LIFE | So far..
Funny isn’t it? Life.
Think about it. I’m 20. 20 Years ago I didn’t exist. My body, thoughts, feelings, issues, problems, concerns, worries didn’t exist. Everything and anything I know has come in those 20 years. And to blow (or bore) your mind even further, none of this matters. We all die some day. If Einsteins theory of special and general relativity are correct, our lives are set in stone. We die a certain way, we fall in love with certain people, its out of our control. Free will is an illusion..
BUT WAIT, before you freak out. Just because you don’t necessarily have the ability to do and go where ever you want doesn’t mean you can’t do and go wherever you want. Prof Michio Kaku explains a hell of a lot better than me:
We aren’t the person who is looking back at us in the mirror. Just because there is no free will doesn’t mean there is no uncertainty. You don’t know what is going to happen today, tomorrow or next year. The sheer fact that we will never know what will happen, in my eyes, is ‘free will’. I wasn’t destined to write this blog. I’m not destined to do anything. If I want to do something I have to use my free will to put down the laptop, have a shower, put my hair up, leave the house and do something. So you can stop stressing. You’re welcome.
Anyway
This blog is going to home in from the great expanse of how the universe works to something slightly more irrational. My life. I’m not some famous person on the telly who’s gonna give you a Xfactor sob story. Christ I think with my singing ability they wouldn’t even let me in the building. Obviously not because I’ve called Simon Cowell a knob that many times on a Saturday night he heard about it and filed a restraining order. Clearly not. No, this is more of a POV. A description of my life from my perspective. Whether its what actually happened I don’t know. No one knows (see above). But hey, I suppose I’ve got the front seat, so I have a story to tell you. (Oh btw, if you are interested in space and all that shit, there’s an app called Time Warper which tracks how much you age/are younger than someone stood at sea level, but that’s for a different post)
In The Beginning
You wouldn’t think it *winks* but I was quite a loud child. I know right, me loud?! Nah. But with my unbroken, half scouse accent, I’m a right ear pain to myself watching old homemade videos 19–20 years later. Jesus. I don’t know how my parents put up with it. No wonder my dad hates kids now. Jeez. I lived on a crescent like road, in a semi detached house. It wasn’t big, but with my metal bunk bed I was still able to play with my action man, transformers and star wars figures perfectly fine (I had action man wallpaper, I was the coolest 0–6 yr old in the close). I lived with both my parents perfectly fine for three lovely, perfect, soothing years of being the center of the universe. Then one day, aged 3, I had to stay at my Nanny Barbs one night. I thought it was because my mum was that fat she had to go the hospital to get it cut off, but no, it was worse.
The next day (or a few days, look I was 3 my memories for that time are vague and selective) my mum and dad come back with someone else, a girl. I remember being thrilled, finally! Someone who I could pester 24/7 and get away with it. A project.. a friend. I didn’t go nursery, my parents couldn’t afford it. Instead I’d stay with my little (at the time and from my perspective, not so little) Nanny Tess, who at the time was retired after she developed arthritis early in her fifties. I would go her house everyday, watch rainbow and eat chicken flavoured super-noodles. This would carry on well into my teenage years, rainbow not so much. She looked after me and I love her unconditionally for that, bless her. But as it was pre/post toddler me, she couldn’t always bare having to put up with that sooty esk voice of mine. So, against my will, I went to pre school..
I was never made to be in front of the camera, I’ll leave that to the other one. But yeah, my only friends at the time were people in the close, so having someone else was great. Her name is Codi. Yes *sighs* I know. If you don’t know I’ll give you a couple of lines to figure it out. So my sister’s name is called CODI, unusual name for a girl in Britain considering its an AMERICAN BOYS name, but it is unique for her and it suits her. She is 3 years younger than me, meaning that there is no possible way that we could be TWINS. Ah yes the SUITE LIFE OF ZAK AND CODI. Got it yet? No, I give up.
My Op(s)
Okay. This part of my story is gonna get dark, not Batman Vs. Superman Zack Snyder “Marther?!” dark, but dark in its own right. Look I’m still here its not that bad, I just want to add a bit of tension and ‘What happens next?’ into your brain. Oooo I’m inside your head, you better still be reading this in a squeely high pitch scouse voice. You can stop that now. Jeez.
When I was 6 I became ill, not like ill ill, it was more like the flu. I was sick and had migraines. It was normal. Yet. It wasn’t. The sickness and migraines would go and come back periodically for months. No medicine worked and would just make me tired. My Mother took action and took me to hospital. There we seen an eye specialist. Now, this part of the story you may be asking yourself “Why did he see an eye specialist when he has a serious case of the cold?”. Well what I say to you and the answer I was told at the time “Fuck knows”. We just did. This proved to be critical in figuring out what the fuck was up with me. The eye woman (her actual name) shone a light and spotted something unusual behind my eye. Actually come to think of it we properly seen the eye specialist because I was complaining about the pain in my head originating from the centre, just behind my eyes. I was referred to Alder Hey Hospital immediately.
Ahh Alder Hey Hospital, the old Victorian building just off Queens drive was my home away from home for the next 13 years. Its full of hard working, genuinely lovely people who work their arses off for kids who have to go through truly horrific ordeals. They now in 2018 have a state of the art building/ campus with all the latest tech, medical know how and so on to make the experience slightly more bearable. If you can please donate to their charity https://donate.alderheycharity.org/public/. Without exaggeration, the old building must of had the longest hallway in existence. And typically for someone like me, the car park was on the opposite side to the MRI scanner and had to wade through crowds of people. Every. Single. Time. Like I said, glad about the new building. There I was referred to a surgeon called Connor Mallucy (I think that’s how you spell his name, I should know. I’ve known him most of my life). He wasn’t like any of the surgeons I seen on TV wearing gowns and face masks, he was in a slim suite, slick back hair and had pearly white teeth, what a knobhead.
Saying that. He DID do a very good job. As a 6 year old I didn’t really know what, at the time what they thought it was, a lesion (cyst) was. Mallucy explained it was like a pimple, and because of where it is, was causing me to become ill. This ‘pimple’ was in the centre of my head in the third ventrical causing the stoppage of cerebrospinal fluid, making me sick. So what Mallucy told me was that he had to make room for this fluid (obviously I didn’t know what ‘cerebrospinal’ was when I was a 6 yr old, or even a 20 yr old). And to do this they would have to operate on me. Now I was fine with this, he promised ‘not change what football team you support’ and for me that was massive. He is a Kopite himself and this fundamentally scared me. Any Kopite does. Whats that? You don’t know what a Kopite is? Well have you ever stepped in dog poop and lifted your shoe up after scrapping it off for ages and can see there is still shit left on your shoe? Well my friend, that is a Kopite. Google it.
From left to right: Lion (no name), Funky Monkey (Or later known as Mr Big) and me (Zak Jaques, my names at the top) in front. Just in case you couldn’t deduct who the random kid was in front.
I still remember the day of my first op. I slept like a baby. No seriously I did. I remember waking up to see my parents looking all worried like something bad was about to happen. Next thing I know loads of nurses come into the ward with a wheely bed. One of whom, was wearing the worst clown hat possible, it was all colourful and weird looking. This scarred me, not the op. This dude wearing this weird hat. He was friendly and pushed to the theatre. There, again I met Mallucy, this time in the gowns and mask I thought he’d look like when I first met him. A nurse put an oxygen mask on me and I held my Mum’s hand. Mallucy told me that it was gonna start smelling like pens, it did. Those really really strong coloured pens junkies inhale to get high. I tried to count to 10. 1, 2.. and i was gone. 8 hours I was away. I still remember the dream I had. Do you know the part in Madagascar where Alex gets tranquilized and the song ‘The candy Man Can’ plays as he backs out. That. Exactly that.
I woke up fine, it felt like I just woken up from a 2 day sleep. My head hurt, it was like someone sliced my head open and barely scabbed back over. I wasn’t far off. I had 6 stitches on the right hand side of my head. The doctors shaved that part of my hair, so when I was finally discharged I went straight the barbers to get a skin head, my dads idea. I was like a war hero at school, and because of my skin head, I got more attention than I should of.
My perspective of what was okay changed. In a sense at an early age I realised how precious life is, but in another I forgot that I was still allowed to say I’m not well even if it wasn’t as bad as my op. And even after a second visit to the hospital a year later to fix the gap that was made inside my head, that was highlighted more.
Well then.
Are you expecting this to be the end? Oh.. bless. Oh no. There’s so more. In the story I’m 7. Over the next 5/6 years I’d start high school, create friends for life that I still hang round today, and start to become the person I am today. Over these years I would go Alder Hey ever 6 months for a MRI checkup. As the years passed I was led to believe that this thing inside me was harmless. That it was just a pimple described to me by Mallucy years before. I had hope I didn’t have to come back and I would be free. See where this going?
A month before my 13th birthday I had an MRI, just like any other. Before my consultation I seen my surgeon, Mallucy, who I hadn’t seen for a year or two. He smiled and walked into the room with Dr Pizar who was my oncology doctor. It was strange but I was happy. My mum said “Look! You might finally be discharged”. I walked into the room and Mallucy’s face wasn’t so cheery like it was moments before. I don’t really remember what he said to be honest. I just remember looking at my parents who were looking back at me, crying. I touched my face and realised I too was in tears. I was broken. Completely utterly broken. I was put into a room with a volunteer from the Cancer Research charity where I was calmed down. She was lovely and comforted me and both my parents. I think about this moment a lot. All this hope I had that maybe I didn’t have to have another fucking MRI ever again, but no. It shows that sometimes life can be a right bitch, but like all shit that happens, you mustn’t get disheartened and carry on fighting. I had a biopsy to see what this thing growing inside me was in 2 weeks time and yet I still went into school the next day. I acted like nothing happened, only telling my close friends and form tutor the truth. The lads I’ve known since day one knew what it was like previously.
The night before the biopsy I was in the ward watching the remake of The A Team. This ward was new and apart of the neurology section of the old hospital. I was surrounded by kids much younger than me with pipes, scars and beeps coming from their beds, fast asleep. Even though I had explosions and *quickly checks iMDb* Bradley Cooper?! Unlike when I was 6, I didn’t sleep. At all. I was too aware of the situation I was in. I knew what they were gonna do with me. I had researched it over the years and asked questions. So I was scared. At 8:30am the next day I was sent to the theatre. No clowns this time. I was man enough to walk, I didn’t need to be wheeled there this time. I knew where I was going.
A week went by and the results came back. It was exactly what I thought it was all along. A tumor. Or a Benign Pilocytic Astrocytoma for all you nerds out there, you know who you are. This operation was going to be a complicated one. Mallucy wouldn’t know how much of the tumor he would get, meaning he would have to take a bit off, then put me in a MRI, then take a bit more and so on. The op took in total about 8 hours. When I got out I had short term memory loss, so I don’t remember anything. My dad, being my dad, took advantage of this and told me ‘the dog misses you’. We don’t have a dog and my drugged up self properly thought we did. I was intensive care for a few days before moving back to the main ward. I spent the next 3 weeks recovering.
In the ward I was the oldest. This meant in the day there wasn’t much for me to do, I mean I love playing with those squiggly lines with the little wooden block as much as the next guy, but I needed more. The ‘Teenage Room’ was a 3x2m room and a foss table, so I spent most my time in there. To get to it I would have to walk past the other ward. I remember one day I walked past and I seen a group of people surrounding a bed. I was curious so wandered in. The kid on the bed had a huge scar going from his chin down his neck to his chest and was strapped to a brace. Everyone was crying and I didn’t know why. I ask the nurse and she, holding back tears, tells me this kid in the brace couldn’t speak due to a complication in his neck and spine. And moments earlier, he spoke for the very first time. He was the same age me, 13. Imagine not being able to talk for 13 years of your life, being locked inside with no real way to express yourself. He spoke perfect english, it was surreal.
My Grandad wrote this letter to me:
“I am just sitting here going through all the events of the last few weeks concepting your time in and out of hospital. And what to came to mind right away was the way you conducted yourself throughout.
I can’t find enough words to say how proud I am to have a grandson like you. I can think of no one, adult or young man who could have handled what you have gone through in the way that you did and I include in that.
How yo could appear to be so chilled out about it all when in your heart you must have had some dark thoughts — Absolutely amazing.
You gave us all some worrying times (particularly Mum and Dad) but you knew you would always be fine. I tell anybody and everybody who will listen to me what a brave, charming, intelligent, caring, polite, handsome young man you are. And how much I love you.
I don’t want to embarrass you anymore but to say I am so so proud of you and love you to bits as my first and No1 Grandson
We can handle anything together after this lot.
Grandad John”
I’ve not read that since I got it 7 years ago until finding it for this blog. Its a perfect in site to my time in hospital and the 5 operations I’ve had over the years. It also describes my mental state at the time. I didn’t care, I wasn’t fazed by it. It was only the years that followed that I realised the psychological effects of it all, even now. It’s my ‘thing’. I have double vision due to the operation meaning I can’t hide away from it because its everywhere all the time. But then again, I’m reminded that I am still here, breathing, living.
It’s the best thing to ever happen to me. No seriously. After I got home and life went back to normal I was nominated for the starlight charity and got to go to Hollywood to meet my hero Matt Groening. This inspired me to have a career in the film industry. I’m sat here now typing away somewhere in east London because I’m working as an editor in a Production company, I’m living the dream.
Like I said at the start of this blog, you make your own destiny.
Thanks for reading. I realise I haven’t spoke about ALL my life, I’m only 13 in the story. However I will be writing more posts on the interesting stuff soon. So keep your eyes peeled. Peace x
