What do we learn from this?

'This' being my recent health travails, needless to say. First of all, I guess, the starkest lesson is to listen to what your body is telling you. I believed what I wanted to believe, namely that what I had was simply a bad chest cold, as I've had from time to time in the past, rather than what was staring me in the face, the fact that it was obviously rather more serious, given my increasing difficulty in coping, to the point where, ten days or so ago, I really couldn't function at all, by which time it was too late to do anything without help. To my very good fortune, my brother came through for me, at really major inconvenience to himself - he put about an extra 500 miles on his car travelling up and down to Surrey, quite apart from the expense and the time he gave up for me. I couldn't be more grateful to him, and I've told him so. Hopefully, I'll find some way of repaying him, and my sister-in-law, at some point in the not-too-distant future. Related to the general 'neglecting my health' issue, I've also spent quite a bit of time reassessing my relationship with my job. In the build-up to what eventually happened, being carted off to hospital, what seemed more important to me was to try and carry on going to work, so as not to feel like I was letting people down, which I really hate to do, and, to a lesser extent, that I wouldn't be seen as a malingerer, going sick at the drop of a hat, something one or two of my colleagues are rather prone to. Ultimately, though, I'm neither indispensable to my employer, nor is the job indispensable to me. It was, perhaps, psychologically important a year or so ago, as my life was imploding, that I had some underlying stability somewhere, which the job provided at the time, but once that phase came to an end, the concept of 'living to work' as opposed to 'working to live' isn't necessary anymore. In fact, I've spent quite a lot of the last week contemplating whether I want to carry on with my job at all, or whether I want to take early retirement while, hopefully, I've still got a bit of life left in me. I've had the daydream of trying to write a publishable novel for several years, and although I'd need to find a more mainstream subject than most of the things I've written about in Nephelokokkygia, I have at least proved to myself, in the shape of Alexandrine, that I can write a near-novel length story while keeping the plot and characters coherent and consistent. Not the finished article, not yet, but a good step along the way, at least. Whether I could overcome my natural risk aversion and undertake such a major change in the context of my lifestyle, though, is an open question at the moment.
On a slightly different, but again related issue, is that some of the things I saw in hospital have convinced me that Pete Townsend was right when he wrote My Generation - 'Hope I die before I get old'. I could, possibly, cope with the physical deterioration of aging to some extent, but the prospect of losing my mental faculties to dementia, as, sadly, was the case with some of my fellow inmates of recent days, is just too awful to contemplate. Given a choice between quantity and quality of life, I'd choose the latter, every single time. To carry on existing, just because pharmaceuticals are available to facilitate that, is just not something that appeals to me at all. I've fulfilled my biological raison d'être by passing my genes on to my daughter, and maybe, to a smaller extent, my sociological purpose by trying to nudge her in the direction of a few beneficial memes as well, so I could face death knowing that I've achieved at least that much that is worthwhile. Not, at least most of the time, that I have any sort of death wish, but there are limits, without wanting to sound unduly negative, to what I would want to have to contend with.
So, for the moment, I'll get on with my recuperation, carry on thinking about what I want to do in the medium and longer term, and, above all, try to avoid ever getting myself into the position that found me in that ambulance last Wednesday in the future.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B