ME & MY BODY:
■
As Marty Wilde woke up on the bedroom floor of his Hertfordshire home with no recollection of getting there, he knew something was very wrong.
“I tried to put my arms up to heave myself onto the bed and I couldn’t,” he recalls. “I was exhausted.”
Marty, 81, had a bleeding head, black eye and bruises all over, but mercifully – having fallen on his side – the singer hadn’t cracked his teeth.
“I’m 6’3” so it was like the Statue of Liberty going over,” he chuckles.
“We don’t have carpets, either. Our wooden floors didn’t cushion the fall.”
Not wanting to worry his wife of 60 years Joyce, 79 – who was downstairs – Marty fumbled for his phone and called youngest son, gardener Marty Jnr.
“I said: ‘I don’t know what it is, but I’m in trouble’ and lay on the floor until he came. He’s 10 minutes away and as strong as an ox, so lifted me up.”
Marty’s blood pressure was dangerously low so paramedics took him to Lister Hospital in Stevenage. There, he had a CT scan to check for brain injury and was attached to a heart monitor.
Doctors diagnosed atrial fibrillation – a recurrence of a condition Marty thought was fixed a few years before.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rhythm due to a malfunction in the electrical impulses controlling the heart’s conduction system. A resting heart rate should be 60-100 beats per minute.
With AF, it can be far higher, reducing the heart’s efficiency and leading to palpitations, dizziness, tiredness and shortness of breath.
Affecting around 1.4 million people in the UK, the problem is more common in older people (affecting one in
10 over-65s) and in men. Although not life-threatening, AF can, if left untreated, increase the risk of blood clots and stroke, so blood thinners such as
MARTY WILDE MBE
For info on more on heart and circulatory diseases visit bhf.org.uk warfarin are often prescribed, as are beta-blockers to control heart rate. Marty was first diagnosed with AF six years ago after a visit to the dentist. “It’s one of the few things I’m scared of so if I have work on my teeth I have a general anaesthetic,” he admits. “After I’d been treated, the anaesthetist said: ‘You’ve got an irregular heartbeat.’ It had been fluctuating under the anaesthetic – going fast, then slow. I didn’t have a clue.
“Now and again you take a deep breath as if you’ve not had enough air. I put that
MBE
with Joyce down to getting older.” Marty saw a cardiologist and had a cardioversion. “They put you out, put electrical pads on your chest and deliver a small controlled shock with a defibrillator to get it back into the right rhythm,” he explains. This didn’t work so he underwent an ablation.
Under local anaesthetic, surgeons take thin flexible tubes called catheters and “they go in through the blood vessels in your groin,” explains Marty.
The catheters are moved up into the heart and radiofrequency energy or freezing is used to destroy areas causing abnormal heart rhythm.
Marty, who found fame with hit songs such as Endless Sleep in 1958 and A Teenager in Love in 1959, thought his problem was cured until his collapse at the start of April, after which he was told he’d probably need a pacemaker. He
Marty in his pomp in 1948
“You’ve got to be careful.”
After one month exactly, Marty was back on the golf course. “You’re nervous taking your first swing,” he says.
“I feel like a new man. The pacemaker is doing what my heart wasn’t and, because it’s linked to the hospital it makes you feel much more secure.”
Both Marty’s parents had heart problems. “My father, Reg, had angina and died from a heart attack when he was 48.” Marty was 21 at the time.
“My mum, Jessie, had a heart valve defect and irregular heartbeat. Her third stroke killed her at 84.”
Musically, the beat goes on for Marty with a new single, Running Together.
His other children (1980s pop icon Kim, guitarist/producer/songwriter Ricky and singer-songwriter Roxanne) join him on the track. “Music keeps me young, it’s my lifeblood,” he says.
“I’ve been so fortunate,” he adds. “If I’d passed out minutes earlier, I’d have fallen down those stairs. I’m very grateful to the paramedics and hospital staff. People like me are put on a pedestal and now, with Covid-19, the public have been focused on the real stars: medics working tirelessly in difficult conditions. They’re the ones who deserve the praise.”
■ Marty Wilde’s single, Running Together, is out on July 31. The album of the same name is out on October 2. martywilde.com
‘‘
People like me are put on a pedestal, but medics deserve all the praise