Wilfred De’ath’s last column
On 17th December 2019, I had a heart attack while sleeping on the floor of St Mary’s Church in Cambridge.
I was taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I asked not to be resuscitated. The very nice doctor preferred to discuss his boyhood caravanning holiday with the patient instead of diagnosing him. But I was told that, as well as a heart attack, I was suffering from a) kidney failure; b) an ulcerated left leg; c) anaemia. I might have had a stroke, too.
As I write this, I have been in hospital for six weeks and I am feeling no better – worse, if anything. I long to die. I cannot commit suicide because it is considered a great sin in the Roman Catholic Church to which I belong. So I shall just have to battle on. The doctors think I will get better (slowly). I don’t. But who knows?
I have been happy only once since I’ve been in Addenbrooke’s and that was on Christmas morning when Rev Jon Canessa, Chairman of the Cambridge
Church Homeless Project, brought me the Holy Sacrament. The sun was shining and, for a moment, all seemed well.
Then it was back to misery. I can’t walk. I can scarcely eat or drink. I breathe with difficulty. My poor left leg is getting better, but the rest of me isn’t.
In the old days, the nurses would put on caps and sing us patients Christmas carols. Now they are too busy trying to work the computers. Here in hospital, we are all victims of the technology that is keeping us alive. I hope not to die, but I am ready to. In years to come, that technology will become so extreme that robotic tentacles will roam round your body, checking out every organ: your blood pressure, your blood sugar level and so on.
After a few seconds of whirring and clicking, a small card will be delivered through a slot by your left elbow. It will tell you how many years, months and weeks you have left to live.
It will be adjacent to another slot, through which, when you first arrive, another disembodied voice will ask you to insert your credit card.
The amount of time left to you will not change. No human being will visit you. You will have become the victim of British medical engineering. There will be no holistic help of any kind.
Good luck, mate. See you in heaven.