The Meyerstein Ward I

In 1999 I was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street, off Tottenham Court Road.

I'd been having what I described to myself as panic attacks. The worst one, a week before, found me presenting myself at the NHS walk-in clinic in Soho feeling very ill and strange with a pulse rate of 220. They took me to the University College Hospital near Euston Square tube station. The ambulance doors flew open as we drove up Tottenham Court Road.

After not responding to any drugs that they imagined might snap my heart out of the rhythm that it had found itself in, they decided to give me general anaesthetic and shock it into resetting. I was sitting in Accident and Emergency with people all around me. The anaesthetist's mask was on my face and they were passing air through it in preparation for putting me to sleep. Meanwhile a junior doctor was checking my blood pressure with a cuff but it was very uncomfortable. I asked him to take it off and the senior doctor nodded approval. 'If he doesn't like it, leave it.'

The surge of blood that the removal of the cuff prompted, it having been so tight, reset my heart's rhythm. This was lucky because it would turn out that I had a scary allergy to suxamethonium and other volatile anaesthetics, and, there in UCLH A&E, or so I was later told, they might not have been able to save my life.

And so a week later I found myself being admitted to Meyerstein Ward where I would remain for two months. They didn't know quite what to do with me, I was just stuck there, feeling fine, eating chocolate, helping nurses make the beds, meeting people who came in and out of the ward. They didn't want to let me out of their sight, They said that I was at a high risk of dying. They weren't sure but they suspected that I was having dangerous episodes of ventricular tachycardia which was, in turn, threatening to degrade to ventricular fibrillation - the heart muscle losing all coordination.

I knew that alcohol and coffee triggered these episodes and suggested simply cutting them out would solve the problem. They wanted to implant an ICD, an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, in me. Something like a pacemaker only it gives you electric shocks to reset the heart in the event of an episode. They were quite new, these devices, and the prospect of implanting one really excited my doctor. I was adamant that I didn't want this thing in me but I allowed Lisa and my parents to persuade me otherwise. My doctor was very intimidating you see and had scared them into taking the stance that they did. I see it as emotional blackmail. Even the sound of her stiletto heels approaching from the distance was disturbing.

I had the horrible thing implanted in me and very nearly died due to my rare allergy to general anaesthetic, and awoke in the Intensive Treatment Unit on a breathing machine. Apparently they had spent all night trying to cool me down with ice, pumping it into my stomach and caking me in it, after the drug that will usually help in this situation did nothing for my case. They had told Lisa and my parents that I had a very high likelihood of having suffered organ failure and brain damage but when I came to the following morning I felt pretty good. I remember marvelling at the sun as it shone through the window and thinking how beautiful the script that the labels on the cupboards were printed in was. It turned out that this was, in part, because I had lots of morphine in my system. The view was an ugly one and the labels were scrawled in untidy handwriting.

I found out a few things about ITU. For one thing it is exceptionally peaceful in there, and very cold too. It takes you about four hours to get your voice back after they take the ventilator tubes from you. An enormous sensation of warmth and gratitude can be projected onto your nurse when you are high with morphine. Each patient has one nurse, and that nurse fills in a complicated A2 chart of observations but they don't let you take it with you, as a keepsake, when you leave.

I became engaged, without my knowledge, at some point during that night. Touchingly, Lisa had decided that, should I survive, we were to be married. When I woke up she was now described by doctors and nurses not as my girlfriend but as my fiancée. After it was clear that I was ok there was no more talk of marriage on her part and she slowly became my girlfriend again.

In 2004, by the time that it was obvious that it was doing me no good whatsoever, against professional advice, I had the ICD removed.

All along I questioned whether or not this problem had something to do with my being a vegetarian but I was told that this was not possible. It turns out that I was right all along. What a surprise.

I was anaemic!! Caffeine and alcohol were both triggers because they chelate iron from the body!! All I needed was some vitamin c and more lentils, or, as I had suggested, avoiding coffee and booze would have done the trick. My anaemia was triggering arrhythmia. It would have helped if I hadn't have eaten bar after bar of pure dark chocolate to while away the hours in the ward.

I met lots of people over those two months. A rocker took the bed beside me after Zara died. He had stories of dray horses in the tunnels that stretched from Camden Lock, having worked there as a child. I felt very sorry for Zara. She was Iraqi but had travelled from Iran where she was living at the time. She couldn't speak English, didn't know anybody in our country, although she was visited twice a week by a charity worker. I don't think that she appreciated the ward being mixed gender. Lisa and I bought her cakes though which she enjoyed. But worse than her loneliness, her consultant cardiologist was flippant, sounded to me like he was making things up as he went along, and seemed more interested in talking to the nurses about his holidays. He would always get her name wrong. Worse still, he killed her in her operation.

She had two tiny, mysterious scars just below the corner of her eyes that looked like tears.

Yes, when you are in a cardiac ward for some time you start to understand how high the death rate is. A girl whose bed was opposite me died during her operation as well. She was everso young, her boyfriend and grand mother were constantly at her side during the final week and they were very happy and optimistic. And Gary, a hardware shop owner from East London, complained that they had damaged his heart and had implanted a pacemaker that didn't work, that gave him arrhythmia. I would play chess with Mohammed, a friendly, bright fifteen year old. There was an old Spanish lady who spoke no English, had no visitors, and would shuffle around the ward expressing her anguish to herself in a pained voice.

Bill was my best friend on the ward, Bill and his conspiratorial cruise ship..