Cyclists

Now, I was a bit of a fan when I was younger of getting up in the saddle and pushing pedals to get me anywhere, and I always thought that the rules of the road applied to cyclists. What I saw today amazed me. 20 or so cyclists in a group travelling the wrong way down a busy, narrow one way street in the centre of town.
This started me thinking that the police are far too lenient on these suicidal morons, after all we have a (fairly draconian) law in this country that if yourcar is uninsured it can be towed off and crushed, no messing. This could easily be applied to cyclists, if you get seen turning right at a no right turn, dodging through red lights, riding over zebra crossings, or hanging on to my roof bars when you pull up, the police should be able to impound your push iron and crush it. And if you manage to kill yourself doing any of these things, then a term of imprisonment should also be imposed.

Scary thing

I went for a 'tune up' of my pacemaker. This is painless, it just involves placing a pad on my chest and plugging into a computer, they can tell how often it has kicked in and at what time of day [or night]. I suspect that this is near field communication. Clever thing is....It now looks for a gap of more than 1.1 seconds between heartbeats during the day and 1.3 at night before it gives me a pulse, I did ask if it automatically changed time zones if I went abroad, but alas that one is still to come.
I was asked to read a sheet of paper, this turned out to be a donor certificate, happily I signed, of course I would want to give someone else a chance to live if I no longer needed the device, I suppose 'no longer needing it' means 'after you are dead' so it is just like being an organ donor.

Or is it!

As I handed the bit of paper back I asked about battery life, these things are good for ten years apparently. This started a little calculator going in my head. No one would want a second hand unit that had less than 5 years life in it , would they? This puts a very finite figure to 'when I no longer need it'. I think I will try and make sure no one inherits this particular cast off.

Zombie

Well, that is it! I am officially bionic, a flatliner, a zombie, one of the returned! And also one very lucky bugger!

I seem to have suddenly developed third degree heart block! [This by the way is not a heart attack.]

What this means is that the signals to fire off my hitherto [pretty much anyway] reliable pump are either getting lost on their way across the muscle, or are too weak by the time they get there, or possibly they are prodding the wrong thing altogether, or just maybe they couldn't be arsed and have buggered off to the equivalent of a Pub for electrical signals.

When I say I am a lucky bugger, I seem to have survived three attacks of Sudden Cardiac Arrest.
[in words of one syllable, my heart stopped.]....is stopped one syllable or two? Unfortunately, since I have a firm belief that good luck comes in bunches of three, then I am not going to win the lottery this weekend, and I am going to have to make my own luck.

So if anyone wants to know what it feels like to die, or my secrets of the afterlife, eg.. did I have an out of body experience, or see a long stairway, pearly gates etc  etc, I shall be putting the info up for sale on E-Bay, [I have to make a buck or two somehow] after all by time I got to flatline number three I was well aware what was happening and that it was not just a funny turn, so I thought that I had better take notice!.... my attempts to write things down as they were happening were however, a bit of a failure.

I thought that I had better do a bit of research on the Internet...It was not a great consolation, I just have to hope that there are a good set of batteries [Duracell at least!] in the pacemaker. Best thing I found is this....

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Bill Cosby