my brother was in hospital last week for something
called catheter ablation. He was under a general anesthetic
for 10 hours, during which catheter-borne electrical gizmos
were stufed up the arteries leading from his groin to his heart.
When they got there, the gizmos began zapping (or “ablating” as
it’s known technically) the cells in his heart that have run amok,
and are causing it to beat irregularly. My brother has been suf-
fering from chronic cardiac arrhythmia for a number of years,
and it’s a testimony to just how stoical he is that he takes this
“procedure” (as it’s predictably euphemised) in his stride. I very
much doubt I’d be as sanguine: indeed, the thought of anything
at all going wrong with my ticker fills me with what one of my
sons once described — aged four — as “the death feeling”.
Ach! Kids! Don’t they say the funniest things, especially
before they’re old enough to feel Death’s bony digits poking
between their own ribs. This being noted, for men of my
age, class and nationality, the headline news on the heart
— and all maters cardiac — has been consistently good for
the majority of my life. True, during my childhood, to call
a middle-aged male myocardial infarction a “heart attack”
was something of a misnomer; a cardiac cliché would’ve
been closer to the truth. What with their diet entirely com-
prising unsaturated fats, and their Mad Men-esque intake of
booze and fags, for men of my father’s generation, the daily
commute to their desk jobs was a veritable sniper’s alley.
I remember seeing them most mornings, lying spasming
on the pavement as I passed them on my way to school,
tightly-rolled umbrella and copy of The Times cast to
one side, their leather shoes kicking feebly at the privet
hedges’ understorey.
OK, I’m exaggerating — possibly for comic effect; but
not much — the number of deaths from heart atacks really
was stagering in those days, as they manifested around the
world in a great Mexican wave of up-flung arms and down-
turned faces. First, rates picked up along the Pacific seaboards
of Australia and America. Next, they rose across the rest of
the continental USA, before, in the late Sixties, leaping the
pond to plague Britain and western Europe. Indeed, “plague”
may’ve been no metaphor: I remember chating to James Le
Fanu, the contrarian medic and writer on maters unhealthy
at some cheesy, winey do — it must’ve been around the time
heart atack rates began declining in the UK and increasing
in eastern Europe. Vigorously munching on a root vegeta-
ble crisp dipped in something polyunsaturated, Le Fanu had
fulminated: “All this stuff about fat and heart disease, it’s
a ypical case of statistical correlation, but no proof of causa-tion. Whereas, if you examine the actual epidemiological data
— the way the disease has spread geographically — there’s
a strong case for some sort of virus being implicated.”
An intriguing idea — it’d be almost like finding out
cream-stufed cannoli were good for unblocking your own
litle tubes — but I’ve heard no more about it. here certainly
aren’t signs up in my local chemist, inviting the over-fities
to stop by and get inoculated against heart attacks. What
there have undoubtedly been is plenty more transplants,
bypasses, ablations and other sorts of procedure that remind
one — rhythmically, insistently — that the heart is the most
mechanical-seeming of the major organs: a two-stroke
engine of a body part, put-puting away at 60–100bpm, and
thereby powering the entire odd-wobbly bubble of each indi-
vidual human existence.Self Examination
Each month, Esquire commissions an unsparing
inspection of Will Self ’s body. This month: the heart
24 Photograph by Dan Burn-Forti
Will Self