It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get you on the table. He wasn’t talking about cracking my chest, thank Christ, but threading a wire in through a vein to get a look at the heart, blow up a tiny balloon to stretch the artery, and maybe leave behind a metal tube or three.
I wasn’t keen on that last part. Then I thought: serves me right. I should have avoided all those bacon sandwiches and steaks fried in butter. ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Probably should have taken the statins, too. But if you are, understandably, unwilling to take a fistful of pills every day for the rest of your life, there are some medical mavericks to confirm your decision. If they are wrong, though, their advice could end up killing more people than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined.
As the great smoker and drinker Christopher Hitchens put it, when you get a serious diagnosis, you cross ‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’. He wrote that after being trolleyed out of a New York hotel room barely able to breathe, chest filled with ‘slow-drying [cancerous] cement’.
I feel a fraud when people ask, solicitously, if I’m OK. I’m not Julie Burchill, consigned to a wheelchair, possibly for life, or Roger Lewis, dropping to the ground in a Morrisons car park without a pulse (he survived). I have no symptoms, no elephant squatting on the chest, not even shortness of breath.
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