my fifth decade, to decorate my desk and other locations in the building with ‘Happy 40^th Birthday’ style messages, balloons, photos off Facebook, etc. You get the picture.

To say I suffered a sudden sense of humour failure would be an understatement. This is where I shifted from denial to anger.

I was appalled and horrified. To put it bluntly, and I did in a loud voice as I entered the office, “I’m thirty-fucking-nine!!!!”. I couldn’t believe that my image was everywhere declaring to the world that I am old, old enough to be the father, nay the grandfather (if I were a guest on the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’) of most people I worked with and therefore past it, not worth bothering about, unattractive and virtually dead. As you can guess, I wasn’t thinking in a particularly rational manner at the time.

This of course didn’t stop people wishing me premature birthday greetings for the entire day. After about an hour or so my seething resentment towards the perpetrators subsided a little and rather than hoping that they would all drop into a localised sink hole as penance for their mockery I began to accept this situation with better grace than when I first arrived. To be fair, no-one meant any harm and we all went out for lunch and there was a birthday cake and gifts and, well, even I could see that I was being unnecessarily churlish in the face of such unbridled kindness and bonhomie.  

To be fair, this was as far as the anger went as the rest of the world was allowing me to be thirty-nine right up to the last minute and, for some reason, that seemed to be incredibly important.

After anger comes bargaining. When people are facing a premature end to their existence they plead with their chosen God for a few more years in exchange for living a reformed life. For me, this meant that I needed to review and re-assess my life so far with the help of an appropriate icon from my belief system. So I went for a pint.

From this discussion with, admittedly, several pints of ale I drew up what is commonly referred to as a ‘bucket list’. As this implies impending death I chose to label mine as a ‘things to do’ list, which is so much less threatening. It turned out to be more of a challenge than I had first thought as I opted initially to keep my list of things achievable. I reasoned that there was really no point in creating any more unfulfilled ambitions than I already had as that way madness and a return to anger lies.

Firstly I began to think of places I’d never been to. For no good reason my first thought was, ‘Well, I’ve never been to Oxford’, so it went on the list. It wasn’t however an illustrious start and before I found myself drawing up a list of various locations around the UK that I had neither visited nor ever wanted to visit I moved on to think of things I’d never done and would like to do. The list has now grown and evolved and includes very achievable things like lighting one of those floating lantern things to visiting Finland.

The depression part of the Kubler-Ross model never really kicked in, other than bemoaning the fact that some of the things on the list may prove to be incredibly costly, so ‘win the EuroMillions’ was added. I’m not sure if it is a legitimate addition but what the hell.

This makes me realise that I have now reached acceptance. I’m 40, I have plans, and no matter how wild or how mundane they may appear to be to the outside world I will strive to tick them off before I fall off my perch. This is assuming that I don’t fall from the said perch anytime soon. Well I could be run over by a bus tomorrow, although probably not where I live given the infrequency of the service.

Enough of this pessimism, after all, the only way is Finland.

Or Iceland.

Or the United States.

Or Oxford.

Welcome to Venice, Lincolnshire

Turning on my TV this morning I was greeted with the usual early morning diet of news and features but, try as I might, I couldn’t find a single network that was reporting on the major news story of the previous day: The Great Bourne Flood.

It’s almost as if this remote backwater of South Lincolnshire had been rendered invisible to the news gatherers in that there London. They were more interested in dramatic pictures of The Shard being struck by lightning than some soggy yokels up to their knees in water, for shame.

Yesterday started warm and sunny, I was working from home but keeping a keen eye on the weather. Having recently laid fresh grass seed in the garden to deal with some threadbare patches and noticing how little green shoots of recovery were pushing their way up from the ground, I ensured that they were being kept fresh and watered. What better though than actual rain water to turn my sparse lawn into a lustrous green tableau of wonder?

As the afternoon progressed the dark clouds rolled in and I opened a window near where I was working so that I could hear the life-giving pitter-patter of gentle raindrops. I perhaps should have taken heed that all may not be well when the forthcoming shower was heralded by a blinding flash of lightning and an almighty clap of thunder so loud that I feared that the very fabric of reality had split asunder, releasing all manner of hellish demons and mischievous sprites upon the world.

The rain quickly arrived, falling hard and fast. Then it turned up a notch and came down even harder and even faster. The rain god looked down upon this small town and was dissatisfied. He stared hard at all the options available to him to up the ante with this deluge and decided to smash his fist down on all of the buttons at once just to see what would happen.

What happened was an impossibly deafening increase in precipitation with a healthy and prolonged burst of hailstones, just for good measure. This kept going for about an hour without much letting up.

I wasn’t concerned; it was just a heavy shower, nothing to worry about. I looked out of the rear window behind where I was working. The garden was getting a little moist and the paved alleyway where the bins are kept was starting to gain large puddles but nothing out of the ordinary.

I continued to work and had just come off the phone to a particularly unhelpful individual at a well-known healthcare provider when I heard a dripping sound from nearby. I closed the window but it didn’t help. There was still a sound of invading water coming from somewhere nearby.

I quickly ascertained that it was originating from my right hand side just behind a shelving unit full of DVDs. With a bit of puffing, panting and swearing I moved the unit to one side to see a damp patch on the carpet. I followed the trail of the dripping water up to a cupboard attached to the wall. I opened the cupboard and, sure enough, from somewhere within this cupboard the offending rainwater was emanating. The only problem was that this particular cupboard was housing the fuse box and electricity meter.

I am, as I have observed previously, not a practical man in any sense. I looked at the bewildering array of switches and dials in desperation. My eyes were drawn to the biggest of the switches, helpfully coloured red. I couldn’t see what the label underneath read as time had faded it, but I figured that it would either turn everything off or be the ‘self-destruct’ switch. With considerable trepidation I reached in to the cupboard and, whilst making my peace with the world, I flicked it downwards.

Thankfully this seemed to do the trick as I found myself still alive and in a strange half-light in a silent house, apart of course from the incessant drumming of the rain. Electrocution avoided I deployed all manner of buckets, cloths and tea towels into the affected area.

Catastrophe averted I looked out of the window, only to see that whilst I’d been distracted the puddles outside were now a raging stream. Not only had the gutters given up, the drains had become redundant. I found some wellies and splashed outside to see if I could assist the drains by clearing them a little. This only had a very mild effect as more rain was falling from the heavens than being swept away by the drainage system, even with my assistance.

I looked at my grass and realised that I could only see half of it, the rest was underneath a newly formed swamp, replete with a frog hopping merrily amongst it. I retreated indoors, threw more towels at the dripping fuse box cupboard and stared miserably out of the window, wishing I’d been one of those people who’d won a speedboat on ‘Bullseye’ back in the 80s. ‘Now they’re laughing’, I thought.

After what seemed to be an interminable age the rain decreased a little and, whilst on the phone to a colleague, I looked out of the rear bedroom window to see that the road behind our house had turned into an actual river. In amongst this river was a fire engine with some sturdy firemen up to their knees in murky brown water trying to establish how they were going to fight the elements.

Funnily enough I nearly had need of firemen at lunchtime when I came close to setting fire to the kitchen whilst grilling some sausages. I reasoned that having suffered fire and flood I only had plague and pestilence to go therefore I may as well venture outside for a closer look.

The one thing that draws human beings together is a bit of a drama on your doorstep. In about half an hour I met and chatted to neighbours that I only knew as nodding acquaintances or had never seen before yesterday afternoon. Everyone had a tale to tell; where else there were floods, which roads were blocked, how they remember when this happened 20 years ago.

I, along with one of my neighbours, went wading into the water to see how deep it was, just like those reporters on the news. I then did what everyone does these days, took a photo and posted it on to Facebook.

Today is another day, which it would be really. The water has been pumped away. Upon calmer investigation I discovered that thankfully the incoming water had missed penetrating the fuse box by millimetres although still too close for comfort, and my garden is now less swampy and full of pond life. My newly sown grass is probably doomed but at least I didn’t live down the road behind ours as that floodwater came perilously close to turning up as an unwelcome house guest for some.

Yet still no contact from any reporters from the BBC, ITN, Sky News, CNN, Fox News, France 24, Al-Jazeera, or any of the other news organisations I can remember that sit within the 500s on my Sky box. All they want to talk about is UKIP or Russia which is most disappointing.

There’s a story right here folks, just waiting to be told, which will now fall into Bourne folklore.

“Those floods of 2014, I remember them well. The water was so high they had to send a Cross Channel ferry to rescue us, oh yes”.