The Greatest Show On Earth

Roll up, roll up, and welcome to the dubious joys of getting old! It’s what you’ve been waiting for all of your miserable life. Miserable? Oh, you don’t know the half of it yet.

Act I, Scene I

At the age of seventy, I am now five years past the opening scene at a hospital in the South of Spain, and I can tell you, there is a very good reason why they call it an operating theatre. It’s because that is where all the drama happens. And your introduction to it comes when you least expect it.

You get to sixty-five years old and look forward to finally retiring from work and kicking back your heels to enjoy a life of leisure with not a care in the world. You could not be more mistaken!

One minute you’re out in the fresh air ambling along the street, bidding a hearty good morning to people you know and even to people you don’t. The next minute you suddenly realise why you are saying good morning to people you don’t know from Adam. It’s because everything and everyone is shrouded in a mist that slowly crept into view but has now become a dense fog and you cannot tell your arse from your elbow. Welcome to cataracts.

Though you may not know what the fog is, you will soon find out at a state hospital where not only do you not want to be, but those fookers don’t want to be there either. The overworked and underpaid doctors and nurses give the distinct impression that they would rather lock all the doors and be bang at it playing horizontal gymnastics with each other. I have never met a more unfriendly bunch of care workers in all my born days.

They make you wait three hours only to try to get rid of you as fast as they can. The eye specialist complained that I didn’t run to her consulting room when my name was called.

“I’ve got lots of people to see here, what do you think this is, a hospital?”

I love a doctor with a wry sense of humour and a vicious tongue. It wasn’t my fault that the consulting room was half a mile from the waiting area through a maze of corridors and secret passageways. Fortunately, this was one doctor I would not have to see ever again as the hospital was so underfunded they had to farm eye surgery out to a private hospital.

Act I, Scene II

The very idea that I needed invasive eye surgery did not exactly fill me with joyful anticipation. I needn’t have worried, the actual operation is a breeze. It helped that the private hospital is run by kind and considerate human beings. And, judging by the way in which I was transferred in a wheelchair from the waiting room to the theatre of operations, it was a fun place to be. A young porter set off from the waiting room pushing that wheelchair at high speed as if he was banger racing.

“Wheeeee, I’ve got a big one here ladies,” he called out to nurses, joyfully pointing out my 6'2" height.

The operation was expertly carried out with a laser by Dr Sandra, a truly amazing individual. I lay on my back and had a mask covering my entire face except for my left eye. In no time at all, my vision went very watery with a Kaleidoscope flash of colourful lights. To my right, I could hear a series of beeps and buzzes, as if I was being operated on by C-3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars. In no more than five minutes I was done and being softly asked to get up.

Back in the waiting area, my friend Maria who took me to the hospital could not believe that the operation was executed in less time than it took her to go to the ladies' powder room for a pee. The real miracle was the transformation in my vision. It was so truly spectacular that I teared up. That is what happens when you give clear 20–20 sight to the half-blind.

Act II, Scene I

To their credit, the Spanish health service is proactive in many ways. One day I received a letter stating that since I had come of age would I be kind enough to take a stick out of the plastic bag they had sent to me, stick it in my poo, and then send that stick back to them. Nice.

All those years I had desperately wanted to send a sample of my smelly shit to people who had wronged me, and here I was being invited to commit that odious crime. I so wanted to add a message to the sample, “Here, smell this, you bastards, it’s a taste of what you gave me,” and send it to one of my many enemies.

In a very short time, I received a response saying they had found traces of blood in my poo and would have to have a colonoscopy. I was quite calm about it having had a long history of bleeding hemorrhoids.

The night before the day before the operation I had to take something to empty my bowels. OMG! At first, nothing happened. Then suddenly my brother appeared at my house in tears telling me he had been robbed at knifepoint a few streets away. I was so pissed off with those scum I forgot all about what I had taken to empty my bowels and ran out of my house and jumped on my bike to go after the swine.

I never found the little shits, which was more lucky for them than me. Little losers like that do not scare me. They would have ended up in the hospital before me. Suddenly……!

In a poorly lit, empty street, my arse exploded!

You can’t hold it in, no way. I just about dropped my trousers and dived between two parked cars when all hell let loose. And just when you think it’s over and pull your trousers back up, a series of more exploding shit rent asunder the cool night air.

I finally managed to get back home and spent the next hour or so sitting on the pan, tentatively waiting for more renal carnage to tear my arse-end apart.

The next day, I sauntered past the parked cars where I had dumped my slimey innards. The owner of the car whose front end had witnessed my social indiscretion in all of its glory was telling a mechanic he thought his car radiator had sprung a serious leak, going by the massive brown wet stain under the front of his car, that had emanated from my arse cheeks.

“The thing that puzzles me,…” said the mechanic, “…is it smells like poo!”

Suddenly the two gentlemen saw me listening in and asked me “Do you know anything about this mess?”

“Moi?” I replied all sheepish. “Perish the thought gentlemen,” I replied.

Over the coming days, I made a perverse point of passing by the same spot. In Spain, it doesn’t rain very often, so it wasn’t going to be washed away any time soon. On one such occasion, for a brief moment or two, I did consider getting a few buckets of water from somewhere to wash it away, but I realised that would be tantamount to taking ownership, and that was never going to happen, not in my lifetime. Shit happens, so they say, just don’t get caught owning up to it.

Act II, Scene II

At the hospital, I was told to get undressed and lie on a trolley. Then a nurse came and hooked me up to a drip. A little later, when I asked her what was in the drip, just as I was about to lose consciousness, she replied,

“It’s what killed Michael Jackson!”

“Oh, coooool, I’ll try to enjoy the trip,” I managed to reply just before closing my eyes. In the end, the test was inconclusive and that was the end of it, for the time being.

Act III, Scene I

With my cataracts and colonoscopy experience behind me, if you’ll excuse the pun, I was good to go.

One lovely fresh summer evening I was doing a solo open-air concert with my semi-accoustic guitar. After three songs I went to get up to stretch my legs and couldn’t. I was very firmly rooted to the low stool I was sitting on and had lost all power to propel myself upwards to a standing position.

I put my guitar down, placed my hands palm down on the sides of the stool to brace myself and pushed up with all my might. As I slowly began to rise I felt the most excruciating pain in all of my lower joints, from the hips down. OMG!

As I straightened myself up the pain dissipated and I took a walk around for five minutes. Then I sat back down to continue performing. Fifteen minutes later, again I went to get up and couldn’t.

This was about the time of COVID-19 and the country went into lockdown. That meant I couldn’t get the medical assistance I needed without a lot of argy-bargy. When I did get to see a doctor she just wanted to get rid of me asap. She told me it was nothing more than old age and gave me a prescription for aspirin. Bloody fool of a woman.

Once more I went to see a doctor and he concurred it was age-related and gave me a prescription for Panadol, a very strong painkiller for terminally ill cancer patients, just because he wanted to get rid of me as fast as he could. And still, the excruciating pain persisted.

To make matters worse, twice the Spanish police assaulted me for being out, even though it was allowed for my purposes. They each threatened me with a 600 euro fine if I did not go back home and stay there. The second one followed me and said if he saw me out again over the next few days he would arrest me. Another bloody fool who would not listen to me when I explained why I was out.

In the end, I left the country to travel to somewhere more medically knowledgeable and civilised, like Japan. What a difference. The Japanese put me through a whole raft of tests and diagnosed something called PMR/GCA. They immediately put me on steroids and within an hour the pain vanished never to come back.

The problem was that during the tests it was also discovered that I had had a silent heart attack and a mini stroke. What all of this meant was that my stay in Japan was going to be long-term.

Act III, Scene II

Having detected damage to my heart with the use of an echograph, the young heart specialist decided that I should have a test called cardiac catheterization. That consists of sending a minuscule camera up into your heart via a tube inserted into the vein of your arm. Let me tell you, that is some pretty scary shit.

On the morning of the operation, the heart specialist came to see me with some paperwork in Japanese, which he translated for me. It was all about how there was a one in five hundred chance of having a stroke and ending up a vegetable, a one in a thousand chance of having a fatal heart attack, etc, etc. On the one hand, I know they have to cover themselves in case the operation goes all pear-shaped. On the other hand, it is pretty darn scary to hear that you might die!

“So, with that knowledge, are you happy to go ahead with the operation, Liam?” the doctor said.

“Happy! Fuckin happy? Happy to possibly drop dead? No, I am not,” I replied.

My lovely wife chipped in with “Well darling, if you are going to die, a hospital operating theatre is the best place for it to happen.”

Then the doctor said “The problem is, Liam, you might die if you have the op, but you might also die if you don’t have the op. We need to see how bad the damage is before it kills you.”

“Fine, let’s do it, just don’t ask me to be feckin happy about it.”

“Ok, try to rest awhile and we’ll come and get you when it’s time,” said the man who held my life in his hands.

No sooner had everybody left to leave me in peace and a young nurse turned up with a basket full of empty vials for collecting blood samples. Nobody had said anything about this being part of the process. And since some of those plastic vials were big enough to hold a good pint of blood, I wasn't convinced it wasn’t some mistake.

When I asked the girl what it was for, she said another doctor had ordered it, a man who knew I was being treated for my PMR/GCA. However, that man was not my PMR specialist. When he came to speak to me I immediately thought of how much he looked like Charles Hawtree, the famous Carry-On film actor.

Apparently, this young doctor had taken it upon himself to instigate an extensive series of blood tests. But for the life of me, I could not see how several pints of blood were needed and refused point-blank to comply. He could have simply fancied making some homebrew black pudding for all I knew. Jeez, he would have had me walking around with two legs totally empty of blood just so he could have a full English breakfast with black pudding. No way, Jose, I thought. I sent him packing and heard no more about it, not from him or my PMR specialist.

Act III, Scene III

The thought of the operation put the fear of God into me as I was wheeled down into the bowels of the hospital to the operating theatre. The room was full of doctors and nurses all gowned and masked up. There must have been a dozen of them!

The trolley was wheeled up alongside a massive plasma screen where everything could be seen in all its gory detail. I was told to remain still whilst they strapped me down with abdomen, leg and head straps. I was not allowed to move a single millimetre.

I was then given a local anaesthetic in my right wrist as I was going to be fully conscious throughout the entire operation. I was absolutely terrified in case I moved a muscle involuntarily. I had to remain like that for forty-five minutes.

At one point I decided to try to relax by taking deep breaths. That had the effect of slowing down my heart and the beeps coming from the heart monitor discernably slowed down as well. I overheard some comments in Japanese, which I imagined to be something like “I think we’re losing him!” It might just as easily have been one of the young doctors saying to one of the pretty nurses “Do you fancy a leg over after this?” It’s amazing what goes through your mind when your life is on the line.

After what seemed a lifetime it was all over and I was wheeled back to the ward. A couple of hours later, the heart specialist came to see me and I have to say I had developed a sneaking admiration for him. It felt like I was talking to God himself. It was down to him if I lived or died.

“The good news is, the damage is nowhere near as bad as we first thought it was. So, no surgery. We’ll put you on a blood thinner and anti-cholesterol tablets and you’re good to go for quite a few years more,” the doctor told me.

That was four years ago, and the treatment has actually improved the state of my arteries and heart. Just as important, I feel great. I am on routine three monthly visits for the rest of my life, and I’m fine with that.

Act IV, Scene I

Of all the health tests I have been through since, I have to say a few were a lot less scary, yet a good deal more unpleasant.

MRI; I hate the bloody thing with a vengeance. Being claustrophobic makes it a very unpleasant way to pass an hour strapped inside a coffin-like tube

PET scan; A Positron Emission Tomography scan is an imaging test that can help reveal the metabolic or biochemical function of your tissues and organs. It’s nowhere near as bad as an MRI, but still not pleasant.

Endoscopy; I had one of these about forty years ago under general anaesthetic and it was a piece of cake. This time I had it whilst fully conscious with just a light spray of a local anaesthetic on my throat. Take my advice, if you have to have one of these, have it under a General Anaesthetic. I felt like I was being choked to death, which in a way, I was! I don’t want to go into detail, just trust me on this one. You can thank me later.

Finale

As if all of the above wasn’t enough to go through, in late 2021 I was stupid enough to fall off my bike by cycling far too fast in the rain. I had taken up cycling as I couldn’t afford a car and the doctors said it was good for my health. Ha!

I came to a bend in the road and hit it at about 30mph. In a split second, the bike flew from under me and dumped me on the road, shattering both my left hip and leg! Pain?!!! OMG!

I knew immediately I had done some serious damage. It wasn’t the first time I had come off my bike. However, when I had those previous falls I just immediately got back up, remounted my bike and continued my journey. This time it was different and I knew it.

To cut a long story short, I spent three months in three different Japanese hospitals. At one point my lungs collapsed and my digestive system packed in altogether. I really did feel like I was at death’s door. It didn’t help when I read on the internet that fifty per cent of older people who break their hip die within a year! When I mentioned that to my doctor he reassured me that I was not in the same group. “There is old, and there is old,” he told me. I think it’s people who are in their late seventies to mid-eighties that are the most vulnerable.

After three months I walked out of that rehabilitation hospital (hip surgery was deemed too complicated and dangerous) on my own two feet. The pain lasted another three months. The last X-ray revealed that the hip and leg had both self-repaired. Amazing.

The only other health issue is sleep apnea which was only discovered when a test revealed that during the hours of sleep, I stopped breathing 48 times in one hour. The doctor explained that their biggest fear was not that I might die, but that the starvation of oxygen might cause brain damage and render me a vegetable. So it’s a sleep machine for the rest of my days. It could be worse, a lot worse.

Well, it seems that I passed the audition and I would like to thank you all for popping in to see the show. I must also give hearty thanks to all the good doctors and nurses who have kept me alive and of course, my incredible wife who paid for it all.

Remember one thing, you can’t be too careful.