The New Normal: an excerpt from Standing with Harry- on healthcare, anxiety and finding reasons to survive.

Since a CT scan found troubling and life-shortening fibrosis in my lungs last month my neurosis over my health has been off its leash. It has run wild across my imagination and upset my equilibrium and overturned my emotional stability like a dog can tear up a garden. Some days like yesterday are lost to anxiety and the aftershocks it produces. It's not overreaction but logical that I should be worried that I am on the cusp of dying because I've endured a fair share of bad health in my 59 years from a heart attack to rectal cancer over the last few years. I'd be probably in better shape mentally if I knew when a Respirologist will see me for my lungs. My GP has put out the referral. However, the healthcare system is in collapse because most politicians want to privatise public healthcare and Respirologists are in short supply owing to the Covid pandemic. 

Daily, long intense walks take the edge off my fixation on when my best before date will be struck. But I've found because I don't have the best shoes for hiking my feet and legs now have a Via Dolorosa ache to them. 

Yesterday it got so bad, I began to imagine I had developed the peripheral vascular disease my dad had and which almost killed him 13 years ago this week when we lived in Portugal. It's an interesting story about how a blood clot in his leg in 2010 led to my dad becoming the World's Oldest Rebel during the last eight years of his life.

I wrote about it in my book Standing with Harry which is a memoir about my life alone during Covid and in the before times with him. Below is an excerpt. 

New Normals

Dear Dad:

Spring was reluctant to return during the first season of Covid. Much of the ground was still hard, from the freezing nights of the winter which had just departed. Dirty tuffs of snow clung to the lawns in my neighbourhood because the cloud cover was too dense for the sun to break through and melt them. On most days, a cold rain dripped from sullen skies onto lockdown empty, pavements and the few lone dog walkers who were outside more for a cigarette than their pets' toilet needs.

I was still weak from my cancer operation, which had occurred a few weeks previous. What- was left of my intestines were in full revolt against the rest of my body. I didn't have an appetite and; instead subsisted on Ensure, toast and tea. My daily intake of calories was no more than 600 calories which caused me to lose weight rapidly.  

The nerves trying to regrow across the vertical surgical incision on my abdomen caused me great pain. I suffered from sleep deprivation, and when I fell unconscious, horrible nightmares attacked me. 

I tried to reassure myself that all this was temporary. "It will pass," I said. “You are alive, be thankful, for that.”

But it’s hard to give thanks when surviving means multiple daily showers to help you piss or clean the shit off your body because cancer turned your intestines into a defective defecating unit. 

 I’d wonder- "What’s my new normal"-each time I scrubbed my bathtub clean from the detritus of my body. Then I didn’t think my being alive was a long-term engagement. I thought Covid was going to digest me. 

I was just going through the motions until meeting my end. “Don’t die on your knees,” I’d admonish myself, “walk straight to your execution.”

Between the routine of trying to survive, I combed through the pieces of our lives after Peter died and tried to understand what we did and why. 

The genesis to make your life story public was formed in my head not long after Peter died when you almost died in Portugal. 

The grief, your age, and a lifetime of smoking caught up with you on a day; we were supposed to go for a picnic on the Algarve coast. After breakfast that morning, you complained you couldn’t walk. You whimpered from the pain in your back right calf. As you had peripheral vascular disease, I knew you were in danger. I took you to a private hospital because I was afraid a state hospital might be more prone to give you a life-threatening virus caused by insufficient cleaning protocols. 

While you were treated at their A&E department, I was ushered to the billing department to put a hold on the visa card and told if the card could not take a 5k euro hold, “you must find your father another hospital.” 

Every blood sample, bottle of water, doctor visit, nurse’s visit and meal were a line-item charge for your stay in that private hospital in Porto Mau. Daily you enjoyed a varied meal plan that sometimes-included swordfish for dinner and imported organic Scottish oat porridge for your breakfast, always served on fine bone china. It was like staying at a Fairmount Hotel, except you couldn’t look online to view your burgeoning daily tab. 

Often you would ask me, “Is this going to be expensive?” I’d always laugh it off and say, “it was as cheap as chips.” As far as I was concerned, the cost didn’t matter. 

I wasn’t going to quibble over euros when your life was on the line. I wasn’t going to be that person who held back on spending money they didn’t have to save a loved one. I wasn't going to allow you to die of insufficient funds or half-hearted advocation for your health. 

Not money, not age, not your comorbidities were going to stop me from keeping you alive, and content until there was no more spirit left in you. I owed you that as my father and as the man who had been both a caregiver to mum and then Pete. I pledged that whatever time you had left would be pleasant and purposeful. 

And fuck the expense. You were going to have that right to get as many kicks as possible at the can, damn everything, and anyone who would stand in the way of you taking a memorable last ride through life. 

When you were in that hospital, I stayed at a cheap hotel nearby where I ate sandwiches for dinner bought from a local grocery and washed it down with Sagres beer. 

I didn’t know if you’d survive your blood clot. I was still in shock from Pete’s death. I even made enquiries about where I could dispose of your body if you died in the Algarve. Our neighbourhood ex-pats told me they used a cheap and cheerful crematorium located in the hills if one of their own alcohol-sodden loved ones “popped their clogs.”

The idea I could lose you so soon after Peter’s death terrified me. If you died, then it would have meant I was severed to the last living link to those in my family who loved me. Your death would have then cast me emotionally adrift. 

I was beginning to understand that if I wanted you to survive with a decent quality of life, I had to become more than your son. I had to become your comrade.

On the fifth day of your stay, your Portuguese doctor told me I could book our flight to Toronto. He said sternly that you were to leave directly, from the hospital, for the airport in Faro. 

The following day, I booked a flight to Glasgow, which connected 24 hours later with a direct flight to Toronto. Before your discharge, I had to go to the hospital's accounts payable department and process a credit card payment of seven thousand euros. It was significant money for us. You had some savings, but I did not. Since I started full-time work twenty-five years before our move to Portugal, I’d had jobs with big titles and small pay. 

Moreover, since Peter died, I hadn’t earned much money from my wine and spirits business, except a few thousand dollars on sales of bourbon to Russia and bulk Portuguese Reds into Canada.

When I put the credit card into the payment machine, I was petrified the bank would decline the payment. I had images of being forced to smuggle you from the hospital, in disguise because we couldn’t pay the bill or tying your bedsheets together and making you climb to the ground outside from the second floor of your hospital room. 

When the payment was approved, you and I left for the airport in a taxi. 

As we left the hospital, you asked how much it had all cost, and I said, “not much,” as I didn’t want to worry or upset you. The thousands of euros we paid to keep you alive in Portugal taught me something you learned as a child without comprehensive public healthcare, the only ones who live a long life are the top ten per cent of income earners.  

At Faro airport that morning, you were loaded via a scissor lift onto an Easy Jet.

“They think I am one of the bloody dinner trays,” you said as your hoisted onboard.

A few hours later, we landed in Glasgow. In our hotel room, you said, “I am not ready to die yet. Your old man will stick around for a while longer.” I don't know if you were trying to calm my fears or your own. But you used that line each time you wound up in the hospital during your last years of life - right up to your- last hospital admission in Nov 2018, when you didn’t. 

That night, as you slept, I remained wide awake, in terror at what had passed and what was to come. I was weak at the knees over my new responsibilities. I now had to be a carer for you, not just a companion. Your needs had to be put ahead of mine for you to survive physically and emotionally.

You only had me to rely upon because all your friends were dead, mum was dead, and Peter was now dead. 

Mournfully, I reflected on the past two years. We both tried hard to keep Peter alive, and despite all our efforts, love and hopes, he died. We attempted to flit from our grief by returning to Portugal only weeks after his funeral. But not the sun, the cheap wine, the sharing of the pleasant company with brits at local cafes could hide us from our unquenchable sorrow. Grief tailed our waking and sleeping moments, like the Police Inspector Javeat hunts for Jean Valjean in Les Miserable over a stolen loaf of bread. Those months after Peter died, we were broken people, defeated, and running off the fumes of emotions burning with grief. All our displeasure with our lives manifested itself in my drinking, your smoking, and us fighting each other and ourselves against the trauma of losing Peter. 

We could not reconcile that his life had slipped from our grasp as if his spirit were water falling from a tap and cascading into the drain of a sink where the evening’s washing up is done. 

You wanted to have done with it all because Pete dying was fate spitting at you. It mocked your longevity. You had endured the Great Depression, the Second World War, and a hardscrabble peace that saw you build a middle-class existence in a new country when you left England for Canada in the 1950s. You had paid your dues to the universe. You only asked destiny to grant you that life progressed in an orderly fashion- one where sons bury their fathers, not the other way around. 

The next day we boarded our flight to Toronto. While you slept most of the way to Canada, I brooded. I didn’t want you to die in the emotional state you were in angry and feeling like a failure. I had to give you a reason to stay alive that gave purpose to your existence beyond simple survival. I had to find a way that both of us could redeem ourselves from the grief over Peter's death.  I had to create the conditions that would make you Harry’s Last Stand.

As always, thank you for reading. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John