The Good Life
The body has a way of telling you it may be time to chill the hell out.
When my eyes finally opened, the car had come to a stop. “Are you all right?” my partner, Michele, was bellowing over and over. It was a good question. I felt weird, confused, a little groggy. “Sure,” I said. “I’m all right.” But as it turned out, I was far from it.
In the long seconds before opening my eyes, I had passed out at the wheel and Michele – a confirmed non-driver – had managed to take control of the steering and pull the handbrake to stop the car, all while screaming my name. My eyes rolled back in my head, my mouth hung open. She thought I was dead.
Instead, I was alive. And within hours I would be under the gentle care of the highdependency unit of Wairarapa Hospital, and within a day, after a two-hour journey by ambulance over the Rimutakas, I’d had a pacemaker fitted at Wellington Hospital.
Within 48 hours, I was back in our lovely new house, set on 12 beautiful acres just outside Masterton, the place we’d been dreaming about for over a year, the place we two Aucklanders had bought five months before, and the home that we’d finally moved into just a day before my heart decided to almost give up.
The diagnosis might as well have been in Greek, and mostly was: bradycardic syncope and sinus node dysfunction. To the layman – me – this meant that the part of my nervous system that controls the heart was playing up, slowing my heart rate and lowering the blood flow to my brain, leading to fainting. Not a heart attack, then, but a failure of my heart’s own pacemaker to do its job.
The big question, the nagging question, as the wires of my heart’s new pacemaker bedded in over the next month, was why? There had been no warning, no long illness, no short nasty virus, no family history. The battery of tests done in hospital didn’t tell me, either. They revealed a pretty healthy 50-year-old, albeit one who needed to up the exercise and cut down on the potato chips.
Perhaps, I wondered, it might be stress. It would be fair to say that I’m a bit of a worrier. Here’s an example of my personality: as I lay there in hospital at 3am, unable to sleep, I thought I’d take the opportunity to order online something called “Quake Hold”, a putty to protect precious stuff falling off shelves if (though, of course, I’m more inclined towards “when”) the Big One strikes. It ain’t easy being me.
But it wasn’t just me. When I looked back over the 18 months leading up to talking to the surgeon as he put in the pacemaker under local anaesthetic, I couldn’t help concluding that life had played its part.
In the year or so before that day in early April, Michele and I had been made redundant – on the same day and after a combined 35 years of service – from the New Zealand Herald. We had made the life-changing decision to leave Auckland for the dream of paradise in the provinces; we had sold up in Auckland in a property market having a sudden stop; and, after all that, we’d moved our entire lives away from friends and family and into the unknown.
Life is stressful without all that.
And then it struck; perhaps my heart was telling me to chill the hell out just when we had finally arrived at the place to chill the hell out. You can call that irony. I call it – and us not crashing and killing ourselves that April morning – great, wonderful luck.
After our friend The Gardener drove Michele down to Wellington to pick me up from hospital and delivered us back to our paradise found, Michele helped me out of the car, before opening up the house.
“Welcome home,” she said. Yes, indeed.