I have been preoccupied with your heart for the past 12 hours or so. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and all the stresses it had to endure.
Yesterday, the inquest into your death was held. We found out what we already knew - the details of your final moments, the notes you left, who you were, how you lived and died. But, sweet man, we also found out something we didn't know - you had advanced coronary heart disease. So bad was it, that you had a 90 per cent blockage in your main artery. In layman's terms, this means that you had a very poorly functioning heart, as there was only one tenth of the normal space for the blood to pass through.
It is hard to imagine then, that you did not have any physical symptoms - you had complained to me of feeling pains in your chest, but latterly attributed them to stress. As somebody who was so physically fit and dedicated to exercise, it was inconceivable to imagine that you had heart trouble. In fact, you did, in more ways than one.
Contributing factors to CHD are listed as the following:-
- Stress
- Lack of Physical Exercise
- Poor diet - increased levels of bad fats in the regimen
- Hereditary factors
- Smoking
- Excessive Alcohol consumption
So, there are only really two factors which count here, as you were very fit and had never been a smoker: you had made changes to your diet during the past two years, but previously had managed on a diet of oven-ready meals, convenience foods and takeaways, as administered by your morbidly obese wife. Incidentally, as you know John, your own son is now clinically, if not morbidly obese at the age of 8, weighing in at nearly 9 stone, so there is a clear pattern there. 17 years of crap food consumption would certainly leave enough fatty deposits on the heart, that is for sure.
Stress - you certainly knew about that. In fact, looking back, you were always worried about something, from the outset of married life, as in addition to your full-time job, you were the main carer for your constantly ailing wife and her moribund clan, tasked with fetching and carrying, collecting and depositing those deemed unfit to walk the 10 minutess to the supermarket or haul their overstuffed shopping bags home. Your descriptions of your daily life led me to the conclusion that you had married into this clan that saw you as some kind of fix-it-all slave, frankly!
Latterly, the whole issue of access to your son had frustrated you beyond belief. Even with court orders in place, your wife ignored them and spent her inactive days firing off text messages for you to call, and then refused to speak to you. You had the added concern of Philip's obesity as in the year since you left, you had noticed a significant weight gain, coupled with a general lack of motivation on his part and an unusual obsession with cartoons - evidently as his main form of relaxation outside school was to be plonked in front of the television of stuffed full of high fat junk foods straight from the packet or the microwave.
Work was causing you concern, as you felt your were not performing adequately, and you felt you couldn't get a handle on it. You had not really dealt with your concerns either, tending to wait until the last minute until things got on top of you and increased the sense of frustration and impotence that you seemed to be constantly feeling.
In short, your heart was historically overloaded with the residual fat incurred through a lifetime of ingesting high-fat junk foods coupled with an overload of emotional and physical stress.
Piecing together the last months we spent together, I see that you had symptoms - chest pains, nausea, insomnia - but easily attributable to the general sense of anxiety you felt. In fact, you had been uncharacteristically ill in November, with nausea and vomiting - again, put it down to a virus. You didn't visit the doctor, but felt unwell for a week or so.
I realise now that you covered it up, as you had been accustomed to in your married life. I think you knew that you had something seriously wrong, John and I am certain this further compounded your sense of desperation and woe: It added to the already heavy heart.
So, as this was undetected, you would not have taken measures to treat it, had you decided to stay here with us. In fact, the most ironic thing of all, is that you most probably would have collapsed during exercise and died suddenly. Given that it was advanced as well, although we can only ever make a conjectural assumption, it is clear that you were not destined for longevity.
And so, sweet man, your departure seems as tough to take as the day you left, except that now we know it really was your destiny to leave us sooner rather than later.
Big man, big heart, big love - and a huge gap without you here.
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