Booze

One of the things I have always loved doing is sitting up in the quiet of the night, on my own, and having a drink. True, I do also love drinking before dinner and during dinner – more of which later - but if I was forced to make a decision and pin down one of the things in my life that makes me most happy, it is the time I spend on my own at the end of the day with a drink.

The house is quiet. Helen is usually pootling about upstairs doing the endless things that women do before getting into bed. Magic the minxie mog will be curled up on the sofa next to me. There is no more work to be done today and I may or may not be smoking a cigar; it doesn’t matter. If it is winter, the fire will be slowly dying in the grate; if it is summer the window will be open and the birds and the cows will be arguing over who can say goodnight the loudest. The telly will be on but I won’t really be watching it because, like Brick in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, I am really just listening to myself and waiting for the click in my head that tells me everything is all right, the day is done and I can go to bed.

Not that I am drinking to try and forget about my dead and unrequited gay lover you understand. Nor am I pouring bourbon down my throat at the rate of a bottle a day. But, like Brick, I am waiting for that moment of calm to descend, a calm brought about by the gentle haze of alcohol, a calm that tells me I have worked hard, I have done what I needed to do and now I am having - were I to use an expression from the women’s magazines - a bit of ‘me’ time. Some choose sun beds, some choose gyms, some like hot stones and massages, some like to curl up in bed and read with a mug of cocoa. I like to sit on the sofa, on my own, quietly drinking a few glasses of something nice, whether it be wine, scotch or cognac. And when the click comes, I will turn to the cat and say, ‘Well then, Magic. Time for bed’, and I will get up, turn off the light, turn off the television and mooch upstairs to wrap myself up in the warm loveliness of my wife.

I have liked to do this for more years than I care to remember. Throughout my adult life I have always enjoyed the hour at the end of the day and, when circumstance has dictated that I have not been able to indulge myself – through illness or adverse domestic circumstances - I have missed it terribly. I know I love it because every night, throughout my adult life, if I have been able to do it, I have done it.

But now it has to stop. It has to stop because the simple truth is, I drink too much.

I have always drunk too much and it has never really bothered me if only because I have never really worried about how much is too much? Well, more than 28 units a week for a big bloke like me, so the government say, but who takes any notice of them? Health officials are endlessly telling us stuff that the vast majority of the population routinely ignore because if we didn’t, life would be so intolerably regimented and dull. I know a lot of people who can do 28 units a day without worrying about it too much. I am one of them. Not every day, of course, but if you count up the units involved in a not abnormal day of a couple of large gins at 6pm, a bottle of wine during the evening and a couple of scotches at bed time, it clocks in at seventeen units. Have a good drink up at the weekend and you can be looking at a hundred units a week. Don’t get the wrong impression: that isn’t every night or every week, but it gives you some idea of how people like me – people like you – can drink a huge amount of alcohol without being alcoholics, without being drunk, without having hangovers and without having the slightest problem getting up in the morning and going to work.

But now it has to stop because I drink too much. It didn’t matter when I was younger. It didn’t matter when my intake was not quite so high, but the simple truth is that over the years the amount I drink has gone up and the years have taken their toll. Blood tests show my liver function is not what it should be. And my heart keeps going wrong.

About eighteen months ago, I had an atrial flutter. Not life threatening (usually), but something that requires hospitalization and either drug or electro therapy to put right. I had my first one while on holiday in Cornwall and it was terrifying because I didn’t know what it was: the palpitations and shortness of breath and the tightness in the chest obviously led me to believe I was having a coronary. Diagnosis took a couple of hours and treatment was swift and efficient: an IV bag of a drug called flecianide and the correct electrical rhythms of my heart were re-established and I was sent on my way. ‘Why did it happen?’ I asked. ‘Because it does, sometimes’ was the answer. ‘Alcohol is definitely a factor, usually in women, usually binge drinkers, but sometimes it just does.’

But then, at 6.15am last Monday, it happened again. I was standing at the kitchen sink contemplating the fact that it was the day my wife was due to give birth as well as the fact that I had 17 exam scripts to mark before work, when I got a familiar feeling in my chest. Imagine if you will a palpitation that doesn’t go away. I recognised the symptom straight away but hoped that it might put itself back in to rhythm. I coughed hard, which sometimes works. I sat quietly at my desk and tried to ignore it, but the fact was the top chamber of my heart was not able to send the correct signals to the bottom chamber and so, in a state of some confusion, my heart started to beat at about 120 BPM in a wild and erratic fashion. It is the wild and erratic nature of its beat pattern that makes an atrial flutter relatively easy to diagnose: if an ECG shows irregular irregularities, chances are that is what you have got.

So I woke Helen up and asked if she would be so kind as to drive me to hospital. She was, because she is, indeed, kind.

On arrival, because I had effectively self-diagnosed, I was spared the spray of GTN, the emergency dose of aspirin and the sense of panic but also the ‘no one dies on my watch’ determination of your average emergency room registrar that does rather push one to the front of the queue. Last year, when they thought I might be on my last legs, the sense of urgency was extraordinary. I was wheeled past a Cornish woman who appeared to have had her leg crushed by her horse who was plainly in some severe discomfort. But she wasn’t dying, so ahead of her I went, giving her a cheery wave as I did so.

This year, there was a more relaxed atmosphere and after ten minutes or so I was called through to a cubicle where my shirt and shoes came off and I was hooked up to the ECG machine whose wild needle readings confirmed in short order that I was indeed having an atrial flutter so no one was going to be in a terrible hurry to see to me. I have no beef with this. I just knew it was going to be boring.

And so it was. Over the next two hours, someone periodically came in and checked I wasn’t having chest pains, wasn’t feeling different etc, and then, having given me some pills that didn’t work, they and I knew that it would have to be IV drugs, so the A and E doctor put a canula in and took some blood and said I would have to have a chest x-ray. So far, so standard. Then, a somewhat bored looking fourteen year old house officer (or so he seemed to me, but he must have been twenty seven I suppose) came in and did the whole tongue out, say ‘ah’, let’s listen to your chest routine. He was from the medical ward and would make an initial assessment and recommendation as to a drug regime. Almost as an aside, he asked me how much I drink. I told him, honestly.

His eyes widened and a look somewhere between shock and pity, as if he had just been asked to treat George Best or Oliver Reed, came over his face. ‘How much do you drink in the morning?’ he asked.

‘What? Morning? Nothing!’ I said. ‘Ever. I never drink before 6pm. Except at Sunday lunch, of course.’ I was amazed. Mornings? I don’t drink in the mornings! People who shout at themselves and smell of wee drink in the mornings. He was assuming I was an alcoholic.

He went off to speak to his registrar on the phone to get some advice and I heard him say ‘blah blah blah heavy drinker blah blah blah.’ Heavy drinker? Me? I’m not a heavy drinker. I am a classy drinker. A serious drinker, perhaps, but not a heavy drinker. I have a rich cellar, full of good claret and some excellent Rhone Valley wines. I like to talk about wine, read about wine, think about wine and, yes, drink wine. And good sherry. And I like London gin. And XO Cognac. And single malt whiskies. Maybe I drink a little too much perhaps, but heavy drinker? It makes me sound, oh I don’t know, working class I suppose. Somehow uncouth. Whatever, it certainly made me about as comfortable as the niggling canula in my arm.

It got worse. A couple of hours later, I landed up on the Coronary Care Unit, an oasis of calm in the otherwise hectic hospital. Another bag of drugs was put up and another doctor stood in front of me. I answered all his questions. And then he asked me the question too and I told him and his eyes nearly came out on stalks like in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

‘But you’re from Pakistan’ I thought (he had told me; I hadn’t made some appalling assumption), you’re more than likely a Muslim who hasn’t progressed beyond a ginger beer and a packet of crisps while sitting in the back of your mum’s car. He gave himself away by not really knowing how many units a bottle a day is. I did the conversion for him, at which point – again much like in a cartoon – his hair stood on end and his eyebrows left his forehead.

‘Wow’ he said. ‘That’s too much.’

Honestly. He said ‘wow’.

The new bag of drugs was due to go in over 23 hours, but after just three, I got teary and panicky. My wife was due to give birth today and it was supposed to be her in bed and me supporting her, not the other way around and I felt selfish and shitty and started to cry. The nurse took the bull by the horns, sympathised with my dilemma and said that they would proceed to an electrocardioversion. No more drugs, just electricity to get my heart rhythm back to normal. ‘I’ll just need to inform the consultant as he has to oversee the procedure.’

Twenty minutes later the consultant came on to the ward and talked me through what was to happen, likely side effects (‘a major stroke, but don’t worry, it’s rare’), got me to sign the consent form and went away to make the electricity or whatever it is he had to do. Two minutes later, he was back.

‘They tell me you are a drinker. How much do you drink?’

I told him. He didn’t say wow. His hair, eyes and eyebrows stayed firmly in place. Instead, he fixed me with a steely gaze and he spoke to me in the stern voice of one who knows what he is talking about and who wants to get his message across to an idiot who isn’t listening.

‘You drink way, way too much. You have to stop. Now. Your heart cannot cope with it. If you don’t stop, you stand a good chance of dying young. I will get your heart beating correctly but when you leave here you have to stop drinking. Will you stop drinking?’

Blimey. He meant it. It wasn’t exactly blackmail: he would have to shock me anyway even if I said ‘no’, but I could tell; he was being serious. And I believed him. I believed him because to have one atrial flutter is unlucky, two is suspicious. I believed him because I have spent too many days and nights of my life in hospital to want to spend anymore. I believed him because I wanted to go home and look after my wife and be a good father to my unborn child and not die an unnecessary and early death.

‘I’ll stop.’

‘When?’

‘Today.’

And so he put pads on my chest, a drug in my arm and hit me with 200 joules of electricity that felt like a thunderclap going off in my head but it got my heart back to beating like it is supposed to. Ten minutes later, I woke up and the monitor showed a steady 49 beats per minute so they took the line out of my arm and took all the sensors off my chest. I stood up and put my trousers and shoes on and said thank you to Kate and Claire who had been so kind to me. As I walked off the ward, the doctor was standing at the nursing station. ‘Thanks’ I said.

‘No problem.’ He said. ‘Did you mean what you said?’ He asked.

‘About stopping? Of course.’ I replied.

‘Good. Then you can have a glass of wine at the weekend. It will be good for you.’

And I got home and I did not have a drink. Nor did I on Tuesday, nor on Wednesday, nor on Thursday. As I write, it is Friday and it is ten past six. I put a bottle of Domaine Testut 2007 Chablis in the fridge a couple of hours ago.

I am going to have a glass and then put the cork back in and when Helen goes to bed tonight, I shall go with her.

David Izod