STEVE EVANS poetically speaking

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So yesterday was an interesting day. Probably the most interesting day so far, without exaggeration. I may have met my maker and lived to tell the tale. Whatever, it was a notable day as I've no doubt my family will testify. They received the fright of all frights, while I, for the most critical part, knew very little and bore only a small portion of their worry.

On holiday in Portugal, on the final day, as we checked out and made plans for lunch before travelling to the airport, I had a heart attack in the hotel foyer. Even now typing and reading those words there is some disbelief but it happened to me and it came as a complete surprise, a bolt from the blue.

Up to then it had been an idyllic family holiday of leisurely walks along the beach and family meals in local restaurants. The holiday began in Madrid at the wedding of one of our close friends' kids. Then we flew to the Algarve for some sunshine and that was what we got until the morning we were checking out, a morning that passed without any hint of what was to come.

We showered, packed up our things and left the room going downstairs to check our bags into the hotel luggage room before heading out for a final lunch. Right up to that point everything seemed normal but as we left the bags and headed back to the hotel foyer I had a feeling all was not well and I asked my wife to hold back and let the kids head off themselves, I thought I would sit down and shake it off but events took over..

As I remember there was no realization that I was entering what was a terminal situation, there was no replay of my life, no fear and no resistance from me. As the heart attack took hold I slipped into peace and out of discomfort. My last memory was of Gail, my wife, just outside the hotel entrance, in bright sunshine, holding the mobile phone, trying to contact our kids, calling them back. My vision blurred until she was the only thing in focus and I think I sat back on a large sofa, then I was gone.

She must have seen me pass out and she came back into the hotel shouting to the reception to summon an ambulance.

My next recollection was of lying on the hotel foyer floor in a lot of discomfort, sweating, holding on to a cold wet towel someone was pressing onto me. There was a woman above me talking to me, calling me Steve. I didn’t know who she was, she had bright red lips and she was asking me about the Beatles and my city of birth, Liverpool. I came back to consciousness quite reluctantly. I had been somewhere in my mind, somewhere quite nice, somewhere comforting, somewhere I was in no hurry to leave. I don’t have any specific memories of actual things or people, there was a sense of redness but that was all physically speaking the rest was just an overwhelming feeling of being at ease.

Through this foggy haze I heard this woman talking to me, saying my name. I opened my eyes and saw her and past her I saw Gail and Jason and Mark, my two sons. Gail had dark glasses she was staring down at me, maybe she had the towel. Jason was wafting something, Mark looked terrified. I wanted to be with them but I let go of that feeling of ease very reluctantly.

I’m not sure even at this stage if I knew I had had a heart attack but the situation felt grave, it was clear something serious was occurring and I needed help. Voices kept asking about an ambulance, it was taking its time getting there. I had no idea how long we had been waiting but I heard the question being asked several times and I too began to wonder where the bloody thing was! Then there was the sound of sirens, people appeared in uniforms and I felt a little feeling of relief, I was going to be OK now.

Through the foyer windows and across the street there was a trade entrance into the opposite hotel. On each side of the gates there was a palm tree. It was one of those palm trees that looked like a large pineapple with the palm leaves growing out of the top. I could see them from where I was lying or it may have been when the ambulance men wheeled me out to the ambulance but I focused on them. The palm leaves were swaying in a breeze. Swaying palm leaves have always been an image from sunny holidays of the past and so I focused on these ‘pineapple palms’ and their ‘flailing arms’ repeating the little phrase as I was maneuvered into the ambulance. I remember Mark reaching over to me and I took his hand and squeezed it trying to reassure him.

Then I was in the ambulance. A doctor positioned himself next to me and he had some sort of machine on his knee that was connected to me by a series of wires. Something printed out high up above me and the doctor was studying his machine and seemed to be balancing medicines that I think were being fed into my arm from one of those drips you see in all the medical dramas. This seemed to take some time before he gave the instruction to the ambulance driver to move off. Then we were on the road. People in the ambulance could speak English but maybe because it was a second language there wasn’t much conversation, just an occasional question to see if I was still there. Then the doctor gave the instruction to pull over and the ambulance stopped again at the side of the road. He went back to fiddling with that little machine on his knee until he was satisfied and he again gave the instruction to move off. This time there seemed to be even more urgency, the siren sounded and a blue light flashed while the driver also seemed to floor the accelerator. All of this registered in my thought process, it was pretty clear we were in some sort of life and death race yet again I felt quite calm. I tried to keep my mind busy hoping that the time would pass quicker. I was reciting ‘pineapple palms and their flailing arms’ trying to remember what they had looked like and also looking round at the inside of the ambulance taking note of what I could see. It wasn’t a comfortable journey, stupid as that may sound, there was a lot of bumping and jostling.

At some point the doctor banged his hand on the inside bodywork of the ambulance and he shouted, presumably at the driver, presumably because he thought he was driving too fast. Anyway, this all killed the time and presently the ambulance stopped and then reversed into a sort of basement entrance into the hospital. The doctor was speaking to me now and explaining what was about to happen. He mentioned fitting a stent and I think I understood that that was what they were going to do.

I was in a lift then I was in an operating theater. I heard someone saying ‘local’ which I gathered was referring to an anesthetic and I felt them shaving my right arm. Then there was a surgeon dressed in blue and someone else seated next to him, then there was a screen between me and them and then there was just a feeling in my arm, just a sensation, nothing else. The surgeon kept up a commentary to his assistant but in Portuguese and so that was it for the next few minutes. I really had no idea how much time was passing. I noticed on my left side there was a large monitor and it dawned on me that I was looking at a route map of my insides and the surgeon was using this to man oeuvre through my arteries.

He pulled away the screen and told me that he had fitted the stent and he asked me if I felt any relief and I noticed the ache in my left arm had stopped so I told him yes. Then we had what I’ve come to call my Kwikfit moment;

He said “we have fixed the lesion but there are another two I could do while I’m in there, you should really get them done while the car is up on the ramp!” (Maybe not exactly those words) He asked me about going home but it was clear that these other restrictions he had found had to be fixed now during this procedure so I gave him my consent to carry on and he did. It didn’t seem to take very long after that. He then removed the screen separating us, pulled the monitor closer to me and he was able to rewind the film and take me through the whole procedure from start to finish.

That was about it really. I was moved to intensive care and connected up to a series of machines in there and monitored for the next 24 hours before being moved to another ward for a few days from which I was released with the gentle warning that from now on “I must be careful with the rest of my life.”

I have a lot to thank a lot of people for, people I will never meet again. The woman with the red lips, miraculously she had been sitting in the foyer when this began, she performed CPR and kept me conscious until help arrived. The doctor who came with the ambulance, the ambulance driver, the surgeon and all the staff in that hospital. In particular a great nurse with a strong character who used google on her phone to work out my weight and height after I told her I was 5-10 and about 13-12 and then she told me what that was metrically speaking. Writing down my details in her file she also asked me about the spelling of my name “Evans”, she asked, “Is that like in heaven?” “Not today I hope” and I managed to laugh as I said it and so did she. Later she would tell me that I had had the heart attack 'because of my fat belly' prodding it to remove any doubt and insisting that it must go!

 

We went to a wedding in Madrid then we flew down to the Algarve in Portugal to stay at the Hotel Alpinus, an old favourite where we’d had some great family holidays in the past. There was a cliff top café where I had sat many times and had a brandy and an espresso and that was where we had planned to spend our last couple of hours in Portugal. Because of what happened I never made it there but because of the magic of chance, circumstance and some amazing random people, I did make it home to tell this tale.

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