How my health robbed me of the joy of working this Christmas

It’s a curious thing to stroll into hospital feeling as fit as any string instrument in the orchestra, then wake up in the ICU sporting more tubes than the London Underground.

The skill and care of medical and nursing staff should not be forgotten this Christmas.

For the best part of a decade, since my daughters stopped being proper children and became monstrous all-knowing mini-adults, I have been one of the noble volunteers who work through the Christmas and New Year period, making sure our subscribers receive those sections of the paper I can be trusted to edit.

I take a perverse pleasure (“Because you’re a pervert,” says my wife, reading over my shoulder) in heading to the office through empty streets, knowing my absent colleagues are desperately grasping for ideas to amuse their dead-eyed kids through the bleak expanse of school holidays, battling the zombie crowds and inflated prices to do things they (and usually the kids) hate.

There’s a camaraderie among the skeleton staff – not quite the trenches of Flanders, but close, I imagine – as the brownie points accrue and you plan your grown-up holiday at the end of January in half-price accommodation, laughing like a musketeer at the notion of having to book a restaurant.

There’s a camaraderie among the skeleton staff in the office over the Christmas period. Picture: istock

This odious degree of smugness was, inevitably, asking to be punished one day; and so I found myself peering with bovine incomprehension at a CT scan in a respiratory specialist’s office last month.

For background, I have had an area of fibrosis in my right lung monitored for some years; it’s what my father was dying of before Britain’s Covid policemen decided to speed things up by whisking him away.

I have borne the investigations with what I regard as admirable silence, stoicism and fortitude, despite my family’s insistence that I turn into a big self-pitying Jessie when testing time comes around. I’d got a little complacent, used to the annual verdict of “No change, see you next year,” until this time my body decided to give me a Christmas surprise, with a tiny dot of suspicious activity.

A swift PET scan, an inconclusive lung biopsy, followed by a core biopsy (named perhaps for the apple corer it feels like they use), furrowed brows, then an appointment with an ace cardiothoracic surgeon. “Nice to meet you,” I said; “No one really wants to meet me,” he smiled.

The good news in all of this was that thanks to the vigilance of my specialist the problem was picked up so early that surgery was an option; the bad news was that the surgery was “routine, but major”: so on Friday, December 13 (superstitious, me?) I enjoyed a five-hour open thoracotomy to remove the offending upper lobe of my right lung, which left me looking and feeling like Wartius Maximus after a tough afternoon in the Colosseum.

It’s a curious thing to stroll into hospital feeling as fit as any string instrument in the orchestra, then wake up in the Intensive Care Unit sporting more tubes than the London Underground and experiencing what the medical professionals gently understate as “some discomfort”.

Anyway, all done now, thanks to the extraordinarily conscientious skill of the surgical and nursing staff who cared for me; and I can look forward to exposing my elegantly bite-shaped scar to the surfers at Angourie next month, scowling and muttering “Sorry dudes, but I won’t be going back in after this.”

To judge by the touching response to my news, nowhere near as many people as I had feared wish me dead, although there is a decidedly un-Christian woman reader of this paper who wouldn’t miss me.

After every column I write she sends me a spiteful email, not appreciating how much I enjoy them.

She usually damns me for being disrespectful to our politicians (she may have a point), although last time she went off-piste to inform me that rather than practising anti-Semitism, the heroes sneaking by night into Australia’s Jewish communities to burn cars and paint their witty slogans are simply “expressing despair” over the problems of the Middle East.

To tempt her back from that poisonous precipice to the realm of the merely abusive, can I reaffirm that I believe our Energy Minister is a prize chump, duped by monorail salesmen who’ve persuaded him that cramming billions of taxpayer dollars into their pockets will keep a lid on the world’s temperatures, from Lapland to the Hindu Kush.

I’m sorry to be rude, but it takes my mind off the pain in my ribs.