Recently I’ve been worrying about me. Not caring about the troubling disappearance of seventy percent of the world’s bee population.
Unconcerned that poor Susan Neill-Fraser has now spent more than 2000 days in gaol for a crime I can’t believe she committed.
Also forgotten are vanishing old growth forests, the disappearing Tassie devil, the mangy wombats, kids in detention and the moans and groans of self-funded retirees.
Bugger all of the above. I’ve been worrying about me!
My decline into selfish exile these last weeks is the result of how pointy-end science, available right here in River City, turned me into the Man Who Saw Too Much.
I have taken introspection as far as it can go and have quite literally taken a good look at myself, and have been scared stiff by what I have seen.
Like all self-inflicted medical nightmares, it started out, seeming like a good idea at the time.
Contemplating another year of travelling the planet and worrying about its various woes often in far-flung and remotest parts, I thought perhaps it was time for a medical check up. After all I’ve been around for so long that even this august journal has taken to referring to me as a “veteran journalist”. Which is a nice way of saying ‘old’ and a veteran of probably nothing more than too many long lunches. But how much is too many?
I would get to the heart of the matter by going to the heart of the matter.
Heart failure is the cause of more than thirty percent of deaths every year and mostly, due to coronary artery disease. Here was the logical place to start.
My cardiologist was a shaven-headed, athletic looking man. He reminded me of Vladimir Putin. I would probably have found a fat slob of a cardio’ more reassuring but they are hard to find these days and anyway I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I wanted to know the worst and time was running out. Besides, I had chosen this bloke because he had the technology that could see inside my coronary arteries to determine just how rusted and encrusted the pipes had become.
He was professionally obliged, the doctor told me, to confide that he actually owned the huge tubular machine into which I would be briefly inserted and teleported from my present adipose assurance into a future world of grief.
When he told me the price of a ten second spin in his medical fun park, I should have backed out like a yabby. But what the hell, I needed to know! And perhaps it would make a funny story for later. If there was to be a later.
“Breathe normally. Hold the breath. Thank you. Release the breath. Breathe normally.”
The diagnosis wasn’t as much fun as the ride.
Incredibly, the machine spoke to me with the computer-generated voice of the world’s greatest living physicist, Steven Hawking. The Doc had spared no effort to give me my thousand bucks worth.
The diagnosis wasn’t as much fun as the ride. There were two patches of white revealed in my plumbing. The Hawking machine had detected calcification in one of my coronary arteries.
Yes, apparently all the grief I have reported over the years has hardened my heart, not completely, but enough to indicate that I need to considerably change my ways, if I am to look forward to those extra five years, dribbling, in the Eventide Home.
So I joined the ranks of the three million Australians who take statins, those all too common cholesterol lowering drugs. If it doesn’t quite act like Draino for my clogged pipes it might at least stop further damage.
Worse was to come. No more carbohydrates. No bread. No pasta. No spuds.
No rice. And no fun. Well almost, but not quite.
The good bit was that I am to become a New Age caveman. So, steak, snags, eggs and bacon, chops, all those nice fatty things I had thought were bad, were now back on the menu. While all the things I had thought were good, were now off. Best of all, kindly Dr. Putin said I could still drink beer, as long as it was low carb. ‘Paleo Ale’, I’m calling it.
I also became one of millions who take a daily low dose aspirin as a blood thinner, which might prevent a clot forming in my raddled arteries. And so within ten days I was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, which of course was also back on the menu. The smallest scratch or even the merest prick of a fish-hook gave rise to unstoppable fountains of blood.
And then, I’m sorry to become so intimate, but it is an acutely intimate matter, I started to pee blood!
Panic and thousands of dollars and many more scans later, nothing was revealed.
But I wasn’t off the medical roundabout yet. Horribly, bladder cancer was a possibility, though my medical pals assured me not a probability.
“But, mate, we better take a look in there, just in case.”
I’m not brave
Now taking a look in the bladder isn’t taking a look at the bladder. It’s not an Xray or a scan. It is literally taking a look IN the bladder and that means putting a camera up there, and regrettably there is only one way in!
I’m not brave but I opted to stay awake and watch it on the wide-screen video, thoughtfully set up for me by yet another specialist, my friendly urologist. Throughout the insertion process I carefully avoided any cheap shots about taking the piss.
The surprisingly mild discomfort of this delicate procedure was overwhelmed by the extraordinary images it produced. I was taken to a place where the sun never shines. A place, unseen by man (or woman for that matter) until now.
Like a subterranean documentary on caving, we glided up a long, narrow, slightly twisting, smooth-sided passage into a vast, beige, velvety-looking cave.
I was inside my own bladder! It was a frightening, though incredible journey, and despite all the amazing places I have seen on our wonderful planet, I must say this introspective voyage, into my own secret inner-space, was stunning.
And what did I discover in my most private man-cave, apart from the extra-ordinary internal geography of everyman and the wildest wonders of technology? Nothing. Everything checked out OK.
All I found there was my lonely, insecure self. And my own vainglorious fear of death, about which I now feel foolish.
I’m finished with introspection. The final end will come to me, as it will, in the fullness of time, to you. But perhaps its best not to seek to know too much.
Meanwhile, my investigations have made me, if not a wiser, certainly, a poorer man.
So now I will turn my attention back to where it should be directed, to the problems of the world. I have started filming that story about the alarming disappearance of bees. A bit late perhaps, with some three quarters of the global population having already gone. Bees of course, are responsible for the fertilization of almost half of all the food we eat. Yet strangely I am finding this imminent catastrophe less alarming than my recent bout of self-absorption.
Yes folks, I’m back.
There’s only one thing. I have a curious swelling on the side of my neck.
Maybe I’ve been stung by a bee during the shoot.
Perhaps I should have it checked out?
First published in Mercury’s Tasweekend
