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?