Is Death Knocking at Your Door?

Is Death Knocking at your Door?

Some people seek solace in smoking a cig.

Some folk get comfort from cider

Some fellows are regaled by reading tall tales

But my fun is just with the writing.

I love writing.  I don't write enough.  I don't have a target, or want to have fame as a writer.

To research a book is definitely interesting, if at times gruesome.   

I write as therapy, a way to get the demons out of my head.

 I've just looked at the statistics for the Battle of the Somme, and they are unbelievable - except you have to believe them because they are true.  The General on the Allied side, Douglas Haig, saw the battle as a shock tactic, to be over in twenty-four hours.

It went on for almost six months.

He became Lord Haig, and was given a lifetime pension.  

Many, many thousands of households did not receive lifetime pensions, 

instead they received a medallion to commemorate the death of sons, husbands, and brothers.  

These were called the "Death Pennies"

Lord Haig's family did not receive a Death Penny.

There were even skirmishes after that six-month "shock attack", when my great-uncle Tom Beesley was killed on January 13th 1917.

Such brave men . . . on both sides.  How must they have felt?

The waiting must have been the worst bit.  Waiting, waiting, waiting, with your heart pounding, just waiting to hear that whistle, as though it were the start of a football match.  At least then, you could do something you were trained to do, even if it was robotic and clinical.  

Even if it was just to be injured or killed for King and Country.

A million troops were killed or injured in six months at the Somme

for just ten miles of territory gained on a thirty mile front.

What must have gone through those troops' minds as they waited in the trenches, calculating the odds of their not seeing the next sunset.?

I recently had an inkling, when I had a fall just over a week ago.  It was just a simple fall, and I got up without any help.  And yet, I thought, for no obvious reason, that I should get it checked out at hospital.  Three hours, and two tests later, i found myself in the Coronary Care Unit, where I stayed for almost a week before I was let out again "on leave" before a return to Hospital for my particular time "in the trenches"

In that week, they examined my "dicky ticker" and came to a number of conclusions.  The team were absolutely wonderful.  I have a surgeon, Dr. Brian Plunkett, who, although, based in Sydney, has worked all over the World.  Canada, the USA, etc.  He was returning from New Zealand before he saw me.

He managed his team, who, day by day, came to see me, with total transparency, to tell me what they could do, what they would like to do, what alternatives they had, why they would advise me to do, - and what my chances were of survival were.  

What were my chances of survival?  Why 100% of course!  I'm never going to die, how could I?  For the last seventy-six years I've been indestructible, so why should that not continue?

The operation itself is straightforward, if long, (about six hours), and then I have to be revived.  For most people, "waking up" is the normal natural thing to do, but I have a problem.  I only have one working lung.  This cuts my air down to 50% of "normal".  When we walk side by side, you may be walking, but aerobically I am running to keep up.  In practice, of course, 50% is my ideal, but in actual fact that is nearer 35% in reality!  In other words, I shall be on a ventilator and I shall wake up and breathe for myself, and from there on it's onwards and upwards into the sunlight.

Unfortunately . .  . at 35%, it may take a few hours to get me to breathe again by myself.  I inflate my lung by using the diaphragm muscle, as I have ever since I was born.  The ventilator will do the job for me during the operation and immediately afterwards, but at some stage I have to be weaned onto my own breathing.  My lung function is not good, and it may take a few hours to get me breathing again, but the trouble is that for every hour that passes, the diaphragm becomes weaker, and in a frighteningly short time, (a few hours only), it becomes "tired" so that it becomes impossible to breathe unassisted.  If the ventilator is switched off, a few minutes later I die.  Regardless of your ideas of the afterlife, your present life will be ended.  No more Christmas, no more trips to the camera club.  Not even one more cuddle with Marg.  If things go wrong, I will have made my last purchase at the supermarket.  I will never come home again.

It's strange.  I have no (well, a little) fear of death, but I wonder what it will be like for those who know me.  What will it be like to eat your meals and watch the telly on the sofa by yourself?  There are so many decisions to make.  How many people should be at the switching off?  How will Marg or anyone, cope with the decision by themselves?  Might I still be mechanically conscious when the machine is switched off, and gradually lose consciousness and die within a space of up to thirty minutes.

I wonder who will take Marg home from my death.  We will have been married for forty-seven years on October 4th.  It's Marg's birthday on August 2nd.

On the other hand, like the soldier back from no-man's-land and into the relative safety of his trench, I shall probably survive.  In which case, I shall go to the supermarket again.  There will be Christmas.

As Thomas Hardy wrote about the First World War:

"How quaint and curious War is!  You shoot a fellow down, you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown"

What knife-edges we all exist on!  On what thin ice we skate!

End of Part One.

Wish me, please, a start to Part Two.  

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