Not quite staggeringly good health for 50 years

While the nation gorged itself on rugby last weekend, my attentions were elsewhere - two of the most significant anniversaries in my life fell on the same Labour Weekend.

The first was in Lake Ohau, a reunion of Heads Ball attendees from 40 years ago, when busloads (nobody could possibly drive) headed, and I use that verb after considerable thought, to Larnarch Castle to remember and relive hallucinogenic hysteria and wild untamed rock music. What times they were! I'm not saying I inhaled, but I do recall being a key player, which is pretty much all I recall, though I remember one year there was a lovely mist, and another I spent solely in the car park carrying out a scientific experiment with nitrous oxide. We sold tickets for the balls at Records Records, and always wondered why nobody tipped off the cops.

I was quaffing a slice of hazelnut cheesecake and whipped cream in the hospital cafeteria last week when a high-ranking figure on the hospital's technical side, I won't sully his CV by mentioning his name, greeted me like a long-lost brother and said he was looking forward to seeing me at Lake Ohau. "I'm not going," I said. "What?" he ejaculated, eyes popping, "You'd better damn well have a bloody good reason!"

I did. This was the second crucial anniversary: 50 years of type 1 diabetes. I wrote about this a year ago, how excited I was to be only one year away from the Sir Charles Burns Memorial Award, a silver medal, the first medal in fact I had ever won in my life. And now the 50 years are up. But financially, times have slumped. Only in Auckland, where money oozes up through the viaduct wharf like ill-gotten liquefaction, can they afford a silver medal. In Dunedin, our ratepayers kneeled in servitude after draining their children's piggy banks and cutting out wads of untaxed dollar notes from behind their wallpaper, the brave surviving diabetic receives only a paper certificate.

No matter. I took the forms to patient inquiries at Dunedin Hospital and stood triumphantly at the window. I just needed a photocopy of my admission to Wakari Hospital, in a coma, on October 22, 1961, and I was done. "Do you have personal identification?" they asked. Bwahahahahah!! Why would I lie about having diabetes for 50 years?

I felt like the winning Melbourne Cup jockey in the weigh-in room being asked to prove he wasn't a drunk who had just walked in off the street. But I went back the next day with my passbook, and all is well. The presentation will be at the annual general meeting of Diabetes New Zealand next May and there will be a photograph in the national body magazine. I may have to wear a tie.

But the party, the real celebration, was last Sunday.

In view of the staggeringly good health I have enjoyed through the 50 years, testament to my monastic diet and abhorrence of recreational substances, I asked guests, for presents, to bring the things I had missed out on all my life - Crunchie Bars, marshmallows, pavlova, Coca-Cola, milk bottle lollies, chocolate pineapple chunks ... it was a 5-year-old's dream.

Though perhaps staggeringly fine health is pushing it a little.

I was back in hospital two weeks ago for surgery, and I'm looking at my file notes from that visit right now.

Apparently I have had a gall bladder, an appendix and a colon removed, and have had a kidney put in. I am blind in one eye and barely functional in the other, and have endured clostridium difficile, Bell's palsy, two frozen shoulders, glandular fever, extranodal post transplant lymphoproliferative disorder, B-cell lymphoma, acute peritonitis, eye cataracts, Dupuytren's contracture, a peri-anal abscess, hemorrhoids, hyperlipideamia, campylobacter (twice), hypertension, pancolectomy, ileostomy and a prolapsed ileostomy.

Apart from that it's been plain sailing. I think I damn well did have a bloody good reason for not going to Lake Ohau.