TO RETIREMENT
9302 ILLNESS & FATE
For much of my life I have been healthy, if overweight; though I was as thin as a rake until I was 7 years old.
Latterly, though, my health has been dominated by diabetes. This crept up on me until, in my 60s, it came to dictate large parts of my life. For most of the time, since it was first diagnosed when I was 30 years old, I have shrugged it off as an inconvenience. As a result, have still not taken enough care of my health. At first I did – on and off – make some attempt to control my blood sugar levels by diet. Then I took pills, and then more and more pills. Now I inject insulin every night and every morning, and my blood sugar levels are – even so – increasingly difficult to control.
This has inevitably led to other problems. The most serious of these is a heart problem. In the later 1990s I started developing symptoms of angina, though these were mixed up with panic attacks. The final diagnosis took a couple of years, with every test showing inconclusive results. Eventually, an angiogram – with a catheter inserted into my cardiac arteries – showed the truth. One of the three arteries supplying blood to the heart, the ‘Anterior Descending Cardiac Artery’, was occluded (blocked). The result was that the heart was getting a third less blood than it needed. As it was blocked at its entrance, this meant I could not have a stent fitted – the modern solution – but must face the risk of a bypass; or, as I chose to do, control it by medication. This meant yet another four drugs I must take each day, and I needed exercise so that alternative pathways were built. Accordingly, I walk two miles a day on my treadmill, something I hate; mainly because I am forced to do it.
On the other hand, my grandfather was diagnosed with angina at the age of 55,and given a very weepy send off by a group of colleagues who expected him to die within the year. He lived until he was 84!
My diabetes means I do not suffer any pain from my heart. I must have had a heart attack when the blockage first occurred, yet I remember nothing like this. To the best of my recollection I was walking fast, on a cold November evening, on my way to the group meeting I then ran at the Strategic Planning Society. I felt a tightness in my chest. I was worried but, slowing my pace, I made it to the meeting. In retrospect, that probably was the heart attack.
For whatever reason, and I suggest that it probably has as much to do with problems in my private life as those at work, I have long almost looked forward to death; almost suicidally so. Indeed, it is arguable that this has been a major contributor to my failures to control my health problems.
In particular, though, I became convinced that this would occur at the Millennium; in 2000, when I would be 60. As a soothsayer, which you will read about elsewhere, this was presented to me in the form of a very strong intuition.
Of course, as is now obvious in 2006, I didn’t die then. But my life did in effect then end – in a very dramatic way – when I was forced out of the Open University. This was an event which was as dramatic as any death, and was presumably what I had foreseen. Soothsaying is a blurred art, peering through the fires of time, not an accurate science.
Perhaps it was coincidence, but the developments in global politics reflected a similarly dark descent into chaos. The Millennium, which I was (logically) expecting to be a happy gateway to a brighter future, actually brought the dark forces at the heart of right-wing (US) politics into global hegemony. This development cast a dark shadow over all our futures. In particular, the use of fear as a political device, which won them domestic elections, has condemned the rest of us to rule by imaginary forces which are far worse than any real ones we may have previously faced. I hope this collection will go some way to reversing that process!
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