Not Like This: how to save a life before it’s too late

Posted on 3 August, 2020

Earlier this year, I did some media for the Victor Chang Institute to raise awareness of their mobile heart health checks.

I told our story for radio and TV, and people who’d heard it came to the shops to have the free testing. I guess it’s pretty compelling hearing a young widow speak of her devastated little boy and explain why there’s nothing more important than getting your health checked. It’s a message I’ve been sharing now for four years, ever since we lost my husband, Jeff, to an unexpected heart attack.

The day of the media interviews, I’d arranged to meet a widower friend for lunch. Trev’s wife, Amy, had died from breast cancer five years earlier. Like me, he’d been awareness-raising since Amy’s death, in an effort to prevent other families from facing this kind of unspeakable loss.

Despite his being intimately acquainted with my story, Trev hadn’t had his heart checked himself. If friends neglect this it really bothers me these days. You can’t help but become a bit of an evangelist, annoying though that must be, when there’s often a simple fix for cardiovascular disease. It kills as many as one in three of us.

Trev turned up and we found ourselves standing beside a bunch of highly-qualified Victor Chang nurses armed with blood pressure machines and tests to measure cholesterol and blood sugar. I didn’t have to convince him. Listening to my radio interview, he’d realised if he didn’t do this and subsequently died of a heart attack, I’d be fairly unimpressed.

So he sat down and acted upon the easy process that could have saved Jeff’s life, had he done the same. It was hard to watch. Trev aced the test, and I was as thrilled about that as I was deeply sad that Jeff didn’t prioritise this, before he ran out of time.

We act like these things only ever happen to other people. We do this even when we have the grief-stricken children to prove otherwise. Busy and preoccupied, we play Russian Roulette with our lives and with our kids’ futures. People like Trev and I should be even more on top of this stuff, in our circumstances. Our children are one parental death away from being orphaned.

As I watched him joke with the nurses, I realised how hypocritical I’d been. So focused on heart health, I’d neglected the rest of my body. Did I think Jeff’s heart attack would protect me from breast cancer? Surely one family couldn’t be that unlucky…

This sort of bargaining was ridiculous and I knew it. Another friend, and mum of three, had just completed her treatment for breast cancer, several years after her husband died of a heart attack.

We’re not immune. Not special. Not safe from more heartbreak just because we’ve already had some.

So last week I had a belated mammogram. On the form, you’re meant to say if you’ve noticed any changes. I ticked ‘no’, but that’s only because I haven’t felt for any. It’s been years, probably, since I did a proper self-check.

Sitting alone in the waiting room, I thought of Amy, who I didn’t meet and wish I had. If only destiny had blown the four of us into someone’s backyard BBQ some time and we’d met in those circumstances and not these ones. Not just two of us. Not at a young widower support group.

I sent him a pic from the foyer at Breastscreen. He wished me good luck, with a smiley face.

The words felt as fragile as they were loaded, coming from a man who’d only recently explained to me during a grief jag that there’s no clear reason why good people die — it’s just bad luck.

Four years ago, I heard a paramedic say, ’I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do’. I know exactly how tenuous our hold is on this earth. When it’s too late, that’s it. No second chances.

There’s a reason the world is scrambling so desperately in the wake of a virus now. It’s that human life is indescribably precious. That’s a lesson a lot of us learn too late.

I wish you excellent luck with your health. More than that, I wish you the good sense not to rely on that luck.

Book your mammogram at Breastscreen.

Get your heart check at the GP (it’s medicare funded for over 45s).

Keep track of all the health checks you need with the WellAware App.