The heart of the matter

Ten out of every ten people die. On this cheery note, Dan Rookwood was forced to consider his own mortality I hit it pretty hard in my early twenties; the way you’re supposed to when you’re arrogantly indestructible and consequences and responsibilities are irrelevant. To paraphrase someone famous (WC Fields or Lindsay Lohan, I always forget which) I drank with impunity and whoever else invited me. It was bloody brilliant.

Then one morning after a particularly epic night before, I had a suspected heart attack. Age 26. Fuck.

I remember it now only too well, in the present tense. I wake up in bed with a searing pain on the left side my chest – the home where the heart is. The sensation is shocking, terrifying, all consuming. It takes my breath away. It leaves a metallic taste in my mouth. And then it eases off slightly, but it’s still there, it’s still hard to breathe. So I lie perfectly still, trying to be calm. Tying myself up in unpickable knots, trying to be calm. Trying not to think about the triple heart by-pass my dad had earlier that year, trying to be calm. Then the pain comes back and I clasp a hand desperately to my chest, convinced that yes, I’m having a fucking heart attack.

Go, they always tell you. Go and see a doctor. But we are men; we are strong and proud. We can’t go and see the doctor every time we want to wag school or be excused from a Powerpoint presentation.

I learned my lesson early on that score. When I was nine, I hated school and the sick days mounted suspiciously, Ferris Bueller-style. One morning my father called my bluff and took me and my ‘stomach ache’ to our local GP. I saw the doctor exchange a wink with my father as he concluded there was nothing wrong with me. But just to rule out appendicitis, would I piss in a jar and drop it into the surgery on my way to school? I did. A couple of hours’ later, my father came into class to whisk me off to hospital quick-snippety. They’d found an unusually high amount of sugar in my urine that indicated diabetes and they needed to run some urgent tests. Twenty-four hours of panic later, the verdict came back: no diabetes. It was only then that they returned to the original piss sample. The one in a jam jar. That hadn’t been rinsed of jam properly. True story.

Ever since then, I’ve been a lot more reticent about going to see my GP. I couldn’t even tell you his name. Dr who? As men we are all bitterly ashamed of the weakness of our flesh. According to a BBC survey, me are five times less likely to visit their GP than women. We suck it up and butch it out until there’s an emergency…

Go, they say. Find out what’s wrong. But what if it is my heart? Just like it was for my grandfather. Just like it is for my dad. What if the doctor confirms all my worst fears? Then, of course, that’s all the more reason to go.

So I don’t go. And neither does the pain. It subsides, but I can feel it there, just below the surface. It’s a dull ache that every so often jolts my body like a Taser gun and scares seven shades of shit out of me. I try to be brave, I try to man up by telling myself to Man The Fuck Up. But on the train one day, the pain is so visceral, I almost pass out. I start to cry out of sheer panic over a situation I cannot control. I don’t want to die. The more you have of life, the more you want of it. I’m scared. If you are not scared when you have a pain in the chest then you are suffering from two things. One is a lack of imagination, and the other is chest pain.

Something is wrong with me. Sooner or later something is wrong with all of us – it just feels like my turn has come sooner rather than later. I’ve been pushed to the front of the queue. So I go to the doctor, massaging my left tit like a sexual deviant. I babble my own diagnosis straight from TV medical dramas and the Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary and Wikipedia. “It’s probably just severe indigestion or a mild heart palpitation. I doubt it’s a heart attack, right?” But say the words “chest” and “pain” in the same sentence to a doctor and they’ll have you on a hospital gurney covered in jump leads quicker than you can say “Oh shit!” Which is pretty quick.

A technician takes a disposable orange Bic razor from its wrapper and starts shaving crop circles into my chest thatch so that she can get the sensors in place. Then she rubs freezing cold gel over my left pec and runs a probe over the area to show an ultrasound of my heart. It doesn’t look too healthy on the screen: an indistinct grainy mass of lub-dubbing muscle. The upshot? An enlarged left ventricle. Which is ironic as that’s always been my favourite one. I have a suspected cardiomyopathy – which literally means “heart muscle disease”. Which even more literally means I could drop dead at any min…

Just joking.

Cardiomyopathy is increasingly common in blokes my age who work hard and play even harder. I’m told never to take any drugs ever, to drastically cut down on booze and to adopt a healthier lifestyle incorporating such things as sleep and vegetables.

That was four years ago. In that time, I’ve had more checks than a Prague prostitute and I’ve tried to be a good boy. The fear of death is quite motivating, it turns out. Four weeks ago, I got another letter with the usual hospital stamp and the latest test results. More of the same… until the last entirely unexpected line: “I have discussed Mr Rookwood’s case in the post-clinic meeting and it was decided to discharge him from our clinic in view of the stability of his studies on consecutive follow up visits.” Eh? I tried to read it again, but it was a bit blurry through my tears.

Life has never seemed more beautiful, more fleeting, more precious. My health reprieve has left me deliriously happy but strangely fatalistic. After all, ten out of every ten people die and I now know how I’m probably going to go. It’s true what they say: you don’t appreciate what you’ve got till it’s gone. And now that I’ve got my health back, I’m a bit more careful about keeping it. It’s not like I skip down the street smelling the roses, smiling beatifically and telling waifs and strays I love them. I’m just grateful, that’s all. And life is the richer for it.

Let’s drink to that.