Lack of death

A year ago, around about now, I suffered a heart attack, fortunately the outcome wasn’t a death in the family! As I keep saying, to quote Monty Python, “I ain’t dead!” when anyone asks how I am.

I told the world what was happening with a tweet that I also sent to Facebook. It’s the 21st century and that’s what you do nowadays!


That seemed to make a lot of people I know very worried. Mainly because the hospital I was in had very patchy mobile signals. It seemed to have one for about 30 seconds every hour!

Suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack and suffered a bad case of deathI managed to get transferred from that hospital to one a lot closer to home the morning after. As soon as I got a signal I was amazed at the number of messages I had and how many people who were concerned for me.

It’s been an up and down year. More ups than downs, I do say.

The first up was surviving the heart attack. A great start. One of the downsides of this is the amount of drugs that I need to take every day to stay alive. 7 pills a day! To put that into something that Americans would understand, I’m on around $500 worth of pills per month. Fortunately, I’m British and we have that evil socialist NHS to help us when we get ill. That means that we get subsidised drugs. It does cost me some money per month. To put my American readers in context, it’s just under $15 per month. That’s quite a saving compared to being an American. That’s excluding the hospital bill for what I had done to save my life.

Another downside is that I have to walk a lot slower than I did before the heart attack. It’s annoying. Not only for me but for people who I am with. They have to slow down as I’m not going to speed up! It can drive some spare as they tend to be quite fast walkers.

On the upside, I have had a lot of great, new, experiences. From being at my best friend’s wedding to covering MCM Manchester Comic Con.

The final is a new look at life and the realisation of how fragile it can be.

The final think I will do before I die is to take my daily does of Aspirin. All of the others are to control my blood pressure, make sure that my body doesn’t reject the bit of metal I have keeping the blood flowing through my body, thinning the blood to make sure it keeps circulating or keeping my cholesterol low.