58. At the End of The day

This will be my last regular posting.

I started writing down my thoughts and experiences and posting them in a blog when I realised that I was well at last and probably had more than just a few months to live.   I felt terrific and as happy as I ever had done.  For the first time, I understood just how close I had come to death.

Since the first posting in January 2010, I have had visitors from every continent except from mainland South America.  I have a regular visitor who is in Trinidad but as far as I’m concerned, Trinidad is the Caribbean and not South America even though it’s only 7 miles off the coast of Venezuela.  

I was very excited in August when I had a visitor from Guayaquil in Ecuador but I found out later that it was someone from England sitting in an Internet Café on her way to the Galapagos Islands so that doesn’t count.  There have been visitors from 54 different countries and 632 different towns or cities.

At the end of 2009 Caroline felt that my palingenesis had advanced sufficiently and that I was mentally strong enough for her to tell me thing that until then, she hadn’t.  (I’ve just discovered ‘palingenesis’ and I love it.  Caroline says that it’s pretentious to use it but it’s staying in.  It means exactly what I want to say.)

She told me about the senior doctor in the Cayman hospital who told her that there was nothing more medically that could be done for me and she should just accept it.   He went so far as to discharge me and call the Hospice and ask them to start caring for me but Caroline refused to take me home from hospital.

"I'm not taking him," she told them and because I was disabled and unable to walk or look after myself, there was nothing much they could do about it and so I stayed.

I was blissfully unaware of all that but when I was out of the woods, Caroline told me about it.  The only memory I had of that particular doctor was of him standing over me one day as I was lying in bed.  

He was totally ignoring me while he made flirty and suggestive remarks to a nurse who was standing on the other side of my bed.  He seemed to have completely forgotten that I was there, three feet below him and he carried on making more and more outrageous comments and suggestions to her while she became more and more uncomfortable and embarrassed.  When he started to tell her how he wanted to rub sun oil into her thighs, even I - a man of the pre-PC era - felt his behaviour had gone too far.  It was blatant sexual harassment of the worst kind.

About 15 months after that, I was walking in a long corridor in the hospital at about 9 o’clock at night.  The corridor was empty, apart from one other person, a doctor in his white coat, walking about ten yards ahead of me.  I had been visiting a friend who had been admitted the day before. A nurse came out of a side room.  

Immediately, the doctor, presumably unaware that I was close behind him, made a comment about her bottom.  The nurse said nothing but went back into the room she had just come out of.  Even though he had his back to me, I instantly realised who the doctor was.

“Dr Cummins!” I called out.  He turned around and looked at me.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember me?”

“No,” he said.

“I’m Terry Wilton,” I told him.  “Remember me now?  Liver problems.  Last year.”

“No. I’m afraid not.”  He turned to walk away.

“You must do,” I insisted.  “I was in and out of here for about ten months.  You were seeing me all the time and then eventually I went to Miami for a transplant.”

“No, sorry.  I’ve never seen you before,” he said dismissively and turned away again.

I flipped and I shouted at him, “So, as well as being a totally fucking incompetent doctor and a sexist, predatory pig, you’re a bleedin’ liar too!”

I felt good and when the following week my GP told me that I had frightened him, I felt even better, not just because I had startled and alarmed him but because my GP told me he had let slip that he had known instantly who I was.

Doctor Cummins didn’t know Caroline very well and when he told her that mine was a hopeless case, she (so I’ve been told by others) first of all went bananas and then went over his head, off island to Miami.   You can tell who won and I don’t think it was ever really much of a contest.

Caroline also told me that the transplant team at Broward hospital, Fort Lauderdale was divided as to whether it was worthwhile and responsible to put me on the transplant list and how it was one man’s casting vote that gave me, literally, the chance of a lifetime.   

She also told me that the person who had died and whose family had given permission for his organs to be used to save my life and the lives of several other people too, had been a 58-year-old man.

When I had absorbed all that, she began to tell me what a difficult patient I was and how completely bonkers I had been for several months.   My lack of lucidity and memories was, in many ways, a good thing.   It meant that I had no real sense of the passage of time and so the dull, boring months of confinement in Intensive Care, the ward and rehab, passed without any grumbling or complaining from me.  (I have been told that the last sentence is completely untrue but as that’s just someone else’s opinion, it’s staying in.)

Caroline also told me of the roster of family and friends that she organised to come over to Florida to visit me in order to give me something to look forward to and to be with me at the times she had to be back at work in Cayman.   Sadly, I have virtually no memories of any of those visitors and apart from the transcript that Roger made of a particularly stupid and unintentionally funny conversation that I had with a doctor, no proof that any of them were there.   I’m sorry if you were one of them but if I was as embarrassing to be with as I was when Roger was with me, it is probably just as well that I have no memory of it.

Apparently, for a week or so, even though I can only speak English, I would only watch Spanish language TV channels and I was hooked on their soaps.   Caroline says that if she switched it to Fox I would throw a major tantrum.   As a matter of fact, I still would - but for different reasons.

I was also certain that some days had two consecutive nights.   That’s hard to explain and you may not understand it but what used to happen was that I would wake up, look at the clock and see that it was perhaps seven o’clock.  I’d think to myself, “It’ll be daylight soon.   Nearly time for breakfast.”  But daylight didn’t come and nor did breakfast.   This happened often and it was very confusing.   I suppose that I must have been sleeping through all the daylight hours.

Caroline says now that I was not sleeping through the days.  I was confused because I was, “fucking bonkers.”  - a medical term, she assures me – and I had no idea of the passage of time.

In January last year, I suddenly thought that if I had died my grandson, who was 21 months old at the time, 5000 miles away in England and whom I had met only once and couldn’t remember, would never have heard about any of my experiences.   He would never have really known what sort of person his Grandpa was.   It was always with William in mind that I wrote the first, subsequent and even this piece.  (Yes William.  Grandpa used to swear sometimes and Gamma swears a lot.)

I sat on the porch, typing away, with the startling blue Caribbean Sea in front of me, the parrots squawking in the palms around and the majestic frigate birds making graceful arcs in the sky above me, thinking that this was probably how Somerset Maugham and Dick Francis, who was living on Grand Cayman at the time, had done their writing.   All my postings were written like that.  It’s somehow not the same in the late autumnal murk and the depressing winter gloom of Winchmore Hill.  I’ve written little in the UK. 

This is the Cayman parrot.  When we first arrived there were lots of them.  They were as common as the magpie is here.  Numbers dropped during the five years we lived on Cayman and now they are only seen out of town.

These are frigate birds and this photograph is here for me.  It’s me being self indulgent.  Some mornings, I would lie on my recliner in the shade of the porch and look up to see as many as fifteen of them wheeling around riding the thermals.  They never did anything but just glide around and in five years, I never saw any frigate bird flap its wings.

So this is it.   Check back occasionally please because if I ever do get the urge to get something off my chest, I will post it here.   I hope that any that you may have read have been of some interest.

This is my 58th posting.  When I put up the first one more than a year ago, I never thought that there would be so many.  I certainly never intended to put up something every week.  You can find any that you missed by clicking on ‘Blog Archive’ at the top of this page on the right hand side. 

What have you learnt about life and me over the last 57 weeks?

1.    Everyone should be on the organ donor list.

2.    On the first Sunday after Valentines Day, tea should be taken with the lights off.  Sports Day

3.    It is possible to categorise your relationships by using  Wilton's Scale of Relationships

4.    The way to make perfect toast. Toast - the proper way

5.    Burns is a crap poet. Hesperody

6.    A handshake is always preferable to a hug. Hugging and Kissing

7.    As a greeting, a kiss is only acceptable when the recipient is family. Hugging and Kissing

8.    The ‘high five’ between white men is embarrassing. Island times

9.    Everyday maths is fun and interesting.

10.  Most inhabitants of Islington in London are a little strange. Chocolate pastry

11.  The authorities in Islington are money-grabbing, thieving bastards. Bloody Islington!

12.  There is only one right way to make tea but many wrong ways. Chocolate pastry    &    Tea and spuds

13.  People whose surname begins with a ‘W’ are destined to a life of disappointment. A - Z

14.  Mick Jagger is not a great cricketer. Name Dropping

15.  I never moan but I do sometimes observe and comment on that observation. I'm Merely Observing!

16.  ‘Christmas confetti’ in Christmas cards is a pain in the arse. Christmas Cards

17.  Some road signs are completely pointless. Signs of the times

18.  There’s a cure for arthritis but it is so disgusting that no one will take it. At last! A cure for arthritis

19.  All-seater football stadia lack atmosphere. Where are the pork pies?

20.  Tipping is a vile anachronism. That won't do nicely!

21.  Middle age seems to end at 60.  At 61 you are officially old. Will you still be sending me a Valentine .... ?

22.  December 26^th 2010 was the best day in the history of the world – EVER! 'THE KING' and Cricket

23.  Both British television and the climate are wonderful.

24.  I am not a deep thinker. Half way?

25.  Everyone should be on the organ donor list.

If you would ever like to contact me, my e-mail address is:

terrywilton@hotmail.com

I am certainly not soliciting messages but if you do write to me, put BLOG in the subject field so that if I don’t already have your e-mail address, I don’t delete it from my junk box.  I will certainly reply.