A cardiac crisis as that sense of impending doom keeps recurring

Published on Thursday 18 May 2006 00:06

I HOPE you will forgive any inconsistencies in these comments, but I fear I am having a heart attack. This is hardly a subject for levity. I don't happen to have at my numbing fingertips the precise figures for Scotland's annual death toll from myocardial infarction, but I am sure it is far higher than anyone would wish. A statistic I grasped personally when I read the phrase on my father's death certificate.

But heart attacks don't just happen to men - as a women's magazine has trumpeted this month. The gender gap snaps shut at the menopause, apparently. Yet there is a persistent discrepancy between the treatment of male and female patients in the red-alert zone of 50-plus. Female anatomy can confuse a number of the recognised indicators, the cardiologist quoted warned. Pains may occur in the back instead of the chest, or not at all. More worrying: female patients are less likely to be referred for ECGs or further specialist investigation by their own physicians. Hence, females over 40 should familiarise themselves with the alternative indicators of a cardiac "episode", which may not include nausea, constriction or a chest pain which progresses to the left arm.

No, women of that certain age should note first: "A sense of impending doom."

IT IS hard to express fully my dismay at this selected symptom. Day in day out, we are bombarded with pseudo-medical advice about food choices, exercise regimes, brain activity - and the concurrent need to avoid aluminium; not to mention the life-shortening effects of too much laundry starch in one's mobile phone.

Day after day, we familiarise ourselves with the planet's personal problems: bad polar dandruff causing large, scabrous ice flakes to detach from the skull of the globe and float down to the temperate eyebrow area - around Fort William. Hyperactive continental drift jostling the kind of plates that Josiah Wedgwood never dreamed of. Oxygen-rich rainforest facial hair shaved from the world's cheeks; and stern forecasts that a large blemish on the nose of the Canary Islands will split in half, thrusting a massive pustule of rock into the Atlantic, which will trigger the mother of all tsunamis to wipe out the UK and the east coast of north America.

What does all this information stimulate? A sense of impending doom.

And this is before we cardially-neglected females even consider the prospect of Gordon Brown as prime minister. The "you'll have had your tea" option par excellence. I fear I should have played Cassandra earlier on this count, but today I can confirm that economic as well as ecological disaster is headed our way. My system is simple, yet fail-safe. I decided to sell some shares.

On Sunday, I checked the prices, sealed up the share certificates and dropped them off to the broker - a strangely archaic method in an electronic age, but effective enough. So it came as no surprise whatsoever to hear on the six o'clock news that the biggest stock-market crash since 2003 had just occurred.

A sense of impending doom? Plagues of locusts, frogs and boils are no longer essential. However, I am interested in the possibility of doom trade-off, or cardiac rebate, on the I-told-you-so catastrophe of the week. Surely all those of us who recognised that Paul McCartney and Heather Mills would not make it to the end of the stash of Linda McCartney frozen veggie suppers which Sir Paul had hoarded in the Mull of Kintyre freezer, must merit some kind of reduced Armageddon award. A little rupture of the rapture.

But the NHS says otherwise. There is no customer cardiac exchange rate in place at this time. Not even a waiting list. So I suppose that's it. I had always assumed it would be my liver that would pack in first, not my heart. But a sense of impending doom turns out to be quite a psychic sandwich-board.

The end of the world is as "nigh" as you wish it. We Scots have always suspected that. The half-empty glass is our favourite tipple, and we sup from it daily. I had so hoped that my cardiac extinction required shovels-full of chips, deep-fried Mars Bars and racks of Capstan full-strength cigarettes (being blameless on all counts). But now I see that it's the 20-20 pessimism which really matters.

May I suggest a wreath of bindweed for the funeral? You can imagine it would fulfil my very worst expectations, and that's such a comfort to a Scot.