Surgical spirit
Monday at 8.15am, just before I start my workout at the local gym, I get to thinking about how I got into the exercise habit which, two years later, has become the cornerstone of every other day.
Predictably, it was a heart attack that sent me to eight weeks of rehab — after I’d recovered sufficiently from the three-stent procedure that Peter Quigley, my surgeon, performed on my ticker. This stunning manoeuvre took place while I lay on a pallet, watching the procedure on a television screen.
I had assumed that I’d be knocked out before the work got under way. When not so much as a sedative came to my aid, I asked the main man: “Are you knocking me out or what?” He assured me in his own laid-back way: “Come on, you’re a big strong fella — you can handle this.”
He was right. I was able to observe the whole procedure: the stent on the tip of some kind of wire gently travelling up along my main artery, the wire turning between the surgeon’s thumb and forefinger. My eyes were glued to the television screen in sheer disbelief, while I marvelled that the procedure wasn’t painful.
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The wire
It was creepy though, watching the wire go up, deposit a stent, and then come back down for another, until this prile of life-savers had moved into my heart. The memory still causes me to shake my head in disbelief.
Some weeks later, my magician — Quigley — pronounced me fit and well, and shortly after that I started gentle exercises in the rehab unit at St Columcille’s hospital before, on the advice of my carers, moving on to the regular gym work that has become an important part of my life.
The only caveat imposed on my exercising was “work within your comfort zone”. This I do, loving the exercise in a friendly environment and having made many friends at the Shoreline gym.
Scribo ergo sum
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On Tuesday, I have a film crew at the house doing some linking shots for a documentary that we’ve been working on. This will cover much of my experience of living on what I call Poverty Row, where my childhood and my early youth happened.
It’s one of two pieces due to be screened by TV3 any time now, and suggests renewed interest in my work and how it was for working-class writers to get anything approximating to a break in the world of letters.
As it happened, I was lucky in this respect. Thanks to my novel Goodbye to the Hill, I managed to create a career that continues to exist even though I have not in recent years made anything like enough money.
But I am still writing, not for money but because this is what I have to do, need to do, must do.
In tune with the people
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Later in the week I get engrossed in my study of Michael Pierse’s book, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey, in which my own work features alongside that of many contemporaries who, like me, are in there still, tapping away, punching and spitting — including my hero, Mannix Flynn.
On Friday, I perform a one-man show in the Royal Hotel in Bray in aid of the Five Loaves charity, which feeds people who have no money to buy their dinner. Last year, this volunteer group of housewives and friends served 20,000 two-course meals, and I’m grateful that they let me help out in my small way.
The audience is mostly middle-aged women and I soon have them singing along with songs such as the Dublin Saunter, Raglan Road and Fields of Athenry. I also get away with some bold jokes before throwing in some of my own monologues about Dublin in the rare oul’ times, when I was young and foolish.
I’m not sure I ever stopped, completely, being foolish to some degree. I continue to feel like I did at 40: happy. Happiness to me is the by-product of doing the right thing.
One very right thing that I do on a daily basis is to sing at my keyboard. Though no longer young in years, I’m grateful that the heart beats sound as ever, now that I have finally got some common stents.
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Lee Dunne is a novelist