Monday 4 April 2016

Mortality - Prague Diaries.

This last week I've seen my own death in a variety of ways. Okay, maybe I’m being over dramatic, but there have been three instances this week where I have confronted my own mortality.
A major difference between the UK and Czech is when you go to the doctors for a routine thing like a headache in Prague, they think nothing of packing you off for blood tests, whereas in the UK a blood test is kept for a special occasion, like an autopsy. Now, unlike some members of my family, (it’s okay Marg, I’m not naming names,) I am not much of a hypochondriac, but waiting for test results starts the what ifs ringing in your mind; what if the indigestion is an ulcer, what if the sleepiness is diabetes, what if the headaches are an incurable tumour. I started planning for worst case scenarios, started composing letters to loved ones - I even wrote a will. I was ready to die. Of course the tests all said I was healthy, even my blood pressure was normal. But there was one thing, one thing that keeps cropping up and one thing that might eventually kill me, yes you guessed it, cholesterol. Good stuff was low which is bad, bad high which is also bad. Time to quit the sausages and find my Lycra cycling shorts.
But before I could get out on the bike I had a little job to do in Estonia. I love flying, I even love turbulence which gives the whole flight a fairground thrill feel, so the bumpy flight home was no problem at all. Nor was the announcement about peanut allergies, although that did make me think how horrible it must be to be one pressurised cabin away from a serious anaphylactic shock. No, my plane problem was the man sitting next to me flicking through pictures of handguns on his phone. What do you do when a man is flicking through gun photos on his mobile? Especially in a week when plane hijackings were the latest think from the Eighties to make a comeback. He's not technically doing anything wrong but he's doing something a bit creepy. If it is illegal to joke about having a bomb on a plane, surely looking at photos of weapons would also be frowned upon. Was he choosing which one he was going to use to take over the plane? I thought for a moment about calling the cabin crew but then thought how stupid I'd look if it was a false alarm. Did I really want to embarrass myself?  Surely being the victim of a terrorist attack would be preferable to making a scene. So I did what every good Brit would do. I ignored it and tried to sleep while wondering what it would be like to die on a hijacked plane.
My final brush with the grim reaper came as a direct consequence of the first. “You need more exercise,” my doc said, so I dusted down my old bike, gave it a spray of WD40 and whoosh, I was off. I was loving the feel of the wind in my hair, the lactose acid in my legs and the phlegm in my lungs. Yep, it was all going well until the wheels came off, literally. Crunch went my back wheel, I wobbled, lurched to the right, where seconds before a dumper truck had trundled past me. Luckily for me the gears had kept the back wheel from leaving the bike completely so no harm was done to me but the damage was done to the bike.
But this was not my brush with death, no, that was still to come.  You see I was a thirty minute walk from home, the back wheel was jammed so I couldn't push the bike home. I had to carry the bloody thing across my back like a wounded calf. I was glad I didn't understand comments in Czech I heard as I walked which no doubt translated to something along the lines of, you’re meant to ride it, not it you. The sun was beating down and my water bottle was empty. I trudged through the streets with the beast on my back. By the time I got home I was sweating, breathless and tired; my heart was no longer healthy and my blood pressure not normal. As I gasped for breath black wisps swam in my eyes, this was it, I was going to die. 

But you’ll be pleased to know I lived to fight another day. But now I am very aware that death lurks around every corner and even when you try to stave it off in one way  you could be putting yourself at risk in another.

No comments:

Post a Comment