Today, 7th March 2019, would have been Carol's 55th birthday. I miss her so much, we had a fantastic marriage. We had only recently had our 11th anniversary in the May, barely weeks before she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I'm not going to dwell on that. I want to celebrate her life, how she had such a sense of fun and spontaneity.
We met through a Christian website called Fusion 101 in 2006. At the time I was working as a live-in carer for a young man with cerebral palsy. I stayed in his flat 24 hours a day and worked two weeks on and then one week off. I had started chatting to Carol via the internet and we discovered fairly early on that we had a lot in common, such as theatre, art, literature and just life in general and above all, that we were both Christians, which was very important to both of us. I then stopped chatting when I went off to work with the young man in Milton Keynes, bearing in mind that this was before smart phones and other devices that you could connect to the internet, so we weren't able to continue chatting. I had a computer connected to the internet at home in my flat, but this was well before wifi which is so easy to connect to than having your computer connected physically to an internet connection using a cable. Carol was working as a humanities teacher at Stantonbury school in Milton Keynes. She was having trouble teaching 'Twelfth Night,' but had absolutely no experience of teaching Shakespeare, even though she was expected to teach this as part of the humanities curriculum. Because I had such a huge interest in Shakespeare and had studied 'Twelfth Night' from G.C.E. Literature level right up to degree level, I was able to help her with lesson planning and understanding the text of this play. So we had that in common.
So there I was in mid-May in 2006, working with that young man in his bungalow in Milton Keynes. This particular week I was coming to the end of my stint and would have gone home on the Monday of that week and to be replaced by another support worker. But on the Saturday that week I began to get a pain in my chest. The previous week I had a bout of bronchitis and had almost got over it. I couldn't return home, because I realised that it would be difficult for the agency which I worked through would't have been able to find a substitute to take over from me. So, when I had this odd pain in my chest, I was assuming it was like heartburn or something related to the bronchitis. It didn't go away, so I walked to the local Tesco's to buy some mint tea, because I had used this in the past to relieve heartburn. But it didn't relieve the discomfort.
When I got back to my flat in Bedford I made an appointment with my doctor and mentioned the odd pain in my chest. I was given an examination but the doctor didn't say what it was. I think I had to have a blood test, but honestly don't remember. All I remember was that I was given a prescription for something called a G.T.N. spray and was told that, if the pain continued and didn't go away, I should read the instructions to use the spray, a few squirts under my tongue and rest for 5 minutes until the pain went away. I don't think the word 'angina' was mentioned, or if it was, I have no recollection and I certainly didn't connect it immediately with having a heart attack. You would have thought, as a carer I might have done, or from memories of my mother who had regular angina attacks, but that was in the late 1980s, well before the sort of mediation we have today. The fact is, that night the pain in my chest got worse and worse, but being me, and doing what most men do, or are supposed to do, I imagined it would go away. Ignoring it was the only option. I didn't want to ring 999 as I should have done, the thought was, I didn't want to bother anyone. I could cope with this thing on my own. But I couldn't. By around 6a.m. I just had to ring 999 and call and ambulance. It's just as well I did. The paramedics arrived, by which time I was hyperventilating and it took them some time to calm me down. I was taken downstairs to the awaiting ambulance which was parked on the grass outside the block of flats where I lived.
I'm going on a bit here. I hadn't meant to. But it explains how Carol and I met. Anyway, I was rushed off to hospital, where I was given the message that I'd had a heart attack and stayed there for a week. Meanwhile Carol must have wondered what had happened to me. Perhaps I had lost interest. She had no idea where I was or what was going on.
I eventually arrived home, not in exactly top condition health-wise. I wasn't particularly strong and could hardly walk. I was given a load of medication to take which I was told I'd have to take for the rest of my life and that I wouldn't be able to drive for at least a month, which was difficult, because I'm quite an independent person and can't stand not being able to get out and about. Carol and I continued to chat via the internet, for a few weeks. The one day she said 'I'm going to phone you.' So she did, and it was the fist time I heard her voice. She said 'come to Milton Keynes and we can meet.' So, it just happened that I was okay to drive, more than a month since I had the heart attack. She said 'meet me at Furzton Lake.' I didn't have the faintest idea exactly where that was. Today you'd use Google Maps, or if you had one, a SatNav, but it was well before this sort of technology was available. It just shows how much we rely on it nowadays to find our way about.
I went to the wrong carpark. I went to Caldecotte Lakes, the place with the pub with the windmill on the top. I'm not sure if it's original or a sort of reconstruction, but does it matter? Then Carol telephoned me on her mobile. 'Where are you?' she asked, and I told her. It wasn't Furzton Lakes, as I soon discovered. She turned up in her car, along with her dog, Poppy. What was she expecting? Tall dark and handsome? Driving a B.M.W. or some open-top spots car? No. Instead a clapped out Renault 5 and a similarly-clapped-out bloke who could barely walk properly since his heart attack. I certainly wasn't at my best, so it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd taken one look and driven away, but she didn't.
We went for a walk, although I wasn't exactly steady on my feet. We took the dog with us and she jumped in the lake, which added to the fun of things and got us talking. She (the dog, that is.) come out of the lake and shook herself, most of it all over me, so that was a good start to things. We went into the pub to have a drink and continued to talk.
I can't complete this in one blog post, so I'll have to continue in a second post. There's so much I want to write about, which can't be done in just one post.
So there I was in mid-May in 2006, working with that young man in his bungalow in Milton Keynes. This particular week I was coming to the end of my stint and would have gone home on the Monday of that week and to be replaced by another support worker. But on the Saturday that week I began to get a pain in my chest. The previous week I had a bout of bronchitis and had almost got over it. I couldn't return home, because I realised that it would be difficult for the agency which I worked through would't have been able to find a substitute to take over from me. So, when I had this odd pain in my chest, I was assuming it was like heartburn or something related to the bronchitis. It didn't go away, so I walked to the local Tesco's to buy some mint tea, because I had used this in the past to relieve heartburn. But it didn't relieve the discomfort.
When I got back to my flat in Bedford I made an appointment with my doctor and mentioned the odd pain in my chest. I was given an examination but the doctor didn't say what it was. I think I had to have a blood test, but honestly don't remember. All I remember was that I was given a prescription for something called a G.T.N. spray and was told that, if the pain continued and didn't go away, I should read the instructions to use the spray, a few squirts under my tongue and rest for 5 minutes until the pain went away. I don't think the word 'angina' was mentioned, or if it was, I have no recollection and I certainly didn't connect it immediately with having a heart attack. You would have thought, as a carer I might have done, or from memories of my mother who had regular angina attacks, but that was in the late 1980s, well before the sort of mediation we have today. The fact is, that night the pain in my chest got worse and worse, but being me, and doing what most men do, or are supposed to do, I imagined it would go away. Ignoring it was the only option. I didn't want to ring 999 as I should have done, the thought was, I didn't want to bother anyone. I could cope with this thing on my own. But I couldn't. By around 6a.m. I just had to ring 999 and call and ambulance. It's just as well I did. The paramedics arrived, by which time I was hyperventilating and it took them some time to calm me down. I was taken downstairs to the awaiting ambulance which was parked on the grass outside the block of flats where I lived.
I'm going on a bit here. I hadn't meant to. But it explains how Carol and I met. Anyway, I was rushed off to hospital, where I was given the message that I'd had a heart attack and stayed there for a week. Meanwhile Carol must have wondered what had happened to me. Perhaps I had lost interest. She had no idea where I was or what was going on.
I eventually arrived home, not in exactly top condition health-wise. I wasn't particularly strong and could hardly walk. I was given a load of medication to take which I was told I'd have to take for the rest of my life and that I wouldn't be able to drive for at least a month, which was difficult, because I'm quite an independent person and can't stand not being able to get out and about. Carol and I continued to chat via the internet, for a few weeks. The one day she said 'I'm going to phone you.' So she did, and it was the fist time I heard her voice. She said 'come to Milton Keynes and we can meet.' So, it just happened that I was okay to drive, more than a month since I had the heart attack. She said 'meet me at Furzton Lake.' I didn't have the faintest idea exactly where that was. Today you'd use Google Maps, or if you had one, a SatNav, but it was well before this sort of technology was available. It just shows how much we rely on it nowadays to find our way about.
I went to the wrong carpark. I went to Caldecotte Lakes, the place with the pub with the windmill on the top. I'm not sure if it's original or a sort of reconstruction, but does it matter? Then Carol telephoned me on her mobile. 'Where are you?' she asked, and I told her. It wasn't Furzton Lakes, as I soon discovered. She turned up in her car, along with her dog, Poppy. What was she expecting? Tall dark and handsome? Driving a B.M.W. or some open-top spots car? No. Instead a clapped out Renault 5 and a similarly-clapped-out bloke who could barely walk properly since his heart attack. I certainly wasn't at my best, so it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd taken one look and driven away, but she didn't.
We went for a walk, although I wasn't exactly steady on my feet. We took the dog with us and she jumped in the lake, which added to the fun of things and got us talking. She (the dog, that is.) come out of the lake and shook herself, most of it all over me, so that was a good start to things. We went into the pub to have a drink and continued to talk.
I can't complete this in one blog post, so I'll have to continue in a second post. There's so much I want to write about, which can't be done in just one post.
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