So, there I am lying on the settee in the living room fantasising about having Acomplia to save me from myself when the front door bell goes off like a clap of thunder. I've managed to clean up the mess of vomit in the bathroom and get myself downstairs, but death still feels like the quickest way to get rid of all the pain.
I think about not answering but, when the bell goes again, I decide the least painful option is to get the door open. Looking back, I'm not sure how I managed it - I was dizzy, falling around like I was still drunk - but a minute or so later I'm collapsed the stairs with this woman shouting at me. It's entertaining to let her rant on just to see how long she can go on without repeating herself. I wish she was telling me the Acomplia had come a month early.
It turns out she's a district nurse who's been sent round to check up on me. She seems to think I'm quite close to death and is on her handphone to get an ambulance. The symptoms are tumbling out of her: shortness of breath, racing pulse and signs that I've just been sick. Then she wants to know if I've got any pain in my chest. If everything didn't hurt so much, I might tell her it's just a hangover, but this looks like a good way of getting back into hospital again. I'll probably kill myself before the Acomplia comes along unless I can find somewhere to hide from my friends. As I passed out, I thought everything working out this way was just a big joke. A few pints was all I needed to get rescued from this life of drinking and smoking. Who needs Acomplia!
When I come to, I'm hooked up to the kind of technology that you usually only see in American TV medical soaps. I've all kinds of things stuck into me and on to me. If everything didn't hurt so much I might take a more active interest in it all. To cut the long story short, I'd had a second heart attack. The symptoms were nothing like the first which was why I was confusing them with a hangover. It turns out I hadn't had more than two pints the night before - my friends had taken care of me. They'd fed me and taken me to my bed. But, early morning is a dangerous time and another clot had formed.
The upshot? I'd had another angioplasty and was tanked up on "clot busting" drugs as a further precaution. And, by this backdoor, my second release from hospital dumped me in a halfway-house nursing home until they could teach me basic survival skills and kill the time until Acomplia came along. So there's me wondering what was so wonderful about this Acomplia. Why was everyone so convinced that it was going to help save me?
Looking at the line of bottles beside my bed, I'd enough nitroglycerin to set up as a terrorist bomb maker, and selling some of the other pills on the streets would have been a good earner were I not so dependent on them to stay alive. At least I was trapped inside a no-smoking building. Until this Acomplia came along, I was relying on Bupropion and NRT gum to keep the nicotine cravings in check. And the kitchen was feeding me. Everyone was worried about my weight (another reason this couldn't come soon enough) but, by my standards, it wasn't enough food to keep a rabbit alive (too many leafy salads for my liking). But even without exercise, my weight was not going up. A big plus, apparently. So there I was, in a limbo of mild purgatory, until I was safe to be released back into the wild (again). Roll on another week or two, and then, with a fanfare of trumpets, a marriage made in Heaven between me and Acomplia would be celebrated and I might actually risk going home.
