health « Pete Hindle

November 5, 2010

The Mystery of the Five Coffee Shops

I should be writing my NaNoWriMo novel right now, but I’m finding it hard. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you about my scribblings; the reason I’m finding it hard is because it was a year ago that I went into hospital. That was the start of the trail of events that led me back to my hometown, Biggleswade, where I am forced to visit the five coffee shops.

That hospital trip a year ago saved my life, and I am eternally grateful to certain individuals who bundled me into a taxi and made me go to hospital. However, the illness itself was so severe that I have only now just come off the medications I was put on, and it will still be a long time until I am well enough to work. Because of this illness, I now live 250 miles away from nearly all of my friends.

Like I said, it’s been a year now. That year has been a long time for anybody in Newcastle; they’ve all been busy, and where I’ve been watching Star Trek: Enterprise re-runs in my pyjamas, they’ve been working hard. I have had literally nothing to fill my time this year, and anything I have done has tended to make me exhausted… leading to more time on the couch in my jimmy-jams.

Let’s just say I have high hopes of completing NaNoWriMo this year.

One of the pieces of advice that NaNoWriMo headman Chris Baty recommends working in a coffee shop, where you can pick up interesting stories about characters. This is completely not the case in Biggleswade, where there are an amazing five coffee shops within two minutes walk of each other. It’s like a vortex of coffee, but not in a good way!

The mystery of the five coffee shops is that none of them are particularly good. I cringe when I write this, because I expect my favourite shop – the one on the corner, that used to be an off-license where I used to work – to find this humble blogpost and beat me round the ear next time I pop in. However, I would like to assure them that they are much better than the rest, especially the small one on the other side of the town square, who made me a coffee so bad that I almost couldn’t finish it.

I miss my old life in Heaton when I think about this. I miss being able to bump into people I knew and liked in local coffee shops. I miss being able to have conversations with people about the things we liked, such as art. And coffee. I’ve tried to get to events ’round here, but they are too few and far between and to hard to get to – there just isn’t much to do without resorting to going into London, which is extremely tiring and quite alienating.

I’ve worked out it’s going to take me at least another year or two here before I can leave. I’ll need to work, and save up a war-chest, in a town which doesn’t value any of my skills apart from “could lift heavy boxes” (the Bedfordshire region does not need any trained gallery assistants). Maybe by the time I can leave this mangled idea of a town, I’ll have managed to solve the mystery of the five coffee shops.

February 12, 2010

Being on ‘the sick’ is making me sick

Every day that I’m on “the sick” is extremely stressful. It’s very rare that I don’t need to call up some government department related to the job centre and correct them. This involves playing phone tag with uncaring, bored people in phone centres.

I just got off the phone with Atos, the private healthcare company that assess the medical state of sick benefit claimants. They called me this morning for about two seconds, hanging up when I answered. Yesterday, I’d had a call from one of my flatmates in Newcastle, telling me that I’d got a letter from Atos. Of course, I’m not there – I had to move back in with my folks because I was too sick to look after myself back in November. This does make it hard to arrange the interview, but after being on hold for twenty-five minutes we managed it. They did refuse to give me their name though.

I’m lucky; I’m recovering from my illness. There are some people who are trapped, by ill health and poverty, in a constant battle with this bureaucracy. At every point of contact with the agencies set up to support me I’m suspected of fraud, and have to continually prove that I’m not somehow “cheating the system”. To be honest, I don’t think I have enough energy to cheat, as playing it straight is so much hard work – purely because of the lazy people behind the desks, phonelines, and Job Centres.

I doubt that this system will ever be fixed. It seems the ideas of mercy and hospitality are far removed from our society; the instinctive reaction to somebody who is on ‘the sick’ is that they are a scrounger. Personally, I can’t wait to be not sick, or at least not sick enough that I can stop dealing with the mean-spirited stupid people who run these systems. There’s no benefit to be had from them.

December 27, 2009

Health Update 2

‘You have to get well. Being ill is like being attacked, you see? Your body is like a great fortress that has been besieged by invaders. You’ve repelled them, you’ve seen them off, but you have to be good, and marshal your forces and rebuild the walls, refurbish your catapults, clean your cannons, restock your armouries. Do you see?’

Iain M. Banks, Inversions

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been unwell recently.

It turns out I was a lot sicker than I thought. This December has seen me go back into hospital, where I almost died from a massive hemorrhage. From there, I was diagnosed with a very rare illness (in the vasculitis family) and told that I’d probably been suffering from this illness for at least six months.

The only near-death experiences I’ve had prior to this have been the result of my own stupidity, but this time wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could have done, nor was there anything that the medics who’d seen me earlier in the year could have done. Vasculitis is staggeringly rare; so rare that they don’t even know what causes it, and I was well out of the age range for people who usually suffer from my specific strain of vasculitis.

At the time, I didn’t notice nearly dying. I was busy, or – more accurately – distracted. In fact, I only realised how close to death I’d been after a few days, when the nurses who’d looked after me during my hemorrhage came back on duty and were fantastically happy to see me. Why?

Because they thought I was going to die, and I didn’t.

Make no mistake, this was a catastrophic breakdown of my health, and although I’m trying not to be dramatic about these events it’s hard to convey how much of a near thing it really was. Would it help to tell you that I couldn’t eat for six days after the hemorrhage, and was attached to several cannula’s and a catheter? Or am I being too revealing?

I don’t think what’s happened to me was a bad thing; in fact, I’m grateful for the experience. I’m still ill, and I’m told my recovery will take months, but given the alternative I’m happy with how things are going now. I’ve had a fantastic Christmas with my family, and my friends have been amazingly supportive. In fact, I should say that there’s nothing more life-affirming than not dying.

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Pete Hindle