After retirement, I did what advisers advise and saw my GP for a check-up. He heard a murmur in my heart so my defective, two-flapped, aortic valve was replaced with a proper three-flapped valve from a cow.
Six months later I contracted endocarditis, a heart infection. Then I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The drugs worked in both cases and life was pretty good, playing with the grand-kids and writing poetry.
My health took a turn: breathing was hard, I was always tired, my feet were puffy. The GP said, ‘Look after your feet because they’ll be hard to heal.’
Walking down the stairs behind our house, through the glowing, overgrown garden to the mangrove swamp where flotsam and jetsam from recent storms had gathered, I tripped and spiked my foot. The GP was on leave so by the time I saw him my feet were puffy and purulent, my breath raspy. I looked like death warmed up. He rang my cardiologist and they sent me to hospital where a young nurse explained my aortic valve had jammed up and I had congestive heart failure.
I was a bit surprised to be alive!
They gave me a diuretic that made me wee, so the congestion dried up and the breathing improved but a close examination showed if I had an operation, I’d probably run out of oxygen and die.
They sent me home.
I saw the GP the following week and he said my health had ‘… fallen off a cliff’. No cruise along the Kimberly coast for me. Going to rehab, half-doing the exercises but still feeling bad, I started seeing dead people out of the corner of my eye.
I needed a second opinion and snagged a appointment with a specialist. My breathing was so bad he said: ‘Go straight to hospital’. They decided I should have the new, minimally invasive procedure called TAVI where they slip a titanium aortic valve through an incision in the groin, up an artery and into the heart.
A very cool surgeon gave me the rundown. Chances of dying: twenty per cent, chances of ending a vegetable: five per cent which left a three in four chance of surviving. Death or glory. I’m a terrible punter and would have been in at 50-50.
The only problem was I needed to lose eleven litres of fluid so I would be flat enough to operate on. That’s 11 kilograms to go: timeframe now. No way. Enter Dobutamine, a drug that spurs on the heart while a diuretic is whipping the kidneys to excrete urine.
I’d been in ICU for a few days, pumping urine out through a catheter that should not have hurt but did. Doctors and nurses told me their life stories. The day before the operation, the cool surgeon was nattering with my nurses and some Korean kids were entering data repeatedly at the surgeon’s direction. He high-fived them both. Then they shaved my big purple balls carefully, but not as carefully as I would have liked.
The crowd thinned, the sun set and the full moon rose. There were conversations at a distance, hints that something was going on. Was management involved? Was it a union thing? Was there a racket selling lavender? Or other herbs? Something heavier? Now it was dark outside and there was chanting and, not far away, screaming. I saw a large wicker elephant out of the corner of my eye.
I went to places I had never been before, right there in ICU. I swam among the lights from banks of machines and their reflections and their reflections’ reflections, a light show, a rave, a happening, a circus of illumination with that wicker elephant peeking out of dark spaces. The beeps and honks and arpeggios of the equipment were a cacophony turning into a harmony turning into a mind-twisting symphony of sound. The music of the spheres. The medical, disinfectant smell mixed with the earthy taste of spaghetti Napoli and the tactile experience of being wrapped in plastic tubes and wires, soft beds and hard edges. There was a tang in the air, or voodoo, or some shape shifting, alien boogaloo. It was a trip to the other side. Like the night Louis Pathos was spooked by rain-making spirits from the Tanami Desert.
The conspiracy unpacked before my eyes. The staff weren’t preparing me for an operation; it was sacrifice. I was tied to the bed, festooned with lights and charms and tiles with letters from lost alphabets. The cool surgeon psyched me into signing a piece of paper without me reading it. The key instigator was a nurse, a woman who told me she spoke Afrikaans with clicks and cadences from the bush. I figured she was ANC Xosha Brigade. Her bodyguards were smiling white guys, bovver boys, assassins in the East End tradition. They had me. I pointed out contradictions in their presentation: they were wearing multiple name tags with different names, the hippy lights didn’t sit well in the ICU, the imperial system tools in their belts were useless with the metric system machinery around. But they didn’t care. A guy said he was my anesthetist and asked if I was ready. I said I was ready, quietly thinking I’d have to crash tackle the elephant in a futile effort to avoid sacrifice.
As we trundled down the corridor, there was much shouting about the right way to put me on the altar table. ‘Not very competent sacrificial assassins,’ I thought. Then the dark, drifting in the sludge.
‘This is it; this is my fate; I’m dead,’ I thought. I went with the sludge. I let the world drop away, all the worries about life and death, future and past, ideas and reality. The weight, all the fear and hate, obsession and desire. Then, for a second, the dark lightened and a girl with Kangaroo Paw flowers in her ears waved through the sludge and I followed. I saw the elephant but it was a small, fragile thing.
Another world was revealed where Trotskyist Enterists were working with the Anarcho-Syndicalists, providing medical services for the Resistance through time: the French maquis, the Mau Mau, Paris 68, Sarajevo, Rwanda and the Arab Spring. These were my people and we were all working together in a clanking Catalonian cordial factory that just looked like the ICU. Rastas helped Skinheads, Mods found peace with Rockers and Jews cooked for Palestinians. Everything fell into place.
My operation was a success and I arrived in the light. It was like the garden behind our house, glowing, on this earth, our home, our heaven, our haven and Hallelujah, I’m here. Alive. It was all just a trip. Then, like the best trips, the transcendental became the everyday.
The rest, as they say, is history. I lost 23 kilos in a fortnight and, when word got out, Dobutamine broke the internet. People suck it down and pee through catheters all week so they’re svelte for the weekend. I’m an influencer. I’d tell them to let the worry and weight go but I don’t think they’re really listening.
Me, I am happy to be here, knowing as I now do, that the dead travel light and sometimes make it back alive.
After his near-death experience, Stephen Stockwell sang with his self-described ‘dirty ass punk band’ The Black Assassins in March 2026 at the Cave Inn in Brisbane. IMAGE: supplied
This article first appeared in the Travel edition of The Cane Toad Times
IMAGE of rainbow man at top of story: Sharan Pagadala
