LIFE — well, it’s all a bit touch and go really…Part 3

Robert Bush
Sep 3, 2018 · 9 min read

Eventually I was ignoring my job more and more and it was obvious I had to make a decision and so I handed my notice in. You’re mad, you’re going to be a partner, they said, and I replied with no, you’re mad, you’re going to be stuck in an office the rest of your life, and with that we parted company. I felt a bit guilty as they had invested heavily in me, but to be fair in the previous year I had changed and they could see my interest had gone, and the call of a new and exciting life was too much for me. In my first week as a self-employed antique dealer I earned more money than I used to earn as a stockbroker, including bonus, in a month. So there was one uncertainty disposed of straight away. I could actually do it, and survive. But it wasn’t just money, I was having the very best and most exciting life possible, and I loved every second of it. People told me I was brave to leave a good job and take a risk like that, but to me it wasn’t brave at all, it was simply the most obvious thing to do and I fell into it comfortably as if I had never done anything else.

And then they brought me a mass of coloured tablets to swallow, and that was more or less it for a sleepless and foodless 5 days. Daily visits from my wife and two children were hard. They had never seen me ill before and lying in a bed hooked up to all the machinery I must have looked frightening to them, but for me things were getting better, the pain in my chest had gone and although I had no desire to eat I was feeling better and certainly better than most of those in the beds around me who looked to be experiencing their last days, there were some people there in a truly sorry state.

Life was now changed immeasurably, I was out every day looking to buy items I could sell and on Wednesdays and Saturdays, market days, I turned up at Camden Passage with a load of fresh stock and local dealers crowded round me and bought my stock as it was unpacked. Business was good, very good, and there was demand from many nationalities who came to Camden Passage to buy and they took the stuff back to France, Holland and Germany to sell and then they came back the following week to buy some more. Americans were big buyers and you could sell anything, nobody really knew the value of anything but everything went and it was easy to get rich, except of course that we thought it was never going to end and lots of the profits got swallowed up in pubs and good restaurants; it really didn’t matter as next week would be just as good and the money would pour in. Until it didn’t.

And finally on the fifth day someone said those magic words, you can go home today. After a hazy ride home I went straight to bed and later got up to discover that I could hardly walk. Getting downstairs was slow but getting back up again was more than difficult, even one step at a time. I was so weak I spent a month on the sofa watching garbage on the TV, in fact I was incapable of anything else.

Your heart is a pump and a heart attack severely weakens it and can kill some of the tissue surrounding it. If you’re really unlucky and your heart, having struggled for some time to pump blood through your system against a blockage, suddenly decides to stop, then you’re dead before you hit the floor. Sometimes it just slows down and the pain lets you know that you need to get someone to have a look at you, and very quickly.

When I was younger hangovers were unheard of, an early shower, some fresh clean clothes and I was good as new, but as I got older the morning after was quite often a sad and lonely place. Apart from the weird feeling of disorientation you suffer by imbibing huge quantities of alcohol which for me was gradually getting worse, I now was suffering from another after-effect. Often in the late morning, I would suddenly remember something I had said to someone the night before and realise that what I at the time had thought was witty and subtle was in fact incredibly rude and insulting, and this often made me cringe with embarrassment and self-loathing.

After giving up smoking 10 years before, I then took another momentous step; I gave up drinking. I didn’t really mean to, to be honest.

After being home a few days I soon realised that things had changed, my sleep patterns were all wrong and I woke up regularly in the night to pee, which I had never done before. One of the pills I now take is to help my heart by taking over its duties of pumping fluid out of me, and that’s why I pee in the night.

Adjusting to the effects of the 9 powerful pills I now took daily was difficult. I had hallucinations, odd dreams that were so realistic. One night I had the idea that I couldn’t breathe and asked my wife to ring the ambulance.

One of the pills is to thin my blood so that it flows more easily around my body but this means that I now bleed very easily. I nicked my tongue very slightly one Saturday afternoon while eating which would never normally have any effect, but for the next 6 hours I stood over the sink spitting out a stream of blood.

These blood thinning pills also mean that I am cold all the time. But who cares, I’m alive.

I massively overdid the booze over Christmas 1998, it seemed that the whole Christmas period was a non-stop boozing opportunity with a more or less permanent stream of visitors, family, friends and business people, all who wanted to drink, and then on Sunday night the 3rd January I did the complete session in the pub, opening to closing. I drank huge quantities of beer and then finished the evening drinking what we called ‘electric soup’ which was vodka and some other stuff topped up with tomato juice, until closing time. As if this wasn’t enough we then went to an Indian restaurant, not because we really wanted to eat, but you could of course drink there. And the next day, the first Monday morning of the New Year when I should really have been considering going back to work, something happened that brought me crashing down to earth.

My wife asked me to put the rubbish out and as I opened the lid of the dustbin to chuck the bag in I caught the rotten smell of it and I threw up violently on the floor. I never throw up, even after years of serious alcohol intake and of abusing my body with ingesting all the wrong things, and this was a huge shock. I stood and looked down at what I had just done, and I admit I had a moment where I was feeling a bit helpless and to be honest, disgusted with myself.

Of course it’s perfectly easy to go and get a cholesterol test. Vans sit outside the library or down your high street and it is painless and takes no time, or your own doctor will do it, but men don’t go. I don’t know why this is but it’s certainly true that we try and talk ourselves out of any kind of illness and only go to the doctor or have some kind of test when it’s absolutely necessary. It’s quite true that if I had gone and had a cholesterol and blood sugar test earlier it would have shown up that I was heading for serious problems and they could have done something about it. But I didn’t.

If I had done so and I had been told that I had a blockage and needed to have an operation on my heart I honestly don’t know what I would have done. I’m uncomfortable in hospitals, even visiting someone in hospital makes me come over all sweaty and concerned, and the thought of making the decision to just walk in there willingly and be operated on is just too frightening to contemplate. And so while a heart attack is definitely not something you want to happen to you, in my case it got rid of all the uncertainty and indecision. I was there and they were going to do whatever they needed to do imminently and it was all going to be over in a few hours and I do wonder if that is the only way that I could have gone through with it.

Being self employed it’s very necessary to approach business life with optimism and confidence, and 5 minutes after being sick on the patio I was laying in bed shaking and sweating. What a complete fucking mess.

I gave up drinking for January, a dry January before it was actually a thing, and then at the end of the month I felt so well that I decided to do February too. And then March and April and by the beginning of May it had become evident that I was so much better without drinking in so many ways, that I simply stopped drinking permanently.

I was shocked that after so many years of regular drinking I felt absolutely nothing, no desire to drink, no craving, no long wistful looks at someone else’s glass of beer or wine. I just didn’t drink any more, it was as simple as that, and I loved it. And I still do, twenty years later.

My first meeting with my doctor after I’d been home a week or so was a revelation, not only because I’d been registered at his surgery for 35 years but never actually been, but of course we had never met. He informed me that what had happened to me was life-changing, and he was right in so many ways.

People asked me why I had never been to the doctor and I always replied that I had never been ill, but at this first meeting he informed me that my cholesterol level had been 6.9 which is what had caused the heart attack. To be fair 6.9 isn’t good, of course, but it’s not that high. I’ve met people in rehab who have had cholesterol levels of 14 and 15, but I had probably had high levels of cholesterol for many years and the doctor informed me that I had in fact been ill for a long time and as my main artery slowly got more blocked, thereby stopping the blood flowing round my body, and with it oxygen, I became more ill. So all this time I thought I was perfectly well, but actually I was seriously ill.

But the good news was that the doctor informed me that as my heart had been mended and blood was flowing more or less as it should be, I was now healthier than I had been for probably 20 years.

THE BISCUIT YEARS

Opening the fridge and discovering a family 6 pack of cherry bakewells was at one point heaven. Obviously I had to have one with a cup of coffee, but what actually happened was that it was too easy to eat 2 while the kettle boiled and then 2 with the coffee, one more while putting the cup in the dishwasher and then of course there was no point in leaving one, so the obvious thing to do was eat the last one and throw the box over the fence. Yup, giving up alcohol had been a great thing to do but replacing it with a serious addiction to sweet stuff probably wasn’t the best thing I could have done.

I had been intending to start a new diet on the 1st January and I had weighed in that morning at 19 stone, the heaviest I had ever been. My 5 days in hospital had taken a stone or so off my weight and I immediately began a diet of fruit, fish and vegetables and the weight continued to go.

Waitrose do a fabulous iced fruit cake. It is heavy and moist and delicious, in fact I don’t know how they pack so much deliciousness into one cake. And it is covered in about a foot of lovely solid crunchy icing. I love these cakes and although I’ve never done it, honest, I’m sure I could eat a whole one. I have certainly eaten half a cake at one time.

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