Jeremy Clarkson on his heart scare: Was I days from death? Maybe
As I’ve discovered, a heart attack is like bankrupty: it happens gradually and then suddenly.
I have written fairly often about the wearisome effects of growing old. You wake up every morning and a part of your body that worked perfectly well yesterday has become wonky in some way. Then you have to watch the television with the subtitles turned on, and then you can’t read them because you can’t remember where you put your spectacles.
But what I hadn’t realised is that all of these fairly trivial things are nothing more than precursors for the main event. The day when you wake up and you have had it. You can describe this process in the same way that Ernest Hemingway described bankruptcy: it happens gradually and then suddenly.
As I hope you noticed, I haven’t been writing this column for the past couple of weeks. This is because I went to a small island in the Indian Ocean for a holiday. And it was there, on day four, the vultures stopped circling and swooped down for a closer look.
I was at the breakfast table and when I stood up to leave, I had to take a moment to make sure my limbs were working properly. You see old people doing this all the time, steadying themselves when they stand, and you may wonder why. Now I know. You can’t trust your body any more to do as it’s told.
Later that day I needed to swim from a boat to the beach. I lined myself up for the dive, but then in mid-air I thought, “Hang on a minute, can I still do this?” So I attempted to turn it into a jump, which meant I hit the water like a labrador. It was an almighty belly flop, and when you have a belly the size of mine, that causes the sort of pain you measure in acres.
Then there was the swim. It wasn’t far, maybe the length of two swimming pools. But when I finally reached the beach, there was more water in my lungs than there is in Lake Superior, and I was mostly dead. I’ve never struggled with swimming before, and now, suddenly, I can’t do it any more.
Nor could I descend a flight of stairs, not without holding someone’s hand. There’s just no sense that my knees can handle the pressure, and as a result I fear I’ll soon have what I’m old enough to call “a tumble”.
I’m not exaggerating. These problems all manifested themselves in one day, which made the rest of my holiday extremely relaxing because all I did was sit in a chair drinking wine and eating cheese.
Back at home, though, the sudden deterioration began to gather pace. I woke on Wednesday morning not feeling too good. I was clammy and there was a tightness in my chest. Naturally, I ignored these things and, after loading 30 pigs into the slaughterhouse school bus, I noticed that I had pins and needles in my left arm.
For some reason Alex Salmond — whose bankruptcy arrived very suddenly last week — popped into my head, so a doctor arrived and then I was in an ambulance and then I was at a hospital in a gown that lets all the nurses see your bottom.
Luckily, there’s a lot of me, so there’s a lot of skin to which ECG electrodes can be fastened. There were so many that with someone like Rishi Sunak, I suspect they’d have to fit some of them to the roof of his mouth and up each nostril. They then took blood and x-rayed me and wheeled in a vast range of portable machines that go ping. And pretty soon they all decided that I wasn’t having a heart attack.
But then one of the doctors, who was so senior he wasn’t even a mister, decided that before sending me home with a headache pill and a “fraud of the week” certificate, he’d put me in a big Polo mint. And after coming out of that, I was off to the operating theatre. Because my bankruptcy was most definitely just around the corner. Days away? “Maybe,” he said.
It seems that of the arteries feeding my heart with nourishing blood, one was completely blocked and the second of three was heading that way. So he made a hole in my wrist, inserted his Dyno-Rod equipment and went in for a closer look. God, it’s weird, lying there and feeling a metal pipe with a camera on the end wiggling its way round your shoulder and through your chest.
The question was this. Were the arteries so ruined that I’d need an emergency heart bypass? Or could he use his Dyno-Rods and some ultrasonic battering rams to loosen them up before inserting a stent? Which is a sort of Brillo pad that’s used to keep the blood vessels open.
Mercifully, this turned out to be possible. But it took two hours and at one point it felt like he’d put a Hoover pipe up my arm, along with a pile driver, and was busy inside my heart with a B&Q chisel and hammer gift set. It wasn’t especially painful. Just odd.
The next morning I went home, and here I am, two hours later, writing this and sort of thinking, “Crikey, that was close.” I have no idea why I had felt clammy the previous day or why I’d had those pins and needles. I certainly wasn’t having a heart attack. But if it hadn’t looked that way, I never would have been sent to hospital and fed into that Polo mint.
Which means I’d be sitting here now, eyeing up the wine and deciding what enormous meaty thing I’d like for supper, completely unaware that soon there’d be a bright light, followed by some elongated silence.
Now, thanks to all those tremendous people at the John Radcliffe in Oxford and all of their extraordinary machines, here I am wondering what water tastes like and if it’s possible to make celery interesting. Because I’m going to try to prove that ageing doesn’t have to be gradual, then sudden. It can be gradual and then gradual some more.
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