Number one thing (number one)

“Broccoli is not as bad as people make out. It might give you wind, but I’d prefer to have wind and have good health. Health is the number one thing on the planet. However, I am quite partial to rum and raisin ice cream.”

Chris Eubank Sr.

I recently found myself looking back over the archives to this online journal. It had occurred to me that – in what is getting on for a decade now that I have been posting to it – I have made very little reference to health – to mine or to anyone else’s.

Whereas I would once have maintained that this was because I have been blessed with an excellent constitution (which is certainly true to a point) I might possibly also have admitted that this is one of those subjects that chaps in general tend to avoid, probably because of the fear that talking about such potentially unpleasant topics could well result in something being raked up that they would prefer not to know about.

Either way – with the advancing of the years it really is time that I addressed some of this stuff. Here goes…

I inherited many characteristics from my parents: most of them positive (and for that, many thanks). There is, however, something else that they passed on to me that is rather more of a pain. That something is hypertension (high blood pressure)!

I don’t recall if they ever discussed the fact that they both suffered the condition. It was the sort of thing that was not much talked about by their generation. I’m not even sure that I knew they were on medication for it – until such time as I was myself diagnosed with it.

This came about as my fiftieth birthday approached. I was working at the time at a very well-known posh boys’ school in the UK and fell into conversation with my doctor (who was both one of the School doctors and a local GP) at a cocktail party at the School (as one does)! Regular readers will know that I don’t normally use real names on this blog but in this case I will make an exception – because the doctor was genuinely called ‘Doc Holliday’!

Anyway – I asked what a chap should do to check on his health at that time of life and he promised to give me a detailed going-over – the which he duly did. This uncovered the hypertension and we discovered (after an extensive round of blood tests, electro-cardiograms, heart echoes and an MRI scan at the Royal Brompton) that the most likely cause was inheritance.

The good doctor advised me as to the probability of my suffering some heart-related incident within a decade should I choose not take regular medication – and not caring for the odds I duly signed up. This all took place not that far short of two decades ago now and things have trundled along in the meantime without further incident – until relatively recently.

Unfortunately that proved not to be the end of things – though for the rest of the tale the gentle reader will need to come back for the second part of the story in the next post.