Friday: The 10th anniversary of One Lung Day is on Thursday, and tonight after dinner the psychosomatic effect kicks in. While playing solo darts and contemplating a 127 check out (treble 19, treble 18, double eight), I suffer sharp pain in the back beneath the left shoulder blade, where the nerve ends for the lungs are located. It was 10 years ago that a young burglar broke into the Johannesburg house I was staying in, breaking my friend's skull and back, and then giving me hammer scars on head and arms preparatory to popping a knife into my left lung. Ten years. How much I have changed.
Saturday: As my friends know, I never talk about the incident ... and yet the approaching anniversary has an impact. Over the dinner my wife has so lovingly prepared (the insouciant way she scoops the bindi bhaji out of the foil carton, the assurance with which she presses the microwave buttons), I remind her how, once the pneumothorax operation had worked and the lung was reinflated, my surgeon Dr Wolfie Frankel pointed at the proximity of the wound to both heart and aorta on the x-ray, and said: "You, sir, are a very, very lucky boy." "Well, yes, it's always been an ambition," I replied. "I even wrote to Jimmy Savile once, but he never wrote back." Perhaps baffled by the reference, he didn't smile, just handed me the x-rays and the bill.
Sunday: The 10th anniversary of One Lung Day is on Thursday, and tonight after dinner the psychosomatic effect kicks in. "Oh God, no, please no, not the x-rays." Rebecca walks into the sitting room and finds me fetching the brown envelope from the top drawer of my office chest. "Not the 18th of an inch. Not the 0.8 of a millimetre short of the aorta." When this metaphorical stab in the back is matched by a literal one (the lung nerve ends are more sensitised by the hour), I return the x-rays and head morosely up to bed.
Monday: A trip to St Mary's, Paddington, reminds me of the day itself - one that dawned for me on a trolley in the reception area of a dismal, underfunded Jo'Burg general hospital and dusked in a private room on the other side of town in a charming private room. The gulf between public and private health is just as wide here now, of course, and in an NHS ward with the traditional peeling walls air of gloom, I visit someone in their 90s being cared for by overstretched nurses making increasingly fraught phone inquiries after a hungry patient's meals.
Then it's over the road to the private wing, where I go to see a day-old baby girl and her mother. Here I am offered champagne. What crude contrasts between the opposite ends of both the life cycle and the health care spectrum these are, and sloping off towards the tube through the late afternoon drizzle I feel a bit like Alan Bennett, only without the wit and acuity to do these contrasts justice.
Tuesday: On the way to work, I pass the old Grove health clinic in Goldhawk Road, an employment agency agency now, but still a ringer for a curiously above-ground nuclear shelter. It was here a decade ago that I first met Dr Sarah Jarvis when I took my chest x-rays for her inspection. It feels like 10 years, too.
Wednesday: Friends come round for supper, and when over the coffee one asks why I'm so subdued, he gets a sharp "don't start him off" glance from Rebecca. "It's nothing," I say, "except, well, you know I really don't like to talk about it, but it's 10 years tomorrow since ..." "Eighteenth of an inch," says the friend. "And this close," chips in his wife, bringing her index and middle together to convey minuteness, "to the aorta."
Thursday: I awake dehydrated and very early. It is not quite 4.30am, the time when the panic sirens went off. I shuffle downstairs and take out the x-rays. Like everyone else, I recall, Dr Jarvis wasn't interested and told me to take them home. Presumably having heard reports from my previous physician, Fleur Navey, she did ask whether this near-fatal experience had helped cure my hypochondria. Oh yes, I said, absolutely.
Well, once you realise how fragile life is, you quickly grow out of fretting about unlikely problems and get on with some carpe diem living. She nodded approvingly, and I got up to leave. "Oh, by the way," I said, Colombo-style, turning back, "just one other thing. I'm sure it's nothing, but I think I've noticed something here, on the base of my skull." She felt it thoroughly and I asked her, the familiar nausea welling up at the expectation of the death sentence, if she had an idea what it was.
"I'm afraid I do, yes," she said gravely. "It's what we doctors call a skull." Ten years on, here I am, older, fatter, balder and uglier, I reflect, as I put the x-rays away for good at the back of my bottom drawer, but quite unchanged and just as petrified as ever I was.
