100809 – 8. Panic Attack Hospital Trip
Hello Again Me, Me Here,
I hope you are damn well Skippy and enjoying some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, like me. It’s been a while since I wrote last and it will be a while longer until anyone is actually reading this which will be strange for people reading this now on my website which for them will be live now. No, don’t stop reading, this isn’t a mistake and you aren’t reading last week’s update, I am merely pondering inwardly to myself as I am currently writing this, to myself. Anyhow, it has been a while and so let me fill the gap with a small update of happenings in the world of me, Andrew Paul Beattie.
Since I last wrote I have:
1. Worked. This includes several hours on the telephone mixed in with toilet and smoke breaks and a constant and nagging feeling that I should have finished my degree.
2. Declined nights out. Against the best wishes of my list of stuff I need to do and my friends who are now starting to advise me that I am a boring bastard. And they haven’t even read my ramblings yet, ah ha.
3. Attempted to get my website live. This involves not trying hard enough to get my website live.
4. Not Written. No letters, no updates and no other writing unless in 140 characters or less.
5. Planned a Canoeing trip that I will never go on to prepare me for Canoeing the length of the country which I will never do.
What a busy chap I have been since I last sat here attempting a blog which incidentally this isn’t as I’m still writing to myself, like a twat. Anyhow, I missed something off the list, something that I’ll go into in a little more detail. Starting……..now……
I suffer from Panic Attacks. I’ve suffered from Panic Attacks for several years now and I’m sure it’s as a result of having smoked a little or a lot of pot when I was in my later school years. I haven’t, had a panic attack for 18 months or so now, the last being the time I last smoked pot and the last time I will ever smoke pot, until the next time, and so I was totally unprepared for the feeling of impending death as a result of my heart giving out before I had managed to have sex on the top of Everest and climbed a plane. I had been feeling pretty good on the day, had tea and a walk around Liverpool in the day with my cousin and returned home for some tea and a few beers in the house with David and then, like a ninja in the night, kerblamo, I am dying. “No mother, you will not drive me to the hospital” I exclaimed calmly whilst hyperventilating and pacing the house, ‘‘phone me a fucking ambulance”. This made perfect sense to me at the time as I was under no illusion that my heart was at that very moment doing its lap of honour around a very small playing field but not, clearly, to the paramedics who arrived on the scene like shining green and yellow knights and burst through the open door seemingly in slow motion to the Baywatch music with not a drop of sweat on their taught, crease free brows. It must be very difficult for paramedics not to be a little pissed off when they arrive at the scene of a panic attack and find a heavily sweating, overweight and bearded 25 year old on Wikipedia researching thrombosis, without blue lips, but fuck them, I was fucking well dying and my mum doesn’t have fucking electro paddles in her Toyota Yaris to shock the life back into me should I snuff it on route to A&E. I will point out that the paramedics were pretty damn nice and considerate to my condition, even if they didn’t acknowledge that I was potentially dying and instead discussed whiskey and Saturday night television with my mother in between telling me to calm down and calling me a sissy wimpy girl, all the way to the hospital.
Hospitals on a Saturday night, particularly in a major city like Liverpool, are much better than Saturday night television for several reasons but mainly because Piers Morgan isn’t there and so I was cheered up immensely upon arrival by several habitual hard drug fanatics and people with worrying in-growing toe nails whose feet, literally, felt like they were falling off, not that I’m judging at all because 30 minutes earlier I was, literally, dying but I’m the fucking victim here and you’ll do well to remember that. I was strapped to a heart monitor shortly after arrival and several litres of blood taken pretty quickly after that and was soon back in the waiting room which hadn’t changed a great deal since I was last there, a bit like an old friend who stinks of piss and is an alcoholic heroin addict with a broken limb. It dawned on me whilst I was sitting there, pondering as is my way and dying a little less at this point, how much of a good job that the A&E staff actually do and with some patience I can tell you. It must be very hard to not get the electro paddles out and surprise attack Saturday night’s latest wino on the back of the head. Maybe I’ve touched upon the future of television here – A&E Ninja Prank Nurses hidden camera show with Ulrika Johnson as the host so that a generation of watchers can comment about the time when she used to be sexy and about the time when she got smacked around by Stan Collymore, who in turn got smacked around by a gaggle of Rugby players and later threatened to smack around Vanilla Ice, on a farm. I can see a trend growing here and I don’t like it.
Anyway, after 6 hours of waiting, probing, blood tests, very pretty nurses who wanted to have sex with me (I may have slept for an hour or so and so this may have been in a dream, which would certainly explain the nipple clamps, the Morgan Freeman Voiceover and her, the one that got away) and a pleasant young graduate in white coat who cupped my balls before taken for the X-Ray on his broken foot, I was discharged with the usual panic attack prognosis, which I had sussed an hour after arrival, my tail between my legs and safe in the knowledge that I will not be back for at least 18 months. Cue another massive panic attack.
Anyhow, that’s just about enough from me. Checked the notepad and this is a taste of the other stuff that I have done that I have now forgotten about already.
09/08/09 – Back to work tomorrow although unsure exactly what I’ll be doing? Also, hospital panic attack notes for journal (I actually called it a journal, ha!)
10/08/09 – Not fucking working tomorrow, that’s fucking well what I’ll be doing. Big sweaty bollocks. Getting drunk tonight.
Until next time,
Calm down and take care of your nurses.
Goodbye,
Andrew