Heart Trouble Begins

The pain stabbed across my chest as I walked up Toorak Road toward my car.

It was like a belt being pulled tight around my heart which was pumping harder to keep up the flow of blood.

I stopped and held onto the iron fence rail next to me, waiting for the throbbing to subside.

It was November ’93 and over the previous month or so the pain had worsened.

I was under a lot of stress. My job, as Coordinator of the Watchdog Association, had brought me in contact with corruption at many levels of society, and my sense of frustration and anger had, I thought, brought about  a metaphysical, not a physical result.

‘Go to the doctor, Sweetheart,’ my wife Rosemary had urged.

At first I resisted. I couldn’t see the point. I wasn’t dying. It would go away, I thought. I just needed to slow down.

But it didn’t. I said nothing to my work mates. I didn’t want to promote any feeling of ill-health.

Then there were other messages.

Andrew was obviously planning to write the whole story of his heart problems but got no further at this time. He had a very successful triple bypass and valve replacement in 1995, by which time we were living near Murwillumbah, NSW — Rosemary