The grim reaper stalks the middle-aged male Golightly line for the smokers, the unfit, the overweight and the complacent. Death took my father in his late 50s, my half-brother in his 60s, and narrowly missed my brother, while female family members sail on to a great age in rude heath.
When elderly relatives say, “Adam you look like your dad”, they mean well, but I hear only the horror of, “Adam, you’re marked for early death.” With Helen’s death, my unease has turned to panic, not because of any intrinsic fear of dying but because Millie and Matt need their surviving parent to stick around. So I must love life and myself as never before.
I need the Golightly women’s longevity, and for this I require their sex’s more positive attitude to healthcare. In my experience, the male chromosomes seem also to carry a doctor-dodging gene, such that we have to be at death’s door before consulting a GP. Also, as a crude rule of thumb, the closer the problem lies to our willies the less likely we are to bother with the doctor’s surgery.
I start in a good place to beat the wrap of family history. I have never smoked, have always exercised and, after a recent return to fitness, have a BMI of 23 and am fitter and leaner than ever. Importantly, after sitting with Helen in so many hospitals, my fear of them has gone. Her courage lights the way; a total lack of fuss facing so much invasive treatment and more needles in a day than I have had in my life.
It was with Millie and Matt’s help, however, that I overcame my most recent reason to dodge the men in white coats – an association of healthcare professionals with Helen’s ultimately futile treatments, in which the smell of antiseptic reeked of failure enough to haul me grief-stricken from waiting room to pub. Leaving the kids in the car on a Saturday morning, I run into the shop to buy cat food for the ever-hungry Harry. With an unscheduled chat to a passing school mum, I’m not back for 20 minutes rather than the forecast 10. Millie and Matt are anxious to the point of tears. “Where were you, Dad? We thought something bad had happened to you.”
It struck home because similar separation anxieties have been happening more often since Helen’s funeral. They need me. So I have embarked on a course of self-induced, largely self-funded medical tests. I have been poked, prodded and scanned, given armfuls of blood and endured the daddy of them all, a colonoscopy.
“Mr Golightly, it’s unusual for someone to do this electively without presenting symptoms. It’s true that if there’s nothing worrying found now, then you are likely to be fine for some years to come, but are you sure,” asks the bemused consultant.
I’m not sure, so I ask the question doctors usually hate, “What would you do?” Heroically, he doesn’t hesitate, “Do it. I had one myself for the same reason, Adam.” I notice his use of my first name – perhaps we are brothers in adversity in the voluntary shoving of cameras up our respective bottoms. “OK,” I say, suppressing an image of him self-administering a Box Brownie up his arse. So off we go.
A week later, I’m lying on a trolley wearing a pair of ill-named modesty pants. “We’ll give you something to make you woozy, but you’ll be awake and can watch on the screen. We’ll start in a few minutes,” he says soothingly.
It has been a hard week in what has been a series of many hard weeks and late nights. When next I open my eyes, the consultant is looming over me. “I’m not sure if it is a first, but you are the only person I’ve ever had who has slept through the procedure without any help from us.”
So I missed the world’s most bizarre TV show – up my own colon – but it was all clear. Add this good news to clear arteries, the blood pressure of a 30-year-old, a resting heart rate under 60, and I ponder the irony that my wife’s legacy to me, other than the kids and a dodgy Rolf Harris-signed painting, may be 30 years more of life with Millie and Matt than she had. A bittersweet gift, but thank you, Helen.
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
