Wifely devotion has its limits. So does our ability to digest onions.
On top of his prostate troubles now comes this – a full-blown heart attack. Belts of pain gripping his chest and shots firing out into his jaw and arms and … Oh, the things he’d yet to do, the words he’d left unsaid … that pretty Tasmanian girl from 1976 he’d never phoned … How could it all be over this quickly?
At 70, Matt recognised Death was tapping him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Sir. We have a vacancy at your father’s table. Step this way, if you would.”
But then, like a woman going into labour, when the first pangs subsided, he sat and wondered if it was a false alarm; cramp, nerve spasm, an ambush of arthritis or colic … He sat waiting, hoping it was nothing … until the wave of pain peaked again. It was real.
He called to his wife, “Deirds, get the car. Quick. I’m having a heart attack.”
They began the half-hour drive along country roads to the hospital, with her assuring him he’d be OK and listing the men they knew who’d survived cardiac arrest. This wasn’t comforting. She could only think of three, two of whom were left physically debilitated, while the third had been starved of oxygen and began voting Green.
Things got so desperate, the pain so intense, life so ephemeral, he told her he loved her. She screamed and pulled the car over in a slew of gravel and profanity and before it was fully immobile she jumped out and ran. At 50 metres she stopped and began to shout back at him, “Matt, run. Get out, run…”
Still in the front seat doubled over and clutching his chest, he shouted, “Wha…?”
“There’s a spider,” Deirdre shouted. “On the dashboard.”
“Are … you … f—ing… kidding?”
“No.”
“Get back in here. I’m dying.”
“It’s massive. And leering.”
“Leering? Leering …” he sobbed. “Just get back in here.”
“I can’t.”
Over the next 10 minutes he was forced, with one stricken arm and a crusty handkerchief, to hunt down and extract the spider. “It’s gone, Deirds. I got it.”
“Really? I’ll be livid if you’re bullshitting?”
“I threw it out.”
“How far?”
Arachnophobia’s easy triumph over love made the rest of the ride to Emergency so heavy with silence Deidre went as far as to turn on ABC radio. Would you drive your partner to Emergency with a huntsman in the car? I would. A tiger snake? Hmmm … yes. An eastern brown? We may have found the limit of my adoration.
Men with chest pains should seek medical help, no doubt. And Deirds and Matt are my friends, so I hope what I’m about to write doesn’t make him come off like a buffoon – though it will and must, as most things written about him do. At Emergency, blasé paramedics probed and a blasé cardiologist explored Matt while humming a Divinyls song. Their funerial ministrations convinced Matt his death was a fait accompli. Until the cardiologist told him, “You’ve got indigestion. I hope you didn’t run anyone over on the way here.”
“Only my marriage,” Matt observed.
How had it come to this? Well, when he consulted the internet about his plumbing problems and found some urology-adjacent individual who claimed a diet of raw onions and honey would restore a fellow’s flow, Matt didn’t see it as a pisstake or a mistake – he saw himself as James Cook, cabbage in hand, about to annul scurvy. He put on swim goggles and performed a frontal attack on a 10-kilogram sack of onions, interspersing their individual disappearance with progressively less delightful spoonfuls of honey.
The ER cardiologist, who had a midlife sideline in swine, told Matt he’d eaten as many raw onions in a week as a Danish landrace on a bender. “I think I pretty much know what a pig is thinking at any given moment,” he said. “But what were you thinking?” It’s a wild claim. Particularly from a man of science. I don’t believe even as famous a pig man as Paul Keating can read a pig’s mind. But the question about what Matt was thinking is relevant.
If you’re taking medical advice from the internet, as often as not, you’re taking advice from someone who, if met in the flesh, you’d be giving advice to. Advice such as, “Shut up and get out of my way, you moron.” It’s worth remembering Dr Google got her degree from the Snake Oil Academy and is as knowledgeable on urology as Marie Antoinette on peasantry. Let them eat onions, indeed.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
