Myles Away From Dublin (20 page)

Here you are – Hilaire Belloc wrote many years ago – twenty-one years of age and you’ve never written a dictionary. Yes, I suppose that shows a certain laziness, a want of enterprise. But let me myself make a comparable but perhaps more serious complaint. Here you are, I say, now around 50 years of age and you’ve never had a heart attack!

Does such a situation call for … shame? The reader must decide that question for himself but most doctors find that a heart attack is not the result of organic disease or an actual cardiac lesion but due to physical stress – to the heart-owner making unreasonable and sustained demands on his most precious of physical machines. Such a person is usually far more fastidious as to the care of his stomach, which is really a crude sort of a bag and fairly well able to put up with abuse; and even when it does go on strike, its owner may not feel very well but at least his life is not in danger. The heart is a different and much more delicate matter.

Needless to say, I am not raising this issue from the academic or literary standpoint. It is prompted by an alarming experience of my own dating back to a few weeks ago, and I might be doing somebody a service by giving some brief account of it here.

One night, feeling a bit tired, I decided to go to bed early and by ten p.m. was snugly ensconced in my luxurious pallet with that most cheerful of sleeping inducements, i.e. a good book. I was alone in the house but felt restful and at peace. Just what happened next it is not easy to say. I think I was leaning outwards to extinguish a cigarette in a bedside ashtray. Apparently in the middle of doing so I passed out and fell bodily out of bed on to the floor on my face. When my be-na-tee came home later, she found me thus unconscious in a
heap, the region of my right eye and ear now turning black from the contusion of the fall.

Frantic telephone calls to a number of local doctors brought no result, though the time was perhaps 11.30 p.m. and not really late. Eventually a man was contacted comparatively far away and he came promptly.

‘A massive coronary, I’m afraid,’ he said, after a brief examination. ‘We must get an ambulance at once.’

This was done and, attired in pyjamas and dressing gown, I came bleakly back to life in a hospital a considerable distance outside Dublin. Curiously, the doctor I found confronting me wore no white coat and no stethoscope protruded from any pocket. Also, I found it hard to understand what he was saying. But as my mind gradually sharpened, the truth dawned on me. He was a priest and he was administering the last rites.

Dear reader, it can be a scaring experience.

When the doctors, three of them at least, got to work, they were not long in coming to the common conclusion that I had, in fact, had no heart attack, coronary or otherwise. What then had happened? Well, first, there had been some sort of kidney failure or infection. This in turn led to contamination of the blood, and the sudden pass-out exploit was due to the supply of the wrong sort of blood to the brain.

After some days I managed to arrange a transfer to a better-organised and more convenient hospital, and it is from there I send these notes. I now feel fine but the doctor says that, after innumerable tests of it, there is an alien substance in my blood-stream. The
immediate
problem is to find out what is causing it. And I have been given to understand that such a problem is no push-over joke. And if I leave hospital without knowing the remedy, I am liable to another similar collapse. I seem to be in a mess that is not a little bit ridiculous.

It is commonly agreed that the man who talks about his illness (or more usually his operation) is a fearful bore. Well, I honestly claim that what I have written here is useful. Why is that? It happens that I am a
member of The Voluntary Health Insurance Board, whose address is 9 South Leinster Street, Dublin 2. The Board will send any applicant a brochure explaining its activities but they may be very briefly summarised as follows: a client may buy annually, according to his means and needs, a varying number of units covering (a) accommodation in hospital, and (b) medical
attendance
; no benefit is payable unless in respect of expenses incurred within a hospital.

I will conclude by saying, testily, that any decent, ordinary person who is not a member of this
organisation
is an improvident fool!

My disclosure last week on The Night That I Nearly Died (absolutely genuine) brought no telegrams of sympathy and encouragement and I did not notice any flowers or wreaths arriving on the offchance of a funeral. Of course my report was preliminary and incomplete and I must now be careful to avoid becoming the classic nuisance who bores everybody he meets to tears with a long detailed story of his operation (in my case, operations).

Yet one, em … incident I absolutely insist on recounting, giving my reason for doing so afterwards. Ever hear the word
biopsy
?
In meaning it could be said to be the opposite of autopsy, which is the examination of specimens from the body after death. With a biopsy you want for examination a bit of a man’s body while he is still alive, in my case a specimen of my kidney tissue.

How is this got? Easy, man. The surgeon drives a thing (which I haven’t seen) known in the trade as a ‘needle’ into the patient’s back, far in until it reaches and penetrates his kidney. That the word ‘needle’ is misleading is plain enough when I reveal that it is hollow so that it can extract a specimen of the kidney tissue and so, if plain language be sought, it should not be a needle but a neat dagger.

A local anaesthetic is used for this job. I felt the little prick betokening the entry of the anaesthetic fluid but almost immediately, before that fluid had time to act, I felt the ‘needle’ being rammed in through my sensitive, noble flesh. Inward and onward, and boys-a-dear, I can certify that no word in print could describe what I went through or, indeed, what went through me. I was flabbergasted to be told afterwards when back in bed in a state of collapse that the mastermind of a surgeon had in fact ‘missed the kidney’. My miraculous feat of
endurance had all been for nothing.

And what is my reason for revealing that
extraordinary
occurrence here? Just to ask why it should be allowed to happen in a closed and private operating room rather than (in the best traditions of cine-variety) on the stage of the Ritz, Carlow. Surely some magician has already sawn a woman in half there?

Well, I quickly left that hospital and went home before I heard somebody say, ‘Ah well, we’ll have another try.’ How am I now? I feel quite well, can eat my dinner like a man, but clinically I might be still at death’s door. Somehow, I feel there is an obligation on me to DO SOMETHING, though I’m not certain what. I have been ill. Very well. Is it not the obvious thing to reconcile myself to a period of convalescence, like Mr Harold Macmillan? But that is easier said than done. I cannot remember ever having been convalescent before, and I find the very word awkward to spell.

I know that nowadays it does not mean a bath-chair, a nurse, a diet of beef tea and gruel. (That would just make me sick.) No, our modern idea is brighter, bigger, more courageous. Even that ‘long sea voyage’ of Queen Victoria’s day is out of favour but how about a recuperative trip to the United States?

Well, here we have to pause. As I write two distinguished Irishmen have recently returned from the United States – the Editor of this newspaper, and our Taoiseach, Mr Sean Lemass. I think a lot depends on the capacity in which you go to the States, perhaps more on the capacity in which you are received.

To judge from his despatches home, our Editor refused to be harried and probably was never in a helicopter in his life, no more than I was. He was looking around with astute observation and talking only to the people who interested him. But Lemass, if the radio accounts can be trusted, was being boiled, stewed, grilled, roasted and filleted for about 18 hours a day, compelled to make a great number of solemn speeches and eat countless dinners.

He was getting a treatment stepped up in intensity to twice what President Kennedy got in this country – and two days and nights of that sort of thing would KILL myself. Nothing would entice me to visit the States.

But where else is there to go – where else is there that is safe? Killarney is always there, by kind permission of the Germans, but it is always raining there. All the seaside resorts are locked up and gloomy at this time of the year. Even a winter trip to London would entail the risk of getting mixed up in some awful scandal. And the south of France is out because I can’t speak the sort of French the people there can understand, and anyway I can’t play cards.

The last resort (no pun!) seems to be Dublin: get digs there for ten days or so and make day trips to great centres of art and enterprise such as Guinness’s Brewery, the Galleries, the Library, the Museum, the Esso Petroleum works, the Gasometer and … well … the most famous of the hospitals.

At one of them I might even be privileged (provided I looked sufficiently like a rubber-necking American) to be a witness at a biopsy operation. Heavens, what strange bliss that would be!

A peculiarity of the Catholic religion is that Sunday morning congregations show a reluctance to disperse. Could it be a weakness for prying into other people’s prosperity or the lack of it as exhibited in their Sunday morning exhibition of themselves in their best attempt at dress? Or could it be a thirst for scandalous gossip?

A forlorn curiosity about what was the outcome of that coursing match held the previous day ten miles away? No, I think this tendency to dawdle is innocent, a sort of genial weekly pause on life’s journey, an opportunity to ask some fellow-dawdler how his wife is keeping. (Yes, that’s the phrase – as if his wife was some sort of a mummy, kept presentable by
preservatives
but liable to go bad at any moment!)

Yet, innocent though the pause be, it can be dangerous or – to use a rather milder word – alarming. It happened myself a few Sundays ago, and I cannot do better than set down in terse language what exactly happened, with no flourishes or hyperbole. The dead honest truth can be more terrifying than anything connected with Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

I was just standing there, looking around me. For the moment I hadn’t a care in the world, though a very dirty letter from the income tax people had arrived the day before. What is Sunday morning for anyway, if not for delusions of immunity, peace, happiness ever after? Isn’t a man entitled to his Sunday morning?

Another character of my own type approached. I knew him well and saw him every Sunday. He remarked that it was a lovely morning, thank God, and asked was I going to Croke Park. I told him I wasn’t, that I thought people who had an interest in games should play them, not just gawk and then write angry
letters to the papers. Anywhere else that uncouth answer would have started an argument – but not on Sunday morning. It seems the wrong time for profitless snarling. What was the use? Some other place, perhaps, with a few pints to encourage rhetoric, some other occasion.

On this particular morning we found a large man in an expensive belted coat bearing down on us. I knew him slightly and had long put him into the mental bracket labelled TYCOON. He had a pleasant way with him. He produced cigarettes and said it was a pleasant morning and how about a drive cross-country to get a breath of fresh air. Neither myself nor my friend saw anything wrong with this. Why not indeed? Both of us knew he had a large powerful car. After a bit of a walk we found it and got in.

Let me tell this little story as it gradually stole upon us. As we got into the country, our driver-host asked us how we thought the country was making out. I personally answered that I did not pretend to know, but that I seemed to be getting bills oftener. Though a perfect gentleman, the driver seemed to be a bit unnecessarily ferocious in his conversation. Did we know what a gallon of petrol cost?

We had to say no. Did we know the duty on tobacco? We didn’t. I can only say that this tour, which seemed aimless, was an occasion of non-stop indignation, with the driver’s speed increasing in direct ratio to his temper.

But he slowed down to a placid 20 m.p.h. or so to ask us in a steely voice what we thought the tour of Taoiseach Lemass in the United States had cost, and how many people were with him. We, ignorant of the price of petrol, did not know that either, but I was foolish enough to add that I thought it would be paid for by the State. The needle showed we were now doing 86 m.p.h. and about to enter Wicklow town.

I said I would very much like a cup of coffee and did in fact induce the host to pull up at a quiet hotel. He
did in fact order a cup of coffee for me, a bottle of stout for my friend, and whispered the name of his own medicament into the ear of the waitress.

Slightly later he fired a piece of paper on the table, inviting us to have a look at that! It was a demand for £65 from the Dublin Corporation for rates on his private house.

‘We are roasted first by the Leinster House crowd,’ he roared, ‘without any regard to the fact that we are due for another roasting by your men at City Hall.’

This remark showed myself up in the queerest attitude I could ever have adopted. I scarcely believed it was myself talking. I defended the rating authority. Central taxation, I said, was a severe but nebulous impost. You didn’t know what you were getting in return. Sending troops to the Congo – I supposed that was fair enough but it was a remote thing.

But rates? You could see and feel the results. You had roads, footpaths, sewers, a water supply, public
lighting
, poor relief, mental hospitals, street signs – even a system of warning against hydrogen bombs. I excelled myself almost to the point of making it uncertain whether I was right for a lift home.

I do think that we should be at least polite to the rate collector. After all, he does not strike the rate, and we should not provoke him to strike us!