Back To The Black

This post is going to start with a bit of medical talk but don't switch off yet I will move past it as quickly as possible and get on with the point with as much haste as necessary. So, I am sure you all aware that I work in a hospital. Well, today I saw for the first time the implant of a device known as an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD). This device is implanted into patients who in the past have suffered from (and indeed may be susceptible again to) life threatening heart rhythms such as ventricular fibrillation in which the heart muscle becomes completely uncoordinated and death is imminent. Now, the only way to regain the correct rhythm of the heart is to give the famous "clear,............. and shock" treatment (defibrilation) much re-enacted in all good and bad medical drama. The idea is to short circuit this bad rhythm and allow the heart own intrinsic rhythm to take hold again. Anyway an ICD is like a pocket sized version of the defibrilator connected directly to the heart. After the device is implanted it must be tested. So a DC current is passed throught the heart to purposely send the patient into this deadly rhythm. The device is then given a short space of time to recognise the rhythm and shock the heart. It is only a matter of around 10 seconds for the device to recognise, charge and discharge.

As I am sure you can appreciate however those seconds are ones of great trepidation. The senses become hightened and a collective sigh is exhaled as a normal rhythm is regained. Now, during all procedures it is quite normal for a little music to be playing, normally something completely unobtrusive and unalarming and such was the case here. Out of the laboratory player was wafting the swinging tunes of that bloody swing album by that modern musical Mephisto, Robbie Williams. So as the patient was plunged into the hands of fate what was assaulting our eardrums but some talentless git from Stoke. A moment of clarity hit and a single thought entered my mind "God, I hope I don't die listening to such dreadful music". Luckily the patient was fine and will now be free to choose his own death tune. I swear every time I open a dreadful newspaper such as the Sun, News of the World etc I am confronted by the same story every slow news day, most requested songs at a funeral. Ok, I'm sure this is important to some people but it seems much more important to me to ensure that as those white lights grow brighter Tom Jones cannot be heard sining 'The Green Green Grass Of Home'. As to what my prefered taste would be I haven't a clue apart from something I like....alot. As I speed about on my bike through and around inner city traffic. headphones firmly glued in my ears, each near miss seems to evoke this question time and time again. I always have visions of paramedics arriving on the scene (I am dead already) and using the music that I was listening to as a sort of post mortem clue to the method of my death. For example the scene might go something like so....paramedic jumps out of ambulance runs to the scene, feels for a pulse, failing to find one he prizes the inner ear headphone from the grasp of my ear lobe upon hearing the last few bars of Raw Power by Iggy Pop and the Stooges he assumes a quick death brought on by my own thirst for speed and reckless abandonment of the highway code. In another world I was an innocent cruelly crushed by vicious motorists due to my leaning toward british folk rock music such as Who Knows Where The Time Goes? by Fairport Convention. All this leads me to think that it should be the patients and not the surgeons who request the music at such life threatening moments as open heart surgery. Who cares if you're awake or off with the angels. It could even turn into a sort of Desert Island Discs moment, whatever song you last hear that song will be the only one you can take with you to the other side the only difference being that on one hand it is looped for all eternity and on the other you decide when it plays.

The attached picture is of me. Maybe you guessed. The original picture was rather bland and documentary, taken in my room. With a little jiggery-pookery it was transformed into what it resembles now which is certainly more exciting. Although it does seem to detract from all the pictures I have seen in this style which seemed so stylised and cool, knowing how easy it is to produce this effect seems to lessen their impact.

Oh well, hope all that talk of death didn't put a downer on your day. Go and enjoy the rest of it!