A customer of ours, one of my best in fact, had a terrible health scare and spoke about it on his handle. In dialogue with him he told me to stay on top of my health. But it reminded me of The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, in the sense that you feel empathy for the person but you kind of concurrently are just very happy it isn’t you. In the end, as Clive James often said “nobody gets out of here alive”, yet each of us tries to not think about our own extinction too often because, as Irvin Yalom once wrote, it’s like staring at the sun, and if we look too intently it will blind us.
He also once wrote “some people refuse the loan of life for the debt of death”. I am not sure if it was his direct line or referencing Schopenhauer, but these two quips have always been at the back of my mind as well as that brilliant novella by Tolstoy.
And I say all this because I had a health scare yesterday. I am now 47, soon to be 48, an age where you think you can do whatever you want but your habits have started to form your destiny, and I am a cheater, something I don’t want to admit to, but between endless diets and exercise, I chose instead Mounjaro and the like once I was labelled type 2 diabetes. I dropped down from 127kg at my highest ebb to 89kg on the scales the other day with my GP. I started running again, I no longer pant when I put on my shoes. Good things!
And when it comes to cheating I have to be honest with you here, I love AI. I am taking photos on my travels and using these as references to get my first renders before I send them across to illustrators, of which I am working round the clock with one at the moment to get the new scarves done. You can call it cheating, you can call it cutting corners, you can call it being resourceful. Depends how you want to frame it I guess. But I feel in some ways it is cheating; whereas Hiroshige would travel to Austria and set up an easel, get his watercolours out, trek to the vantage point he desired, I don’t. I take a digital photo, sketch some basic ideas. Figure out how I want to describe it to my portal, get a basic render, pass it on, collaborate on the process after.
How does all this relate to my health you may ask ? Well, in the end if you are looking to cut corners to get results you tend to take into other areas of your life and so saunas and ice baths I considered to be a way to shock the body, sweat out the toxins, stimulate circulation yada yada.
I work 7 days a week unless I am travelling so I ordinarily take off a portion of Monday or Tuesday to go to the bathhouse, sauna and cold bath.
Yesterday I gave myself permission to do that and met with one of the school dads from my daughters school, we get on well, one of the few I have really connected with, and off we went down to our usual spot, there aren’t that many in the area I go so for the purposes of protecting their business I will refrain from telling you where.
Anyway, it happened to be that the sauna was so very hot I can’t remember it being like that. And the cold bath was so cold that there were icicles forming. We did 4 rounds of sauna to ice bath. I thought I was doing my body the world of good after a stressful past week. I am shuffling a lot of things at the moment and the economy is not helping after our government decided to spook the remaining goodwill out of our consumers. If you are overseas and don’t know what I am talking about just know that somehow 17% of Australia is now employed by the government which misspends money like it’s nobody’s business and we now have one of the highest overall taxation systems in the world. I feel I have been asleep at the wheel on all this because I don’t make enough money from my small business and I was too busy just trying to make ends meet.
Now anyway, fuck I like to meander sometimes, it is with all of this and much more running on my OS that I got to the 4th round of my fire and ice plunges that I started to feel a little under the weather. We followed it with a magnesium bath then something started to shift. I didn’t do the 5th round. I sat on the day bed and wasn’t sure what was happening and signalled to my friend that I was off to have a shower and change. Luckily as I left the shower and was feeling like something was about to go down that I managed to get my underpants and pants on because shortly there after I was on my back on a bench in the change room with two of the ladies that work there holding up my legs and calling an ambulance. I was rather certain it was my last day on Earth and looking up into the yellow subdued lights of the creamy walls lit by those hidden LED strip lights recessed into the cornices, well, frankly, I saw God and I saw nothing concurrently. I went from feeling numb and finding it hard to move to feeling I was going to black out, where the people around me found it hard to hear my speech and I thought of my daughter, of a woman I care for, of my family, my resentments, what mattered, what no longer mattered, of my friend who rubbed my shoulder but was clearly concerned I might not make it, and I looked up at him, gave him two messages to deliver, thought on my brothers and that they would hopefully look after my daughter and then remembered my grandmother. She was dying, I was at the Prince Of Wales hospital. She pulled off her oxygen mask that was covering her entire face. She looked at me. She looked like Darth Vader at the end of Return Of The Jedi, then she said “there’s nothing out there, I prayed to God, but there is nothing out there”.
Ah, I was having a very real moment. Good news, I cried, but I wasn’t panicking, I think I will not fight death when it comes. For real. So long as I am not in too much pain. If I am in pain I think nobody should come near me, I think I will be intolerable.
So I slowed my breathing as I have always practiced having had asthma and almost died a few times as a child. And I waited for it to come. And I waited as the helpful staff called the ambulance. It seemed to be a long time coming but they came, they did an ECG, ran took my blood glucose, stuck a canula into my arm and started reading the paper outputs from the machine.
When I say I thought I was gone, I mean it, I didn’t think I would leave that room and in part I was sad, in part I was amused. I had been busy making plans for the future, so much so that I had gone to that bathhouse to destress. Funny that. And I was thinking about my American Express bill that was due to be paid on the 16th and who would be able to pay it now. And the funds that hadn’t been moved from one sales account to the other. I was thinking about my other friend, I will call him Michael, and his health had been so poor, heart attacks and severe gout and so on, and I had said to him not 6 months earlier “you know, when you die, I think I am going to cry so hard that day” to which he said, and he is one of the funniest people I know “what are you talking about! I will be going to your funeral” and a small smile came over my face as I lay there.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am writing this now, so clearly I am still alive, but for that special moment, when I didn’t know what would come next, I must say, in a good way, I felt I had lived enough to die. And in a funny way I also was glad my daughter wouldn’t have to take care of me as an old man.
Ah those poor other visitors to the bathhouse seeing this scene unfold, a middle aged man being treated by paramedics and surrounded by staff and God knows what they must have thought. I will never know, I was too busy trying to stay focused on my breath and answering questions when I could.
And those questions they asked, well now, it did nothing to improve my standing there…. What is your date of birth? Do you have any pre-existing conditions? What medications are you currently on? My my, at that point I was really hoping I would indeed black out and not have to answer them.
Ah my friends, I cannot believe I am lucky enough to be typing this. And I am certain I am not yet in the clear. I’m now monitoring my glucose with my CGM and waiting for everything to die down. I am now fully aware of my mortality in a way that once might have been glamorous, which now seems to be far more realistic, dying in an ambulance alone but for the company of a paramedic and a driver that didn’t even bother to put the sirens on.
And the ego stepped in - but who will do your work now? Where will your customers get their products from ? No matter, I reminded myself, cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable men. Life would go on, nobody would care, it would just be an incident for the day that became fodder for people talking about Tuesday at the bathhouse.
When eventually I was loaded into the ambulance and we made our way to POW in Randwick, I was thrown into emergency but already I felt more lucid, something was different. I managed to walk to the bathroom, do my number 1, I came back to the bed and I thought “hey, I’m not going to die today”. And I didn’t. Not that day anyway.
I discharged myself in the late afternoon and my brother, who really came good on me yesterday, he sat with me for a couple of hours, I talked about life with more depth, we hadn’t been the best at being brothers for some time.
I went home, got into bed, my daughter was concurrently sick, she didn’t feel like speaking, I did not feel like reading The Count Of Monte Cristo, I did not want to watch television, but I did want to continue on with my silk designs, finishing off my Sumo wrestler Shiga Kogen silk scarf designs and move on to my next design, ski resort postcards. Life, once I gathered myself, goes on. It reminded me of an old friend, he was 92, preparing himself for the end, genuinely saying goodbye to me, and in between, taking a phone call from his accountant discussing business affairs as though he was going to be alive next year. Weird no?
Such is life, it keeps going. I will be replaced, so will you. How do we want to live between now and then?
