Sunday 28 October 2007
Thursday 18 October 2007
IT'S ALIVE!
Mercifully, I’m unconscious for the sawing of the head. I’m only brought round when they’re digging about inside my temporal lobe. Again, when they start to put everything back together and insert the staples, I’m put back under.
I wake up vomiting as usual. There’s something about surgery and me that doesn’t agree gastrically. Once the nausea has passed I quickly conduct a self-assessment. Arms, legs, third leg, eyes, yes, everything seems to be working fine. A nurse points a very bright pencil torch into my eyes. “What date is it? Where are you? Who is the prime minister?” I reply, “2136, an orbiting medical facility 2500 miles above the Earth, not ‘who’ more ‘what’ is the prime minister.” The nurse is confused and turns to a colleague for advice. I smile, still got my sense of humour, self-assessment complete!
An hour later I’m on the Critical Care Unit (CCU) surrounded by friends and family. I’m starving and I’ve missed dinner. Not a bad thing considering what had been on the menu. TQ steps forward and suggests a Big Mac and fries. Not usually a 'Maca D' fan I amaze myself by accepting the offer. Thirty minutes later he returns with a Burger King instead. Result!
The nurse returns with the eye torch, "Where are you? Who are you? Who is the prime minister?" "Well, if this is CTU I must be Jack Bauer, as for the last question... dont remind me".
My neurosurgeon and his entourage visit me later in the evening. Mr Marsh is honest and straight to the point when he tells me that he estimates that he has only managed to remove 30% of the tumour. He adds that because of my good reaction to the surgery he is confident that he can go back in next week to remove the remainder. I agree immediately, in for a penny in for a pound, who dares wins, nothing ventured nothing gained, blah! Blah! Blah!
I wake up vomiting as usual. There’s something about surgery and me that doesn’t agree gastrically. Once the nausea has passed I quickly conduct a self-assessment. Arms, legs, third leg, eyes, yes, everything seems to be working fine. A nurse points a very bright pencil torch into my eyes. “What date is it? Where are you? Who is the prime minister?” I reply, “2136, an orbiting medical facility 2500 miles above the Earth, not ‘who’ more ‘what’ is the prime minister.” The nurse is confused and turns to a colleague for advice. I smile, still got my sense of humour, self-assessment complete!
An hour later I’m on the Critical Care Unit (CCU) surrounded by friends and family. I’m starving and I’ve missed dinner. Not a bad thing considering what had been on the menu. TQ steps forward and suggests a Big Mac and fries. Not usually a 'Maca D' fan I amaze myself by accepting the offer. Thirty minutes later he returns with a Burger King instead. Result!
The nurse returns with the eye torch, "Where are you? Who are you? Who is the prime minister?" "Well, if this is CTU I must be Jack Bauer, as for the last question... dont remind me".
My neurosurgeon and his entourage visit me later in the evening. Mr Marsh is honest and straight to the point when he tells me that he estimates that he has only managed to remove 30% of the tumour. He adds that because of my good reaction to the surgery he is confident that he can go back in next week to remove the remainder. I agree immediately, in for a penny in for a pound, who dares wins, nothing ventured nothing gained, blah! Blah! Blah!
Tuesday 16 October 2007
I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens (Woody Allen).
All too soon we’re back to reality (is that a cue for a song?). My surgery date comes through for the 4th of February. The days pass quickly, and before I know it TQ is driving me down to the hospital. I’ve stocked up on Graphic novels, and my AV500 is full to bursting with my favourite movies. At least I’m going to be entertained during my stay.
The day of my surgery is surreal. I try my hand at some virtual temporal shifting. Its worked well for me in dentists’ surgeries before, it should work in an operating theatre. VTS is a phenomenon that I seem to have perfected. I first honed this skill in a sleepy Italian coastal village when I had to undergo excruciating root canal work. At this point, dear reader, you would be forgiven for thinking that all the treatment and surgery I’ve been through has left me quite ‘wibble’. Oh sorry, best explain what ‘wibble’ is. This is the word used by Rowan Atkinson in ‘blackadder goes forth’ to denote a state of insanity. Picture the scene, the hapless Blackadder, faced with certain death, inserts pencils up his nose and repeats, "wibble wibble", in order to get sent home from the trenches.
George: "What is your name?"
Blackadder: "Wibble."
George: "What is 2 plus 2?"
Blackadder: "Wibble, Wibble."
Moving swiftly on. VTS is a mind-set. Hey, come on I studied psychology for nine years (including two wasted on a doomed M.Phil./Ph.D., my career in the police was the ‘other woman’, so I tore up my thesis, deleted it from my hard drive, and never looked back). By focusing on a likely pain free future point you can say to yourself, ‘I might as well be there now, because this unpleasantness will soon be over and I’ll be looking back on it as just another memory’. Say this enough times and the unpleasant present swiftly passes and you’re in that pain free future. Wibble? Well it works for me!
I also like to become the stand-up comedian in the face of adversity. So when they wheeled me into the prep room I exclaimed to the waiting theatre staff that there’d been a terrible mistake as I thought I had booked myself into the Premier Travel Lodge on Kew Bridge Road last night, and not some scary hospital where they slice heads open. They start to panic, especially when they realise my D.O.B. is wrong on my hospital ID bracelet. It’s easy to get surgeons flustered. I shouldn’t be screwing with these guys, especially when they’re going to be ‘skull-fecking’ me in under an hour. A bloke with a beard steps forward and introduces himself as some prof. from some uni. somewhere. He tells me that with my permission he’d like to video the procedure so he could show his students. What did Andy Warhol say about being famous? Ah yes, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. Youtube here I come. I agree, and the cannula slips into my hand.
It was the establishment of Christianity as a major religious force, overwhelmingly supported by Plato’s philosophies that furthered the concept of the brain as the temporary residence of an immortal soul. This supposition was bolstered as many Western thinkers applied their own theories. For example, the physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675), founder of the term neorologie, believed that the human brain had a rational soul placed there by God. Whereas, the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) stated that the seat of the soul was in the brain’s pineal gland. Whilst, Albrecht Von Haller (1708-1777), the Swiss anatomist, physiologist and poet, believed the soul’s location was in the medulla oblongata.
I could go on, but the point I’m trying to make is that brain surgery, whilst awake, is probably the most intrusive thing you could possibly do to a human body. The surgeon is feeling around, cutting through the very fabric of our existence, our memories, our thoughts, our feelings, what makes us unique, what makes us ‘us’.
I don’t want to court controversy and draw similarities to rape, but if you subscribe to Willis’s, Descartes’s, Von Haller’s and others views, the surgeons tools are intruding, burning through the very core of your soul, and you’re lying there helpless for hours listening to the noises coming from your skull, sniffing the smells, sensing the vibrations through your body, watching them move about their work. Aware that you could die at any minute as the anaesthetist will ask you to wiggle your toes and fingers for the twentieth time.
The day of my surgery is surreal. I try my hand at some virtual temporal shifting. Its worked well for me in dentists’ surgeries before, it should work in an operating theatre. VTS is a phenomenon that I seem to have perfected. I first honed this skill in a sleepy Italian coastal village when I had to undergo excruciating root canal work. At this point, dear reader, you would be forgiven for thinking that all the treatment and surgery I’ve been through has left me quite ‘wibble’. Oh sorry, best explain what ‘wibble’ is. This is the word used by Rowan Atkinson in ‘blackadder goes forth’ to denote a state of insanity. Picture the scene, the hapless Blackadder, faced with certain death, inserts pencils up his nose and repeats, "wibble wibble", in order to get sent home from the trenches.
George: "What is your name?"
Blackadder: "Wibble."
George: "What is 2 plus 2?"
Blackadder: "Wibble, Wibble."
Moving swiftly on. VTS is a mind-set. Hey, come on I studied psychology for nine years (including two wasted on a doomed M.Phil./Ph.D., my career in the police was the ‘other woman’, so I tore up my thesis, deleted it from my hard drive, and never looked back). By focusing on a likely pain free future point you can say to yourself, ‘I might as well be there now, because this unpleasantness will soon be over and I’ll be looking back on it as just another memory’. Say this enough times and the unpleasant present swiftly passes and you’re in that pain free future. Wibble? Well it works for me!
I also like to become the stand-up comedian in the face of adversity. So when they wheeled me into the prep room I exclaimed to the waiting theatre staff that there’d been a terrible mistake as I thought I had booked myself into the Premier Travel Lodge on Kew Bridge Road last night, and not some scary hospital where they slice heads open. They start to panic, especially when they realise my D.O.B. is wrong on my hospital ID bracelet. It’s easy to get surgeons flustered. I shouldn’t be screwing with these guys, especially when they’re going to be ‘skull-fecking’ me in under an hour. A bloke with a beard steps forward and introduces himself as some prof. from some uni. somewhere. He tells me that with my permission he’d like to video the procedure so he could show his students. What did Andy Warhol say about being famous? Ah yes, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. Youtube here I come. I agree, and the cannula slips into my hand.
It was the establishment of Christianity as a major religious force, overwhelmingly supported by Plato’s philosophies that furthered the concept of the brain as the temporary residence of an immortal soul. This supposition was bolstered as many Western thinkers applied their own theories. For example, the physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675), founder of the term neorologie, believed that the human brain had a rational soul placed there by God. Whereas, the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) stated that the seat of the soul was in the brain’s pineal gland. Whilst, Albrecht Von Haller (1708-1777), the Swiss anatomist, physiologist and poet, believed the soul’s location was in the medulla oblongata.
I could go on, but the point I’m trying to make is that brain surgery, whilst awake, is probably the most intrusive thing you could possibly do to a human body. The surgeon is feeling around, cutting through the very fabric of our existence, our memories, our thoughts, our feelings, what makes us unique, what makes us ‘us’.
I don’t want to court controversy and draw similarities to rape, but if you subscribe to Willis’s, Descartes’s, Von Haller’s and others views, the surgeons tools are intruding, burning through the very core of your soul, and you’re lying there helpless for hours listening to the noises coming from your skull, sniffing the smells, sensing the vibrations through your body, watching them move about their work. Aware that you could die at any minute as the anaesthetist will ask you to wiggle your toes and fingers for the twentieth time.
The Big Day
Signing on the 'dotted'.
Wedding car and escort
The big day comes and goes far too quickly. Everyone has a great time, and the Thai Elephant is a big hit. So big in fact that my Borough's CID organise their next lunch there. The Richmond Hill Hotel wedding night treat from my extended Met family is amazing. An atmosphere that is conducive to ah, well... err, a wedding night?! The only hiccup occurs when my good friend Mike, an officer from Merseyside Police, takes a drunken wrong turn and ends up in a very predatory gay bar. Well, that’s his excuse!
Nonetheless, after a flurry of nervous texts to my hotel supper table, I organise a rescue party in the shape of my loyal fellow detective friend TQ, who helps peel the inebriated Mike from his new mustachioed chum.
Anyway, a final nod of appreciation to Superintendent Chalk, DCI De Meyer, DI Leonard, DS Windmill, DC Sheridan, the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, the traffic Sgt. who did the out riding, and everyone else that made this a very special day (sorry, I just don't have the space to fit you all in). To my very special family, thank you.
Anyway, a final nod of appreciation to Superintendent Chalk, DCI De Meyer, DI Leonard, DS Windmill, DC Sheridan, the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, the traffic Sgt. who did the out riding, and everyone else that made this a very special day (sorry, I just don't have the space to fit you all in). To my very special family, thank you.
Monday 15 October 2007
Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
It had been a bit of a rush job, probably wouldn’t have been any faster if I’d ‘knocked-up’ a Sicilian Don’s daughter. Anyway, neither Francesca nor I had been big supporters of the institution of marriage. I had always subscribed to the idiom; if its not broken, don’t fix it! And Francesca had bore witness to her parents’ messy divorce when she was a child, and that would taint anyone. However, the circumstances that we were now caught up in made us see the sacrament from a completely different perspective. By getting married I was protecting Francesca and the childrens’ police pension rights, giving them extra security. And besides, it seemed like the right thing to do. The woman had borne me two lovely daughters, and had stuck with me through ‘thick and thin’.
The invites were easy, simply log on to a vacant terminal at the closest police station and send out a blanket invite to my Borough’s Crime Squad and their spouses. The rest of the places would go to officers in other Boroughs and departments that I had grown close to, blood relatives (err… that would just be my Auntie Ann then!) and friends that weren’t in the Met. I was going to fill that church. Best man would be my oldest and most steadfast friend, J.T.L. (What do the initials stand for? I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask him that yourself. It’s not for me to say!).
The church? None other than St. Elizabeth’s, the venue of my oldest daughter’s baptism, and mother’s funeral. Only seems fitting, as the expression goes, ‘births, deaths and marriages’.
The reception venue was found quite by accident. Walking home from the church after a meeting with our priest, Father Mathias, we stumbled across a familiar, but hitherto overlooked venue, the Thai Elephant, Richmond. Simultaneously we exclaimed, “Hey, that would be large enough!” It didn’t take long for us to give the restaurateur the number of guests and requirements, and in record time a deal was struck.
To give the whole proceedings a topical crime scene theme, I insisted that the wedding photographer be a Scenes of Crime Officer (CSI). Well, they are professional photographers, and it’ll raise a smile in years to come when the guests think back. An urban legend in the making perhaps?
Little did I know that my friends on Borough had arranged with the Commissioner to use his staff car, which he kindly donated, as the wedding car. I was also to discover on the day that the Superintendent of Operations, Mr Chalk, had offered his services as chauffer, and Detective Chief Inspector De Meyer would be usher come umbrella man. As the ‘icing on the cake’, traffic police would kindly supply a uniformed motorcycle outrider.
After shopping for clothes and accoutrements, such as an engagement ring, we were all set for the big day. Not bad considering the whole thing took less than three weeks to put together. That would be the Royal Logistical Corps background then!
The invites were easy, simply log on to a vacant terminal at the closest police station and send out a blanket invite to my Borough’s Crime Squad and their spouses. The rest of the places would go to officers in other Boroughs and departments that I had grown close to, blood relatives (err… that would just be my Auntie Ann then!) and friends that weren’t in the Met. I was going to fill that church. Best man would be my oldest and most steadfast friend, J.T.L. (What do the initials stand for? I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask him that yourself. It’s not for me to say!).
The church? None other than St. Elizabeth’s, the venue of my oldest daughter’s baptism, and mother’s funeral. Only seems fitting, as the expression goes, ‘births, deaths and marriages’.
The reception venue was found quite by accident. Walking home from the church after a meeting with our priest, Father Mathias, we stumbled across a familiar, but hitherto overlooked venue, the Thai Elephant, Richmond. Simultaneously we exclaimed, “Hey, that would be large enough!” It didn’t take long for us to give the restaurateur the number of guests and requirements, and in record time a deal was struck.
To give the whole proceedings a topical crime scene theme, I insisted that the wedding photographer be a Scenes of Crime Officer (CSI). Well, they are professional photographers, and it’ll raise a smile in years to come when the guests think back. An urban legend in the making perhaps?
Little did I know that my friends on Borough had arranged with the Commissioner to use his staff car, which he kindly donated, as the wedding car. I was also to discover on the day that the Superintendent of Operations, Mr Chalk, had offered his services as chauffer, and Detective Chief Inspector De Meyer would be usher come umbrella man. As the ‘icing on the cake’, traffic police would kindly supply a uniformed motorcycle outrider.
After shopping for clothes and accoutrements, such as an engagement ring, we were all set for the big day. Not bad considering the whole thing took less than three weeks to put together. That would be the Royal Logistical Corps background then!
Sunday 14 October 2007
A step closer
Two more Italian 'virtual' consultations follow in quick succession. One of the surgeons concurs with Spallone, whilst the other rejects the notion of further surgery as being 'too risky'.
Risk? I 'shit' it! If it wasn't for man taking risks we'd still be in the stone age! Can you imagine Christopher Columbus saying, "I'm not getting on that boat, its too risky". Or Winston Churchill commenting, "War with Germany? I don't think so, too risky mate".
We return to the UK to tell my oncologist that I'm going to 'bite the bullet', 'dig deep in my pockets', and have the surgery in Rome. He's not a happy chappy, and urges me to have a consultation with the UK's premier neuro-surgeon, Mr Henry Marsh. The same surgeon that operated on classical singer Russell Watson a few months earlier. An appointment is set up.
A couple of weeks later I'm sitting in Mr Marsh's office going over my latest MRI from Italy. Mr Marsh is an extremely interesting and charismatic man with the appearance and mannerisms of Dr Emmett Brown, the time travel pioneer from Back To The Future. Like Spallone, he is confident that he can remove all if not most of the tumour. He acknowledges that there will be some risks, such as hemiparesis and death, and is keen to point out a major blood vessel and bundle of nerve fibres on my MRI. Take a nick out of the former and there'll be ten pints of my blood on the ceiling in a blink of an eye. Slice the latter and my best friend becomes a wheelchair. Nonetheless, I accept the offer of surgery, and Mr Marsh is openly astonished at my enthusiasm that I'll be awake throughout the operation. I explain to him that I remember vividly the lecture in my Clinical Neuropsychology module back in 1995. The lecturer explaining that in some cases neurosurgery is best performed whilst under local anaesthetic. This minimises the possibility of paralysis, hemiparesis or loss of some other function such as speech or memory.
No date is set, but he tells me that he'll fit me in on the next available Monday (the day he operates) at St Georges, Tooting. In the meantime I've got a wedding date on the 6th January. My wedding.
Risk? I 'shit' it! If it wasn't for man taking risks we'd still be in the stone age! Can you imagine Christopher Columbus saying, "I'm not getting on that boat, its too risky". Or Winston Churchill commenting, "War with Germany? I don't think so, too risky mate".
We return to the UK to tell my oncologist that I'm going to 'bite the bullet', 'dig deep in my pockets', and have the surgery in Rome. He's not a happy chappy, and urges me to have a consultation with the UK's premier neuro-surgeon, Mr Henry Marsh. The same surgeon that operated on classical singer Russell Watson a few months earlier. An appointment is set up.
A couple of weeks later I'm sitting in Mr Marsh's office going over my latest MRI from Italy. Mr Marsh is an extremely interesting and charismatic man with the appearance and mannerisms of Dr Emmett Brown, the time travel pioneer from Back To The Future. Like Spallone, he is confident that he can remove all if not most of the tumour. He acknowledges that there will be some risks, such as hemiparesis and death, and is keen to point out a major blood vessel and bundle of nerve fibres on my MRI. Take a nick out of the former and there'll be ten pints of my blood on the ceiling in a blink of an eye. Slice the latter and my best friend becomes a wheelchair. Nonetheless, I accept the offer of surgery, and Mr Marsh is openly astonished at my enthusiasm that I'll be awake throughout the operation. I explain to him that I remember vividly the lecture in my Clinical Neuropsychology module back in 1995. The lecturer explaining that in some cases neurosurgery is best performed whilst under local anaesthetic. This minimises the possibility of paralysis, hemiparesis or loss of some other function such as speech or memory.
No date is set, but he tells me that he'll fit me in on the next available Monday (the day he operates) at St Georges, Tooting. In the meantime I've got a wedding date on the 6th January. My wedding.
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