Meet
my Dad. That's me on the right, looking slightly embarrassed. This photo was taken on my 70th birthday. It kind of sums him up, in a way.
It hasn't, I have to say, been a terribly easy year. I've always had a strangely dislocated feeling from my family, but since we moved to Brighton and I've been geographically nearer to them, I've reacquainted myself with them, and it has been delightful. At a family get-together last Christmas, though, I had the strangest feeling - that
this would be as good as it gets. I couldn't put my finger on where it came from, but it was quite overwhelming.
Turns out that I was right - at least for a while. In January (as some of you may remember), my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. It's surprising how quickly you get used to it. She started her chemotherapy in the spring, and has just finished it. Her husband and children have been just awesome about it. She's still as bald as a coot, and rejected wearing a wig in favour of a baseball cap more or less straight away. There have obviously been times when she has been weak, but last week she had her last operation for a few weeks. She starts a course of radiotherapy at the end of August.
I surprised myself at how well I reacted to it. I would have expected to be a dribbling, blubbering mess, but I wasn't. The dribbling and blubbering phase of my year has come over the last couple of months. While they were on holiday over the May Bank Holiday in Devon, my dad complained of slight chest pains when my parents went walking on Dartmoor. He's 71, so they expected it to be little more than Angina, but it was more than that.
It turned out that he had a calcified aortic valve (that needed replacing, and I'm choosing to overlook the apparently hereditary aspect of it) and that he also needed a double heart bypass. Over the last few weeks, I have been beside myself with worry, crying intermittently and completely unable to cope with anything with any emotional content contained therein whatsoever.
His appointment was made at the London Heart Hospital for last Tuesday, and I didn't mention it at all on here. His condition is hereditary, so I had to get my heart checked out but, apart from blood pressure that was through the roof, my heart was fine. So, I went to see him last weekend, suspecting that (in contradiction of everything - which was a lot - that I had read up on about heart surgery) it might even be the last time that I spoke to him. I spent a lot of time thinking about the time that we had spent together - about how he had constantly told me that Ted Ditchburn was the greatest goalkeeper of all time, and about how, if I ever got myself into a fight, I should just turn and run - and I mentally prepared myself for the worst. Irrational, I know, but I couldn't control it.
He went into theatre at 8.30 on Tuesday morning, and I received a text message from my mum at 2.00 to say that he was out. He has made remarkable progress since then. He was out of the high dependency ward same day, and was moved from there to intensive care the next morning. They moved him into a normal ward yesterday, and he was walking (albeit somewhat unsteadily) this morning. He's going home on Monday, and we're going to see him tomorrow.
The last few months has felt like a lot of pressure and neither my sister nor my father are out of harm's way yet, but it feels as if some of the weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Moreover, I feel like a better person for it. I've felt myself become more polite with strangers. My nieces are coming to stay with me for the first time next weekend (I'm going to fill them with sugar and buy them puppets, of course). I feel somehow cleansed by it all.
In addition to this, I have seen first hand how well the NHS can treat people - the London Heart Hospital have been outstanding, as have the people at the Haywards Heath hospital that have looked after my sister. Every single person that been involved in their treatment has been amazing. I've noted a couple of people here recently say that the NHS is one of the very few things that people can be proud of, and I had my fingers were crossed that they were right. It turns out that they were.
So, slowly but surely, they're making progress. Dad will be back at home on Monday, and Caroline, my sister, is responding as well as possible to the treatment that she has received. It's early days for both of them but, you know, it's a start. In spite of everything, I've been very superstitious about it all, so I haven't mentioned it on here over the last few weeks. Like I say, just something I wanted to get off my chest.
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