Takotsubo Hearts *

When I walk across my local park, I pass a municipal table tennis table and each time I do so I am inexorably sad. I’ll return to the table and that sadness later.

At age 74, I have had health hurdles not uncommon in those fortunate enough to have lived as long as I have. A subdural haematoma resulting in an operation to release blood from my cranium. Open-heart surgery to replace a valve with a bovine alternative and a stroke six months later caused by a streptococcal infection which had attached itself to the new valve. After seven weeks in hospital, I was left with a weakened left side. It also left me unable to play the guitar which may be a relief to some as I wasn’t very good.

This all came after a long and eventful life so I am not writing this as a complaint, nor as an exercise in self-pity. Quite the opposite. I don’t wish brain and heart ops and strokes on anyone but, if they turn up, don’t turn over and face the wall. If you are alive, breathe in deeply, look around you at the world as it is, with you in it still. And continue.

That is perhaps easier said than done. For those who are alone in the world, illness involves extra suffering. And those of us who aren't alone should watch out for those who are. But all of us are surrounded by the living and the dead.

In an excellent article about ageing in The New Yorker Roger Angell writes that, “Our dead are almost beyond counting and we want to herd them along, pen them up somewhere in order to keep them straight. I like to think of mine as fellow-voyagers crowded aboard the Île de France.” I agree but, in addition, I like to think in quantum terms that everything, everywhere at all times, is present. That includes my parents, my close friends, the baby my first wife and I lost at full term and me, of course.

It may also include the absent living. I have close family who have removed themselves from my life or, more truthfully, removed me from theirs. But even then, there is no need to turn to the wall. Family does not have to mean a reference only to the biological. I am fortunate that I have people in this living world who consider me to be a part of their family.

After my wife, Anne Aylor alerted me to a TED talk given by the cardiologist, Sandeep Jauhar, I decided to write this blog. I had a particular interest in his talk because of my own history. My heart had been broken, but was this a mechanical or congenital failure? Or was Sandeep Jauhar correct to argue that “emotions can and do have a physical effet on the heart.” That the heart,“weakens in response to intense stress or grief.” He offered proof that it can actually change shape and form, the so-called Takotsubo effect, whereby the base becomes wider and the neck narrower. Quite literally and physically, a broken heart in every sense of the word.

So back to the table tennis table in the park. My youngest son lives with his wife and their son in Barcelona. I have had no contact with them for over four years and have never been given a reason for my expulsion. There has been hearsay evidence, all too awful to believe possible. When I used to visit them in Spain, my son and I would go to nearby Park Güell every day to play table tennis. It was great fun and became a strong part of our relationship. Indeed, the day I left Barcelona after being told I was no longer a grandfather, we played before I entered the Metro at Passeig de Gracia en route to the airport. It is a memory which I place on my own ghostly voyage of the Île de France.

 

* The photo on the left shows Takotsubo syndrome, a condition where the heart muscle becomes weakened and takes the shape of the Japanese pot on the right

My memoir, "Left Field" can now be read online for free at

www.davidwilson.org.uk

Prisoner of my past

At Victoria Station, alongside platform announcements for Chatham and Orpington, there used to be the international routes. In the 60s, I’d board the train for Dover, ferry to Belgium and on to Cologne, Munich, Salzburg, Ljubljana and Zagreb.

At Ostend, I always hoped to be the only passenger in my 3rd class couchette—not because I wanted to be alone—but because it meant that the train would fill up in Germany with Turkish gastarbeiters, setting out on their annual holidays.

They would always have two suitcases, one for clothes and the other filled with food and drink which they generously shared with strangers. There were kebabis, spinach and cheese borek, hummus, pitta bread, dates and honeyed cakes. We would drink raki through the night.

After a short sleep, I would wake up as the train travelled through the Karamanka Alps into Yugoslavia. The Austrian customs officers in their smart, blue uniforms were replaced by the Yugoslavs in their drab brown when they came on board at Jesenice; the only other colour, the red stars on their caps. 

30 hours after leaving Victoria Station the train arrived in Zagreb. All cities have their unique characteristics; defined by their architecture, climate and their people. What is rarely referred to are their smells. Zagreb’s was the coal burned in the steam engines: lignite from Breza in Bosnia, a soft brown fuel somewhere between coal and peat. This smell characterised the Croatian capital until steam engines were replaced with electric and diesel.

I would take the No 4 tram. The blue cars clanked and screeched their way over the bumpy rails, the driver hunched over a lever which was both accelerator and brake. Pedestrians ran when they heard the tram’s bell, a double dang-dang. It was like being on the set of The Third Man.

Today I return to London from Barcelona and because of my brain op it's not a two hour EasyJet flight, but eight on TGV via Paris. Plenty of time to read a book. It will be Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prisoner of Heaven - set in this city. I struggled with his The Shadow of the Wind but my writer-wife Anne tells me this one is much better. I will let her know if I agree when I see her again – she is returning on Easyjet tomorrow.

Read more about train journeys at 'Left Field'