Call the Midlife (4 page)

‘Ah, Mr Evans, don’t worry about what’s going on down there. It happens all the time – as does the fruity banter you were entering into with the nurses.’

What?

‘All you need concern yourself with is the fact that you did the right thing in coming to see us because we located two polyps. One quite large and the other one not so. Anyway, we’ve snipped them out and that usually does the job. But we’re duty bound to send them off for a biopsy so that’s what we’ve done. We’ll see what happens from there. So far, however, so good.’

Don’t you just love medical professionals when they tell you everything’s all right? Even if it’s only ‘for now’.

I was on a golf course a few days later when Indiana Bond rang me with the biopsy results.

As his number came up I excused myself from the order of play, again my cancer-mode calm surprising myself.

‘I’m delighted to say your polyps biopsy came back ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR.’

Wow, what a message! People who have experienced this will tell anyone who hasn’t that hearing those words CHANGES YOUR LIFE ON THE SPOT.

By far the best message I have ever received.

I discovered subsequently that polyps are the chandeliers which cancer needs to hang on to so it can then set about growing in your colon and killing you. Without the polyps, cancer is a monkey with no arms or legs, it has nowhere to cling to and nothing to cling on with. Get rid of these little polyp fuckers and cancer’s party is yours to ruin.

The saddest and maddest thing is that if my dad and both my uncles had been able to benefit from this same procedure circa 1980, there’s copious evidence to suggest they would still be around today.

And there I was, that was me done, completely cured. And not only of troublesome polyp syndrome but also, as an added bonus, no longer hostage to my thus far self-imposed life sentence of ‘don’t tell me, I’d rather not know’ syndrome.

Completely hypocritically, the phrase ‘I’d rather not know’ now makes my blood boil and causes me to spontaneously spit bullets of ire. ‘I’d rather not know’ is one of life’s great non-phrases. Because not knowing is NOT AN OPTION.

Eventually you will know one way or another, come what may, whether you want to or not. It’s just a question of whether you will know
in time
. Whether you will still have a chance of doing
anything to save your own life
. Or whether you will have no choice but to succumb to a HORRIBLE, shitty, DEGRADING, long, SLOW and utterly miserable DEATH.

Like my poor old dad did. HIDEOUS and HUMILIATING.

He withered and wilted and disappeared in front of our constantly crying eyes: day by day, inch by inch, breath by breath.

Martin Joseph Evans – once a stout and sturdy jocular man who wanted little else but to survive the war, marry his childhood sweetheart and then give his family everything he possibly could. A man who ended his days ebbing, wasting, and fading away until there was nothing left of him. Eaten away from the inside out, a hale and
hearty fifteen-stone force of nature eventually reduced to a pitiful six-and-a-half stone of dead and decayed skin and bone.

And of course death to one brings pain to many. The way Dad died devastated me and still does to this day. It also completely fucked me up for years to come, much more than I realized for a long time.

So please allow me to reiterate: when it comes to detecting any potentially fatal disease, the phrase ‘I’d rather not know’ should not be anywhere on your radar. You will get to know eventually and you will definitely wish you’d done something to get to know sooner.

There are thousands of people, millions of hours and billions of pounds of research, development, equipment and treatments, waiting to save you from yourself.

The very least you can do is what little it takes to help them work their magic.

As you have probably gathered by now, I have become an annoying and committed don’t-fear-the-check-up convert. An evangelical reborn pain in the arse, following my own very real and bloody message from the arse – and I offer no apologies for being so.

But here’s the thing: once I had seen the fire of my life light up again in front of me, burning brighter than ever, I became intent on embracing every single second of whatever time I might have left.

I made a promise to myself that I would set aside a serious chunk of time to figure out how to squeeze every single drop of JOY, EXCITEMENT, LOVE and FASCINATION out of anything, everything and anyone whom I come into contact with.

One day life will kill us.

The sooner we accept that the better.

And then suddenly there is so much of life to think about.

How about that phrase we often hear in old movies when a bespectacled crotchety doctor informs a soon-to-be-deceased unfortunate, ‘It is with great regret that I must inform you it would be most remiss of me if I did not advise you to get your affairs in order.’

Well, why wait until then?

We’re all in the same boat from the moment we’re born. Let’s stop fannying around, get our affairs in order now, and free ourselves up to roar like never before.

The Doc

Top Ten Bits the Over-40s Need to Worry About:

My doc’s name is Edwina but she always abbreviates it to Ed, which makes most people that haven’t seen her presume she’s a man. Because the world’s like that. I’m sure it’s a gaffe she encourages so she can toy with the consequences.

She also asked me specifically to include how old she was if I were to include her in the book.

‘I can’t stand any of that “never ask a woman her age” nonsense.’

So, she’s fifty-nine and will be sixty a month after I notch up my own half-century on 1 April 2016.

Maybe she wanted me to include her age because she doesn’t look anything like fifty-nine. Forty more like. She also happens to be beautiful. In a very Mrs Robinson way, but a bit more aloof and untouchable, like a work of art.

She’s tall and strong with a handsome face, big brown eyes, deep and sparkling, separated by a strong nose, her lips almost criminally
alluring. Totally hypnotic. Luscious shiny waves of dark brown hair, tinged with vapour trails of grey. Even her fingers are spectacular.

‘What can I help you with today, Mr Evans, another steroid shot for your myriad allergies?’

I am the most hysterically allergic person she has ever tested. I suffer from
seven
different pollen allergies alone.

‘No thanks, I’m fine on the hay fever front at the moment. I am here instead on behalf of the nation’s – who knows, world’s – midlifers.’

‘Ooh, intriguing. Pray, do tell.’

I explain that I want to know about age-specific health issues for us folks somewhere in the range of forty to seventy. (The more I have researched and thought about this book, the more I have come to the conclusion that the midlife spread is wider than it’s ever been – in a very good way.)

‘Ahhh, hang on a moment.’ She presses a wonderfully clunky button on the vintage grey-and-white intercom machine in front of her. A small red light illuminates. ‘Mrs Lewis, see if Dr T can take my eleven o’clock. Mr Evans is here for a bit of digging.’

Right, that’s it, I was in. We were in.

‘As I see it, we are faced with an increasingly worrying, incalculable and unanswerable problem,’ says Dr Ed. ‘In as much as we are keeping people alive for much longer than is good for either them or the rest of the world. Yet no one has the balls to ask why. And I furthermore suggest we would be much better off letting nature take its course a little more.

‘Dinner parties aren’t better for being longer, they’re better for being more fun, or more engaging or more stimulating. Films can become interminable if they start to drag, as can those dreadful best man’s speeches. I find holidays too wretched if they go on too long. Why should life be any different? Surely, ninety is the absolute tops we should be aiming at. After that, unless nature dictates otherwise, everyone but the Queen should be put out to grass and have done with it.’

That’s why Dr Ed’s ten health issues that over-forties should be
worrying about (see page 25) has a top three many of us might not have expected.

‘The thing about my “top three”, as you like to refer to them – your joints, bones and muscles – is that they may not be directly life-threatening but they very much dictate the quality of your life while you are still here. The vast majority of people spend their whole time faffing around worrying about the things that might kill them – none of which matter if you can’t have a decent time while you still have oxygen in your lungs and your wits about you.

‘If you are able to still move, you’ll be amazed how that will continue to help maintain your health. Stretching, exercise, massages, saunas and steams. Lots and lots of water. Greens, fish, meat. And the crossword and reading to keep the old grey matter ticking over.’

What’s the
number one
thing we can do to improve our health?

‘Oh that’s easy. Choose your parents well. Ha ha! Good, strong, healthy parentage is the gold star when it comes to the school of preventative medicine.’ She’s now guffawing.

‘Good genes are second only to luck in the superhuman stakes. Some people do everything wrong and nothing right, yet still manage to outlive the rest of us. Entirely unfair, but then again like so much in life. Bad luck makes good people better. Good luck makes bad people even more of a pain in the backside.’

Thirty to fifty are our golden years in health terms, according to Ed. The time when time itself and our maturing years have least influence on our aches, pains and unmentionables.

‘Thirty-five can be a bit iffy on the gout and testicles front, but other than that you’re pretty much clear. Approaching your half-century, beware of shingles and dreaded blood pressure – that’s a killer waiting to happen. Stress is a huge factor, although exactly why, nobody really knows.

‘Also, do anything and everything you can not to get fat. Imagine you’re a Morris Minor and then one day someone comes along and sticks the body of a double-decker bus on your chassis. That’s what happens when we start to pile on the pounds. Same engine, same fuel tank, same suspension and yet somehow we’re surprised when
we begin to break down. Sometimes we humans and our lack of logic completely bamboozles me.’

Dr Ed doesn’t do fat.

‘Fatness leads to lethargy which leads to immobility, which leads to more fat, more lethargy and eventually seizure, which is the beginning of the end. Not to mention diabetes, which can be horrible and costs the Treasury billions in health care.

‘Use it or lose it is the key thing to remember as we get older with all things physical and mental. This is so important. Especially when it comes to your muscles and your brain, which of course is a muscle anyway. As you get older you need to keep moving, which means you need to move more in the first place. Your whole life in fact. Just don’t ever stop. It’s much easier to stay fit than get fit, to maintain rather than rebuild.’

Dr Ed pauses for a moment and plucks at her bottom lip with one of those long fingers of hers.

‘What else is really important?’ she muses.

And then she
screams
:

‘Oh yes: DON’T BLOODY RETIRE! Whatever you do – DO NOT RETIRE! Unless you absolutely have to or absolutely want to – and you have to be so sure that you want to. Certainly don’t retire because you think you should. So many of my friends in the medical profession have retired and literally fallen off their perch a few months later.’

She cackles and then checks herself.

‘Well, actually it is OK to retire as long as one doesn’t stop being interested and engaged in oneself, the people around and the world in general. But we must always retain a getting-up-and-going-to-bed schedule. This is vital for keeping a shape to our lives. Decide on a healthy regime and make a promise to yourself to stick to it. Do not let it become a choice. And if you do miss an alarm, or press the snooze button once too often, fine yourself in some way. There has to be a consequence to everything we do. When that stops being the case, things begin to go seriously off track.’

What about all the dreaded cancers?

‘Catching cancer early is the absolute name of the game. More people now survive cancer than don’t, but I cannot over-emphasize how important early diagnosis is. You are crazy if you don’t get checked for any cancers you may be particularly vulnerable to. On a regular basis. Or, should you suspect anything in the slightest untoward. The only fear one need have is the fear of doing nothing.’

Pause.

And the cue:

Another glorious outburst.

‘And don’t accept ANYTHING that leaves you feeling unsure or uneasy in the slightest.’

What does she mean exactly?

‘What I mean is when things start to creak and threaten to drop off or break down or show signs of wear and tear, if you can, get them fixed immediately. Or at least die trying. DO NOT TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER from yourself or anyone else unless you absolutely have no choice in the matter. And even then I’m not quite so sure.’