Call the Midlife (3 page)

Thank you, Panic.

We owe you.

If we continue to panic thereafter, this is merely our choice. Breathing is by far the preferred option. To continue to panic will lead to haste that will lead to the great myth that doing anything but nothing is the way forward. Because nothing is the one thing we don’t have time for.

Wrong!

Unnecessary panic is born out of time claustrophobia. To stop panicking, here’s what I do.

Think about what’s past. Anything. You as a kid being brilliant or happy or sad. Your eighteenth birthday. Passing your driving test. Remind yourself who you are and that the past is forever calm.
Allow it to bring you back to today. On your own terms.

The future loves to take us hostage. But if we don’t unlock the door and allow it in, it’s stuffed. We NEVER have to succumb to the future because it will NEVER arrive.

Breathe, listen, relax.

We are HERE, it is NOW. That is our greatest gift. Add to this all you have seen and learnt and consider yourself to be the go-to expert on you.

As we grow older but not old, never old, we have the great advantage of no longer having to think – about anything. We know so much already, all we have to do from now on is to give ourselves the chance to listen. All the problems the universe likes to throw at us are no match for the experience we now possess. They are random and disorganized whereas we are sophisticated ultra-intelligent super computers. We are ready for anything. We are International Rescue.

Midlife – the chance to understand who we are and what we are truly capable of.

We are the Harlem Globetrotters. We take on all-comers knowing we can run rings around them just for fun. We are better than we ever have been. It’s time to show the world and ourselves just what we can do.

Health

Top Ten Near-Death Issues I’ve Experienced so Far in Life:

It was only when I wrote this Top Ten that I realized just how lucky I’ve been with regard to serious illness.

With the exception of number one and number two, it seems I’ve never really been in mortal danger, which is quite something considering the way I’ve abused my body and brain over the last few decades.

Like most blokes, I have been an acute sufferer of white-coat-phobia most of my life, until my unforgettable bright-red-paint-poo moment. Since which I have become a changed man.

Now, if it’s a medical issue and I can be tested for it, count me in: bring on those syringes, I’m your guy. And the more likely it is to kill me, the keener I am to find out about it sooner rather than later. There isn’t an examination in the world I wouldn’t sign up for today if I thought it might do me some lasting good.

So when was the epiphany?

As I’ve already alluded to, mine came not so much out of the blue, as out of the loo.

T’was a Monday afternoon and the only person home was me. There I was, having a relaxing afternoon flicking through car magazines in the front room of our crumbling old ruin of a house. A house which local folklore claimed had originally been commissioned as a hunting lodge by King Charles II. A regal base from which to enjoy the sport of his newly constructed game reserve at Virginia Water, as well as, it is rumoured, doubling up as a love nest for His Majesty to enjoy some secret tiffin. And general pleasures of the flesh with his long-term mistress, Nell Gwyn.

Easy now, Sire!

All very clandestine and cloak-and-dagger, but whatever had or had not happened there in the past I was about to have my own dramatic chapter written within its legendary walls.

The call of nature having beckoned, I thought I was in for an entirely run-of-the-mill five to ten minutes of throne time. Off I scooted from the kitchen, through the hallway, first on the right, just beyond the large framed black-and-white photographs of John McEnroe, Michael Caine and James Hunt. My three wise men of cool and inspiration.

Once ensconced in our downstairs lavatory, I sat a while, as one does, a little longer than necessary perhaps. Thanks this time to a particularly compelling back issue of
Auto Italia
, featuring a rather lovely piece of artisan Carrozzeria on the front cover. All’s well that ends well, however – or at least that’s what I thought. Ten or fifteen minutes later, with the inevitable sense that haemorrhoids were becoming an ever more likely side effect of my ill-advised straining, I reluctantly began to finish up.

It was while completing this process that I glanced down into the pan, only to wonder exactly what the rather beautiful rich cloud of ruby red liquid floating in the water was all about.

That couldn’t be blood, could it?

And then, after a few seconds of initial shock and continued examination. I had to admit to myself, it was indeed blood, undoubtedly blood. And what’s more, undoubtedly my blood.

But there was almost too much to comprehend, like someone was trying to play a joke but had blown it by going over the top with the density and colour.

What was this? What was going on? Sure, I’d experienced spits and spots of blood before, many people have, even the odd wisp of thin red cloud, but nothing compared to this. This was too much, surely?

Plus, it wasn’t as if I’d experienced any such spits or spots recently, to serve as some kind of warning that a more serious issue may be afoot. But yes, it was definitely blood. And the closer and longer I looked, the more of it there seemed to be. As if it was intent of leaving me in no doubt.

There was obviously something wrong. How wrong, I had no idea. But easily wrong enough to shock me into action.

What I did next still surprises me to this day.

I calmly finished up, flushed the toilet, and walked purposefully back into the kitchen. I then picked up the house phone and proceeded to dial my assistant’s number, one of only six I can remember by heart. I never use the house phone as a rule, but I wanted to make the call as quickly and as clearly as possible.

‘Hi, Hiten.’

This was the moment I’d been dreading all my life, and now it had arrived. Finally – thirty-four years finally to be precise. Thirty-four years, the length of time that had elapsed since my dad died of bowel cancer.

‘Hi, what’s up?’ We usually text, email or chat face to face. We hardly ever call and talk. ‘I need an appointment with Dr Ed as soon as possible. Any time at all from now, whenever she can see me soonest.’

Getting the same thing and dying the same horrible death as he did had been scaring the shit out of me for most of my adult life. And now here I was, facing the weird irony that the very shit in question may well have just saved my life.

Not only did bowel cancer see off my dad, it claimed both his brothers too. Ronnie went first, Dad second and my lovely Uncle
Bill third. They died in order of their age, picked off one by one by a ruthless assassin at the top of his game. Infuriating, to say the least, especially as now I am aware that bowel cancer is one of the most curable cancers currently known to mankind.

EARLY DETECTION IS EVERYTHING.

You could therefore be forgiven for thinking that those of us in the high-risk categories would have to be raving lunatics not to take heed of this. Surprisingly, millions of allegedly entirely sane people do exactly that. They are of course considered moronic idiots by the medical profession and quite rightly, even though for years I was one of them. I had never yet been tested for any cancer in any way.

But when I saw all that blood, it was as if a switch had flicked inside of me. A switch I didn’t even know existed. A switch that had evolved over all those years of worry and woe ‘in case of emergency’. A switch that had secretly been on permanent standby to launch me to battle stations should there be even the faintest whiff of a genuine red alert.

Well, it didn’t get any redder than this.

It was spooky and bizarre at the same time, but the most unexpected sensation was that of relief. Relief that I could finally confront this spectre, deal with it, hopefully get rid of it and move on with the rest of my friggin’ life. A life I can now see one aspect of which had been on permanent hold ever since I was thirteen.

It was a genuine ‘thank God’ moment.

My nightmare scenario at last, thrust upon me to HAVE TO DEAL WITH. All those sleepless nights asking myself, ‘Would I want to know if the worst came to the worst?’

Well, now here I was, my answer a deafening:

‘YES I BLOODY WELL WOULD!!!’

In fact I’d never been more certain of anything in my life.

A few rings later and my doc was on the line: she instructed me to come see her at the first available opportunity. She would make time whenever.

I knew a few hours wouldn’t make any difference, regardless of
what might be lurking in my backside, so I made an appointment to see her first thing the following morning after my radio show. I told her what had happened, whereupon without even examining me she referred me to undergo a colonoscopy.

‘It’s the best way to see what’s going on and what might need to be done. Go this afternoon, I’ve already called my oncologist consultant friend who says he can see you at 1 p.m.’

A couple of hours later it was time to lube up, close my eyes and welcome a camera probe up my rectum and on to wherever it needed to go. And yet again, there I was, feeling more liberated than agitated, more prepared than scared, more intrigued than squeamish. The beginning of a new me.

The new me that had finally discovered the kahunas to tell the school bully where to shove it, while receiving a rapturous round of applause from myself to myself. In stark contrast to a few years before when I would have more likely been a shaking, quaking mess of pathetic self-pity, running to the pub, sobbing in my drink for a miracle, rather than embracing reality, sobriety and a perfectly sensible solution.

Somewhere inside me, deep in my psyche perhaps, a quantum shift had obviously taken place, clearly for the better. Whether it was to do with having my young sons Noah and Eli and making up with my daughter Jade, and them – instead of me – now shouldering the shared responsibility of our lineage, I don’t know. Or maybe it was the opposite, maybe it was more to do with the fact that, because of their existence, I now had something more tangible than my nebulous self to stick around for. Or maybe it was simply because I was a lot happier than I used to be and I would dearly like a bit more of the same please.

And all this ‘heroism’ without telling anyone other than my assistant.

No fuss, no playing the victim and soaking up as much sympathy as I could elicit. I just got on with it. For the first time in my life I felt totally in control of a situation – grown-up almost.

Choosing to go to have a test which might tell me I was no longer
for this earth, instead of just doing nothing and hoping everything was going to be OK, had opened a box inside me that had been closed for a very long time. A box that held the answer to my own big personal ‘why?’, a box I had always known existed but which was too scary to contemplate, let alone contemplate taking a peek inside.

The same box that I greatly suspected of being the drive behind my intermittent yet never-ending carousel of must do, must get on, must everything, nonsense. Heart attack material.

Since getting back in contact with my daughter Jade and having two new young sons, the lead weight of a lifetime of ‘why?’ had begun to lighten. But it hadn’t vanished completely, still weighing heavy enough to cause the permanent dull ache and distant nagging from the demon of unfinished business.

Until now. Until my survival challenged me to a staring competition. So far, so good, there was no way I was going to blink first.

My appointment with my own thirty-odd years of lost property had popped up out of nowhere for me to confront. And though I realize this may all sound very wise and convenient ‘after the fact’, I cannot put into words how much of an awakening it became.

‘OK, what we’re going to do is go in with our camera,’ announced the consultant, a cross between James Bond’s dad and Indiana Jones’s older, more intelligent brother.

‘Then once we’re in, we’ll have a thorough look around and if we find any nasties we’ll snip ’em out there and then and send the little buggers off for a biopsy. OK?’

Already lying on my side with my bare bum exposed to two nurses, an anaesthetist who was standing by to put me under and this besuited superman, it’s not as if I was about to say no.

‘Sure,’ I squeaked unconvincingly, ‘go ahead.’

Which is exactly what they proceeded to do.

Fast-forward no more than ten or fifteen seconds later and off I was floating somewhere up in the sky between Central London and the ionosphere. Unable to give two shakes of a donkey’s tail what they were about to find or not find.

As I came to with no idea whatsoever of how long I’d been out – although I’ve since been told it was no more than twenty-five minutes – there was the same handsomely lined, tanned face of the consultant looming over me once more. If this friendly smiling gentleman was about to tell me I was going to croak, at least it would be with exemplary bedside manners and a reassuring fatherly tone.

Again I felt strangely calm with regards to any potentially unwelcome news about my mortality. What was bothering me much more was the throbbing erection I seemed to have acquired at sometime during the ‘procedure’.