Shite or flight?

The diary of a hypochondriac

Still April 2012

Fight, flight or shite?

Apparently a recent study suggested that those horrible little nausea inducing butterflies that flit and glide around our stomach in moments of great stress, fear or trauma or in my case most things are performing a function other than inducing desperation.

They are busy pumping your blood to the extremities of your body to prepare you to run or fight, well at least that is what the men in white coats said to me. Fight or flight hey, well as a man who struggled over 20 years ago to pass his science Gcse’s I do not consider myself qualified to confirm or deny this theory but I have a few, well one of my own.

These brave champions of human science have probably spent decades and millions thoroughly researching this but how? That is what I want to know. Did these men and women of science have to place themselves in ever increasing positions of danger to record these results?

How do they orchestrate the tests?  I have visions of white coated boffins on the plains of the Serengeti wrestling lions and tigers and bears oh my! While other white coated scientists gather around them carefully placing electrodes on parts of the body and studiously recording the results.

“Look, Kevin didn’t seem that scared right up until the Lion ate his arm”

How many of these selfless citizens of science have perished for this study, too many I say. Sacrificed, in the never ending quest to explain the mysteries of the stomach butterfly. But my real concern here is with all this wanton loss of life, why have they yet to discover the third variable in all of this; shite.

Having recently found myself abandoned in Poland, heart cracked into pieces by a cardiologists daughter (yes I am still banging on about it) I spent my last 10 days in the Polish city of Wroclaw being taunted perpetually by the crafty tummy butterflies. Yes there were moments (oh so brief) of fight, some to of flight but the resounding twenty four hour response of my stomach was an overwhelming urge to shite. What the scientists seemed to have failed to grasp is there is a small third category of which I belong to the shiters.

Being a shiter is a major hindrance. It must have been a nightmare for any of my ancestors who suffered this same malady. If you had needed to flight from battle, stumbling over inhospitable terrain as fast as your little armour covered legs could carry you; the last thing you would have needed was the urge to shite. Somewhere in the history books there is a poor Reichhold, crouched by a bush, holding his armour to the side, bottom in the air shitting away as the axe wielding murderous hordes drew ever closer, what an end!

There is really no situation when these dreadful butterflies creep in, that unloading your bowels on the nearest toilet is going to be of help but you are what you are and I am not a fighter, not a flighter, just a shiter.

So come the revolution, Armageddon, or the apocalypse; some will fight, some will flee but if you need to find me I will be availing myself on the nearest lavatory.

The diary of a Hypochondriac April 2012

Diary of a hypochondriac

 April 2012

Bad heart

I have been convinced now for over two decades that I suffer from a bad heart. There has been something wrong with it for as long as I can remember; I think it all stems back to a fateful night 19 years ago on the hallowed grounds of Farnham Art College. Under the influence of some particularly potent LSD at some point during the evening I found myself lying on my back on the damp grass of the field shouting at my friend Pier to call a helicopter as I was having a heart attack!! A helicopter was what I needed not a communal garden ambulance yes a helicopter maybe even Air force One could have swept down and come to my aid? All I knew was an ambulance just wasn’t going to cut it.

Unfortunately for me my friend seemed more concerned with fiddling with checking his hair (a full time occupation for him) and getting back to the bevvy of young art school girls back at the house. Somehow I found myself back at the house sometime later and was put to bed dribbling and raving about hear attacks by a pretty girl in her bedroom. To be truthful even all these years later I think ending up in her bed had been part of my initial plan but not alone drooling, humiliated and half way through a cardiac arrest! To this day I can still remember everything going black and then my heart stopped.

I awoke the following morning to discover my heart hadn’t stopped after all, I did my best to artfully hide the pool of dribble I had left covering it with a pillow. Thanked the lord for my resurrection and bounded out of the room happy to be alive. This warm feeling was short lived however when I saw the expressions on the faces of my friend and the four girls who I suspect he had managed to seduce while I had been dying. Suddenly the joy of being alive dissipated as quickly as it had come and forlornly I left the house and got the train back to London. Incidentally the pretty girl never called.

This is just one of many examples of the trouble my bad heart has got me into over the years.

Another drug related heart incident I can recall took place on the railway track of a small wealthy Berkshire village. That night I spent several hours walking up and down the railway tracks having the longest heart attack on record. My companion that night was a burly fierce faced small town crook, feared in the local communities which wasn’t say much when you considered the local area consisted mainly of very wealthy privately educated toffs. Anyway this terror inducing crime lord spent the evening trudging up and down the train tracks alongside me showing a patience, kindness and tenderness I shall never forget. I will not reveal his name as I suspect it is an image that will not help his career if he is still in the same line of work.

So why out of my multitude of ailments and believe me there are a lot, too many to count though I love trying; have I chosen to start on my bad heart?

Well the answer is it seems an appropriate moment as for the first time in my 36 years of life I do genuinely have a bad heart. Its broken, shattered, splintered and by a cardiologist’s daughter no less. Done by the seed of a heart doctor the comedic nature of this is not entirely lost on me.

Until but a few weeks ago our marriage plans were going full steam ahead, as I was being indoctrinated sorry I mean welcomed into the ways of Polish Catholicism (a subject for a later date)

On a recent visit to her family home my one time prospective father in law decided to bestow on me an early pre-marital gift. It was a Saturday evening when he suggested I followed him down to the basement, apprehensively I followed like any good son in law. We went down some darkened stairs and then I found myself in a room that was either a doctor’s surgery or a place reserved for medical and psychological experimentation I prayed for the first. There he turned to me and I was instructed to remove my shirt.so there I am stood in front of this man my hirsute and less than impressive chest defrocked. He approaches me with a razor, now I start to feel true fear but am pleasantly surprised when he begins to shave parts of my chest with the most tender of touches. The intimacy of the moment was soon broken when he produced some electrical contraption that looked like a lie detector machine or maybe even an electrical interrogation unit. Was I about to become a victim of the strangest case of rendition?  Carefully orchestrated over years; culminating in tricking me to move to Poland nine months before. I suddenly felt like a cross between an inmate at Guantanamo and Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents. It was all alright though it turned out to be an Italian made (it did look stylish) portable ECG machine. Half an hour later I found myself sat back on the sofa clutching my own heart print out, a blood pressure monitor and a lovely black leather diary to record the results in. A hypochondriac’s diary! Why had I not thought of this before?