Piove sempre sul bagnato

That evening a few of my workmates kindly drive my aunt and I down to Kingston Hospital to visit my mum. I find her giving the nurses a hard time, telling them what treatment she’ll have and what treatment she won’t. She does have a point though as she has probably spent more time on a ward than most of them put together, and that’s only when she was a child.
The following day, another visit thanks again to a lift from my workmates. I’m starting to feel that I’m imposing on them, and I stress my concerns. They assure me that its no big deal, and they’re more than happy to help out. As the weeks progressed their generosity and compassion never failed to amaze me, nor would I ever take them for granted. At the hospital, my mother and I attempt to chat a while, but she had a difficult night and her health has not improved.
The following morning my aunt receives a phone call. It’s a doctor asking us to attend the hospital in the first instance. Francesca urges me to go with my aunt but I have an appointment with a member of the Strategic Management Team, and a representative from the Police Federation immediately after that. I had planned to visit the hospital straight after the meetings, the 65 bus to Kingston passing the police station where I would be.
The reception in the office is uplifting. Most of my workmates are present, and we chat and eat the cakes I brought for about half an hour before the first meeting. Just as I’m about to sit down with Chief Inspector Morgan for the first appointment I receive a phone call on my cell. It’s my aunt, she’s crying. Slowly she tells me that my mum has just died, that her heart had given out. I collapse into my chair with my head in my hands. I cannot hold the tears back. I sob into my phone that I’ll come down right away, and then end the call. An overwhelming feeling of betrayal and loss surges up from my stomach. I should have been there with her, to hold her hand and to comfort her in the last moments. Instead I had put the police first. Then I tried to rationalise, I had believed that my mother was indestructible, she had to be. How could someone who had been ill so many times before in their life die now, at this moment in time, when I needed them the most? I turn to the Chief Inspector, compose myself, and tell him the news. He puts his arm on my shoulder and offers words of comfort and condolence. He then goes to find my Detective Inspector. The Chief Inspector returns a couple of minutes later with a shocked DI Leonard and DS Robinson (Robbo). They offer their condolences and then go to find a driver to take me down to the hospital.
The trip to the hospital is surreal. As the scenery races by I find myself questioning what has happened in these two short months. I’m in denial, this shit can’t be happening! I call Francesca, and she starts to cry. She tells me that she’ll leave the girls with a friend and make her way down as soon as possible. I tell her that DI Leonard and Robbo have arranged for a couple of officers to collect her shortly.

I meet my aunt at my mother’s bedside. As we stand by the bed, she tells me her last words and that she went peacefully. I sit down and cry as I gently take her lifeless hand. Francesca arrives moments later. She breaks down upon entering the ward. We hold each other a while and sit next to the bed. Francesca tells me that two of my workmates had volunteered to baby-sit until we got back. The kids are in very safe hands. After some time Francesca and my aunt leave me with my mother so I can pay my last respects. I sit for a long time holding her already cold hand whilst reflecting upon the good times we spent together, the occasions I had held that hand before, when it was warm and full of life. I kiss her forehead softly, apologise, tell her I love her, and leave…

Happier days; from left to right, my aunt Ann, Francesca, and my Mum.

A Motto for the McNally Family Crest

As an aside, I noticed that the McNally crest, coat-of-arms, whatever you want to call it, has no motto on a banner. Based upon what I've been through in the last 10 months I’m thinking that I'm more qualified than most other McNallys to decide on one. I think the one below is the best and sums up our fighting spirit. Its in Ulster Gaelic (thanks Seán), which is more accurate considering where the name originated. Translated it says - 'Fate, when I catch up with you I'm going to kick your ass.'

Sleeping space was clearly limited in the flat, so being small of frame my mum opted for Ol’ Faithful the Chesterfield. Meanwhile my aunt plumped for the futon in the girls’ room. Each not as uncomfortable as they may first appear. Ol’ Faithful is a remarkably restful couch. I’ve lost track of the amount of evenings I’ve drifted off into its antique leather whilst watching my favourite shows. Whilst Francesca and I spent a year using the futon as our main bed when we moved into our first unfurnished flat in what seemed like a million years ago.
After a couple of days my mum’s health deteriorates. She complains of shortness of breath, and her movements become laboured. I’m used to her being poorly, desensitised even. My mother has never truly enjoyed good health starting with the removal of a lung as a child due to TB. Later in her life, doctors had advised her not to have me for fear that the trauma of the pregnancy would kill her. However, she went ahead, and here I was 490 months later. I had grown up with her bronchitis, crippling migraines, gall bladder removal, Sjoegren’s syndrome and other associated maladies, but despite all this I believed her to be a strong woman, and I was glad that she was there despite the feeling that it was going to take more than a motherly ‘kiss it better’ and an elastoplast to fix my problem.

A few days later my mum took a turn for the worse. Her breathing is even shallower, moving exhausts her, and she has pains in her chest and back. An appointment is swiftly made at my doctors’ surgery across the road, and my aunt goes across with her. At around the same time Craig, my DS, calls around to see how I’m getting on. Half an hour or so later my mum returns and announces that the doctor wants her admitted immediately to Kingston Hospital, and that her intentions were to pack an overnight bag then call a taxi. Craig steps forward and volunteers to take her to the hospital in his unmarked police car. Initially she declines afraid that she would take him away from his duties. However, being of ‘good heart’, Craig won’t take ‘no’ for an answer and eventually she accepts his offer.
Later, I was to discover that my mum and aunt had tried to force £20 on Craig for his ‘trouble’. Craig had had to remind them that he had driven them to the hospital as a favour, and to make sure my mother got there swiftly and safely due to the immediate health concerns and not for profit. I laughed so much imagining Craig’s face when they tried to force a gratuity on him. Craig as straight as they come locked in a ‘war of attrition’ similar to a hapless priest having tea forced on him by Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle, “Oh go on, go on, go on, ahh you will, you will, you will (and on, and on) .” Priceless.

Family

A couple of days later my mother and aunt arrive at the flat. As they step into the hallway we embrace in turn, each hugging me tight repeating that everything is going to be okay. My mum reiterates that the McNally family is strong and together we would beat this. She had a point. Those few relatives that had died of the big ‘c’ or coronary heart disease had done so because they had abused themselves over the years through drinking and smoking. I on the other hand didn’t smoke, apart from the odd ‘Cuban’ on special occasions. I drank in moderation even infrequently, that trip to Poland being a ‘one off’. I exercised regularly, and ate good wholesome food, mostly organic. Indeed, the ancient McNally coat-of-arms was a defiantly raised arm clad in armour gripping a battleaxe. I was from a long line of fighters who didn’t recognise the concept of ‘giving up’. Still, I sobbed into my mother’s collar that there was so much that I had yet to do. She replied that everything I’ve ever seriously put my mind to I had accomplished, and that I had done more in my 40 years than any average man had done in an entire lifetime. That kind of reminded me of a famous unforgettable quote by Abraham Lincoln, “In the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
My aunt puts her arms around us both, and Francesca follows suit. Olivia and Camilla wrap their tiny arms around my legs. Family.

Often it takes something like a tumour to make you open your eyes properly.

Later that evening Jamie and Stuart, a couple of friends from the Crime Squad call around. They sit and we chat across the hall on all the good ‘jobs’ I’ve missed as I put the kettle on. Once tea and biscuits, staple diet of the police officer, are out of the way Jamie leans forward and presents me with a bulky envelope. I open it and pull out a card. “Just a little something from the guys at work”, says Jamie. I open the card and my jaw literally drops to the floor. To my amazement, the card is stuffed full of £20 notes. “We had a whip around, thought it would come in handy”. I am overwhelmed and humbled by their generosity. For once I am lost for words. Equally, the words on the card show true compassion and solidarity. I am sincerely honoured to work alongside these people, and as the coming months would show, they surpassed being colleagues, workmates, police staff, police officers and truly became for me my second extended family. I love them with all my heart.

When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Uncle did, in his sleep -- not screaming, like the passengers in his car.

“Don’t worry babe, its only temporary. Its probably only for a year. The tablets will control the epilepsy and you’ll get it back”
“I know, but will I live that long?”
“Please don’t talk like that”.
“Look, I’ve read the research on the Internet, so have you. Come on love don’t cry we have to be strong”.
I affix the 1st class stamp to the envelope. One last look at the stupid photo on the license. A goatee bearded, wavy haired, uniformed cop. I had the photo taken in a passport photo cubicle in the local post office whilst grabbing a quick break a few years ago. I had to update it for a driving course at Hendon. I had worked bloody hard for all the entitlements on that laminated card, and barring the odd point here and there for speeding collected and lost over the years, I had kept it relatively clean despite inexperience and stupidity on two wheels, cranking up thousands of miles in four, and tiredness in sixteen tonnes of green multi-wheeled mayhem belonging to HRH. But the law is the law, and with the sealing of a manila envelope an era in my life was over. I was effectively banning myself, talk about Judge Dredd.

Bearer of my own bad news

I got through to my Mum’s sister, Ann, first. “Are you sitting down?” I asked.
“Hold on I’ll get your mother”, I sensed fear in her voice. Moments later my Mum picked up the phone, I heard frantic muttering in the background then, “Hi son, are you okay?”
“I hope you’re sitting down Mum, I’ve got a bloody brain tumour”. A moment’s silence, then…
…She told me not to worry, not to give up hope and that miracles happen all the time. We talked about my prognosis, the type of tumour, Francesca, the kids, my job, religion. She told me not to lose faith, and that she’d come down to London on Friday with my aunt because at times like this family should be close together. Her words were calming, soothing, what I needed to hear. Not the reaction I expected. She was composed, collective, and rational just when I needed her to be. If roles were reversed, and I just discovered that I was likely to survive my offspring I’d probably go ‘postal’. I couldn’t help thinking that it was rehearsed, that she had braced herself for the worst news after I had told her about the seizures those few weeks ago. I was later to discover from my Aunt Ann that after I hung up they held each other shivering and crying for what seemed like an eternity. The ‘stiff upper lip’ was for my benefit. After a while my Mum turned to my Aunt and had said, “Oh my God he can’t drive, that’ll kill him!” She knew my passion for the internal combustion engine.
God knows she’d seen enough cars and motorbikes grace the driveway.
Against her better judgement, when I was 17, she bought my first motorbike, a Honda XL125R
(Hey a flick side parting, Levi cords, Adidas Capri trainers, and Benetton rugby tops were de rigueur in Liverpool in the early 80's). Later, when I came back from a working holiday in the USA, she helped me import my VW Karmann Ghia. Later still, she stopped me from committing GBH when a very ex-friend purposefully neglected to add hardener to the two pack paint laid on my cherished 1973 Carrera RS replica. Imagine a classic sports coupe effectively covered in a thin layer of yellow putty – sacrilege. She even watched in amazement as I shoehorned a Porsche 356 Super 75 motor into a VW beetle 1303S. She was even more amazed when I through a rod racing a 2.8 Capri.

Strange, the things that ‘pop’ into your mind and take ‘centre stage’ when faced with adversity. But then again we’re complex creatures with many inbuilt psychological defence mechanisms especially designed to deal with such circumstances.

There’s a few people that’s gonna dance on my grave but that’s ok as I’m getting buried at sea (thanks for that one Bernard)

If I had a penny for every time I lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling and agonised about how I got the bloody tumour in the first place I’d have about 63p, or some figure like that.
But seriously, over the coming months I had plenty of opportunity to go over every possible scenario and factor that led to my predicament. I got it down to four possible causes.
The first and most obvious was the ‘demon’ cell phone. At risk of being sued, my girlfriend at the time and I bought two Motorola digital flip phones after I started my psychology degree at UCLAN. This was around 1992/93, and we were still in the ‘cross-over’ from analogue. Digital phones were cumbersome things with huge batteries compared to today’s arty miniatures. I’m no cellular communications wizard but I reason that this is largely due to the positioning and number of phone masts, in addition to battery technology. To explain, these days there’s a phone mast at the top of every church, block of flats, and any building with some real height.

Back in 1992 you would be lucky if you found a couple of masts in a town the size of Preston, Lancashire. As a result, a cell phone had to generate a lot of power to ‘throw’ that signal out, and ‘pull’ it back in. These days they don’t need as much power as there’s probably a mast in your back garden. As a result, super slim ‘sex toys’, that everybody fawns over, which have, together with the arrival of the MP3 player, pushed robbery statistics through the roof, (well you can take the boy out of the police [temporarily], but you can’t take the police out of the boy). So there I am scribbling away at my coursework in my tiny room in the university halls of residence. Meanwhile 45 miles away is a lonely insecure ex-to-be twiddling her talons, er… I mean thumbs, convinced I’m high on speedballs pole dancing with nubile young student vampire babes at the local student union bar come ‘Titty Twister’. As a result, she kept me pinned to the phone every night talking crap. I do remember though, at the end of every lengthy exchange the right side of my face and head being warm to the touch. The extended antenna ending exactly where the tumour began. I should have kept those conversations to a minimum but the aggravation would have been unbearable. Oh for foresight.

Secondly, I left school when Margaret Thatcher had her steely grip on the country. At one stage there were 3.5 million people unemployed. A job was like gold dust. At the time my CV wasn’t exactly brimming over with qualifications and experience, so I took the first thing I could find, a job with one of the largest dry cleaning chains in the UK. Wasn’t long before I was fully trained as a machine operator and Hoffman presser and acting as relief across Merseyside. However, some of the working practices of the managers, and the aging machinery, left a lot to be desired. Indeed, many a time I saw, and smelled, damp clothes being extracted and sent up for pressing in order to keep up with the burgeoning workload. Unfortunately, research has since shown the solvent used, Perchloroethylene, to be carcinogenic.

I narrowed the third possible cause to blow to the head. By it’s very nature the astrocytoma is a deep-rooted bastard that may have been there for many years. How long? Nobody knows. Its not like you can cut it in half and count the rings, or take a sample and have it carbon dated. I lost track of the number of falls and bumps I had at school whilst playing boisterous childhood games such as British bulldogs (probably now called UK Labradors), and block 123. I’m not going to explain these, suffice to say they were gladiatorial.

But all that was 30 or so years ago. What had happened recently? Well there was an altercation with an empty tea urn belonging to Her Majesty in the back of a Bedford 4 tonner, also belonging to HRH, when I was wearing a certain green uniform.

However, there was no unconsciousness, concussion, lump, blood, nothing. I had come off my motorbike a few times, but I never landed on my helmeted head. And I had been punched a couple of times, but no cartoon ‘tweety birds’ circling my skull. Besides that, zilch!

Finally, it may be my own bad luck. Perhaps people sometimes get these things in a vacuum with no obvious causes. Maybe non-conformist cells ‘wake-up’ one day and decide, “Fuck it, I’ going to grow different from now on!”
One thing is for certain though, given a long enough time line the survival rate for everybody drops to zero!

Oh yeah, did I mention on a bad day I've got one
of these every 45 seconds? Can't be good for your health.

And on a final note, its also crossed my mind that one, maybe more, disgruntled ex-girlfriends may have got their hands on one of these. No not the 747, the bloody doll. Creepy.