If it wasn’t for bad luck,
I’d have no luck at all
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By Graham Hatton-Downward
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Published by
Graham Hatton-Downward
at Smashwords
Introduction
Please excuse the vernacular but we have all seen the bumper sticker – Shit Happens! But the truth is, it does and I can guarantee you one thing, if it’s going to happen to anyone, then it’s going to happen to me and/or my wife!
I suppose in a way, that the ‘bigger boys’ have picked on us from day one. If we were still at school it would be simple. All we would have to do is to go and tell the teacher and Miss or Sir would make everything fine. But, when you are in your fifties and you left school longer ago than you care to remember, you left that luxury in your satchel along with your school cap and your homework book (assuming that the dog didn’t actually eat it!)
In my humble opinion, tenacity isn’t something that you are particularly born with but it is something that you can (and should strive to) develop if you want to stop the bigger boys from picking on you and you need to develop it quickly and effectively if you want to save yourself a whole lot of heartache. I am lucky that my wife (Lorraine) is just as, if not more, tenacious than I am. This comes in real handy when you are drawing up your ‘battle plans’ for the upcoming fight.
Throughout this book you will find that I continually refer to certain people, so I suppose that I should make the introductions now. Firstly there is the great love of my life, my beautiful wife Lorraine. We have both been married before and Lorraine has a son, Nathan from her previous marriage. I also have a son, Ian, from my first marriage. Ian is also married to a beautiful girl, Vicky and they recently presented us with the greatest gift of all, our first grandchild. His name is Kaiden and I know that I am biased but he is the most handsome, well behaved and contented baby that I have ever known.
I don’t know who or what I upset very early on in life’s great plan but it seems like I have spent my whole life either paying for it in some way or in fighting to get back only what I have been entitled to. A good friend of mine tells me that I must have ‘Killed a Nun’ in a previous life. I wish! I think I pillaged a whole convent! I know the old saying “What goes around, comes around” but come on, even Hitler was given a few breaks!
This book contains just a few selected examples of what I mean.
Chapter 1: We’re Getting Married in the Morning
I have never been one of those ‘macho men’ who is too afraid to show his true feelings. I love my wife very much and I have always said that getting married was the best day’s work that I have ever done. When you feel that way about someone, then getting married should come naturally. But, why do things always have to come so hard?
Like I say, my wife and I had both been married before and were divorced from our respective partners. We had been living together for a couple of years and I suppose we both felt that re-marrying was the inevitable next step. Besides living together, my wife and I work together and run our own training company. As I have said, we both have a son each by our previous marriages and we had planned to take the boys on vacation to Disney World in Florida during the Christmas break. It was the day that we had closed the company for the Christmas break. All the staff had left but my wife and I were still in the office tying up loose ends before we departed for our holiday. We shared an office and our desks faced each other. We had just about wrapped everything up when I had an inspirational idea. I looked up from my desk and said to Lorraine, “Do you fancy getting married while we are in Florida?” Alright, I accept that this wasn’t exactly the most romantic of proposals but I had everything figured out and this was going to be the most romantic wedding ever. My wife was going to look beautiful in her wedding dress and our sons and I would look great in matching tuxedos. Lorraine’s son was only three years old and would be the ring bearer and my son who was sixteen would be my best man – now you tell me if that’s not romantic!
In true ‘girly’ fashion, Lorraine was swept away with the idea, so I set about putting my plans into action. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. If you have ever been to Disney World, you will have seen the beautiful little white wedding chapel set on an island on a lake with its own romantic white sandy beach. I telephoned Disney and asked to be put through to the wedding chapel. I explained to them that we were going to be arriving in three days and that we would be staying in one of their hotels. I acknowledged the inescapable fact that it was extremely short notice but asked if we could possibly get married while we were there? Even if you have never been there, you will know that at Disney World everything is possible and the young lady on the other end of the telephone typically went out of her way to be as helpful as possible. “Sure, what day were you thinking of?” came the reply. Well, I don’t believe anyone is used to that kind of efficiency and the reply had me completely floored. I looked over at the blushing bride-to-be and asked. What day do you want to get married? Equally floored, Lorraine offered up the suggestion, “How about January 6th?”… “January 6th?” I asked the Disney representative. “Sure, what time?” she came back with.
This was getting creepy now. I just wasn’t ready for this type of efficiency. “Err, what time love?” I asked Lorraine. Equally thrown, Lorraine held her hands up in a questioning motion, “12 o’clock?” Lorraine offered. I relayed the message to the lady on the other end of the ‘phone, “12 o’clock?”. “Sure, no problem”, “do you have a fax machine?” Wanting to try and go some way to matching the young lady’s efficiency, I replied that I had and she said that she would fax me a questionnaire relating to our personal requirements for the wedding and asked that we fax it back to her as soon as possible. I assured her that she would have it within the hour and was told “okay, so everything is booked”; Lynne McKittrick will be your wedding co-ordinator”. “Just ask for her when you get here and she will confirm all the arrangements and take care of any further questions or requests you have”.
Wow! How good is that? I asked myself. I just couldn’t believe how easy it had gone. Lorraine was over the moon and suggested that it might be an idea just to let the travel agent know what our plans were. I called them up and commented to Lorraine that they were bound to be blown away by the whole romanticism of our plans – Wrong!
“Guess what, we are getting married while we are in Florida”, I excitedly told the travel agent. At the same time, Lorraine got on another phone line to start giving our families the news. “No you’re not” came the reply. “Yes we are. I have arranged everything” I said. “That’s the problem”, “we didn’t organise it”, I was told. Basically, the travel agents get a nice little commission for making the same phone call that I had made to Disney and for graciously passing on the paper questionnaire.
I broke the news to Lorraine, “you can stop getting excited, we’re not getting married”. “Why” came the question from Lorraine and not unreasonably I thought. “Because they told me we can’t” I said. It had happened again; someone or something always had to rain on our parade. Lorraine snatched the ‘phone off me and demanded an explanation. Eventually, we had to agree to pay the travel agent the thousands of pounds commission that they would have got for arranging the wedding so that we could have the wedding that we had actually organised.
You would be forgiven for thinking that that would be an end to the bad luck for the wedding but you couldn’t be more wrong. The next day we headed to the nearest big city to buy two wedding rings. You would think that would be pretty easy wouldn’t you. Wrong again. Can you believe that there wasn’t a jeweller in the city who could sell us a wedding ring? It didn’t have to be anything fancy, we were prepared to settle. A plain gold band would do. We would even settle for just one. As long as Lorraine had a ring everything would be fine – no can do! We tried everything from the major retail jewellers to jewellers who made their own rings; no-one had a gold ring to sell us.
A sign of the times I suppose and I don’t know if it’s still the same these days, but apparently at that time, all of the wedding rings on display were brass. The customer chooses the ring they like from the brass selection, the jeweller then establishes the correct size and then you can have your ring – in a couple of months!
We were left with no choice; we had to travel to Florida without the rings. We met up with our wedding co-ordinator Lynne McKittrick, and told her the ‘slight problem’ of not having a wedding ring. “Oh no problem” she said. Lynne gave us the name and address of a jeweller not too far from where we were staying. We went along and chose his and hers wedding rings, both gold and both with diamonds. The jeweller then sized our fingers and explained to us that as they didn’t have our exact sizes in stock. It was going to take an hour before we could pick up the rings. Love them or hate them, we could certainly learn a thing or two from the Americans when it comes to customer service. Lynne also gave us the name and address of a shop where we could rent a wedding gown for Lorraine as well as the suits for myself and the boys. We went along to the shop and Lorraine dove straight in to the dresses in her size. They had some lovely gowns but the one that Lorraine really fell in love with wasn’t her size.
“That’s no problem honey” the owner of the store said, “don’t worry about sizes, just pick out the gown you want and we make it fit you”. Picking the suits was a different story. Mine was straight forward enough, but they didn’t have one to fit Nathan our youngest son and Ian our oldest had stayed in England to spend New Years’ Eve with some friends. Displaying what we by now had come to accept as typical American efficiency, the store owner said she would simply make a suit for Nathan. But, Ian was going to be a different story. After all, he was still in England.
We remembered that we had hired a black tie suit for Ian a couple of months earlier in England. The owner of the wedding gown shop got on to international directory enquiries and found the phone number of the shop. They called them up and got Ian’s sizes over the phone and made a suit to these sizes. Now, remember that when all this was happening, we were only three days before the wedding and Ian was due to fly in the day before the wedding. Again, “no problem honey”, “just call in to the store when you have Ian”, “we will have everything ready by then”. Two days later we picked Ian up at the airport and drove straight to the store. Everything was ready and we all tried on our respective outfits and as you would expect, everything fitted perfectly. “Okay, leave it with us”, “we will get everything cleaned and pressed and deliver it to your room tomorrow”. And they did. They even brought two pairs of shoes for Nathan because his feet were different sizes. Like I say, we could learn a lot about customer service. But, if we had been prepared to accept the first ‘no’, then the wedding would not have taken place and, if we had listened to the jewellers, then we wouldn’t have had any rings.
Chapter 2: We’re All Going on a Summer Holiday
I don’t know where to begin with this one as my wife and I have had more problems on holidays than anyone I know. On one vacation, as we checked into a hotel in St. Lucia our youngest boy said to Lorraine, “Mummy, this place smells funny”. That was in the reception which you would think that at the very least would be kept clean. But, when we got to our room, the smell was even worse. It turned out that our room was situated right over a crack in the main sewage pipe and they had no other rooms that they could move us to. You would think that they would try and compensate for the smell by at least cleaning the room but they hadn’t even bothered to do that. It was extremely late when we arrived at the hotel so we decided to just stay the night and in the morning speak to the travel agent and get a move to another hotel.
We got up in the morning and walked to the restaurant to check out the breakfast. As we walked down the road we became aware of a strange noise behind us. It was slowly getting louder and louder and sounded something like a marching army. Eventually over the brow of the hill the source of the noise started to appear. There must have been between 150 and 200 people jogging in unison. They were being led by a famous television keep-fit personality who was singing these songs you see the American army marching to in films. He would sing a line and then the group would repeat it.
We managed to beat them to the restaurant but they congregated on the lawn outside and started doing press-ups etc, while the keep-fit guy berated those of us who had chosen food over fitness. To make matters worse, it was supposed to be an all-inclusive holiday but not everything was free. Believe it or not you had to pay for water but beer and spirits were free, so the majority of the restaurant clientele sat there in luminescent shell suits washing their cornflakes down with alcohol. Not wanting to stay around to witness the inevitable results come sunset, or to stay in the filth and stench, we went back to the room and got on the phone to the travel agent and demanded a move to another hotel.
The agents did their best to avoid the extreme workload of finding us another hotel and kept insisting that as this was their flagship hotel, nothing could possibly be wrong. I wouldn’t accept this and kept insisting that they found us another hotel. It was becoming more and more obvious that they really didn’t want all the extra work and effort but eventually the travel agents agreed that if we found a hotel ourselves they would sanction the move.
On another holiday everything had gone surprisingly well until the last day when I suggested to my wife that we hire a ‘hobbycat’ for the day. A hobbycat is a small catamaran which basically was two canoes strung together with a ‘cargo net’ in-between them and a sail sticking up in the middle.
My wife questioned the wisdom of the idea as neither of us had ever sailed before, but I assured her that I would get instructions before we set off. Maybe it was the romance of the idea or maybe it was the Pina Coladas or maybe I just caught her at a particularly weak moment but she caved in pretty quickly and agreed to go.
Prior to this day my wife had spent the best part of the vacation coveting a hat that a woman was wearing around the pool. It was basically a peak with a flat band to hold it around your head and left the top of your head open to the air. They are quite common now and are really popular amongst the golfing fraternity but at the time we had searched everywhere and couldn’t get one. We had even commissioned one of the locals to craft one out of banana leaves but it wasn’t quite right. We eventually spotted one the day before we went on our sailing trip and Lorraine had to have it.
Anyway, we went to the boat house where we were given the complete beginner’s guide to sailing. This consisted of: “pull this stick to the left if you want to turn right, push it to the right if you want to turn left and keep the sail tight”. Seemed simple enough. Armed with this foolproof information and after being issued with a life jacket each (which I thought was rather ominous), we set off with Lorraine looking magnificent in her lovely new hat. Our hotel was situated to the extreme right of a bay which was about two miles wide and we set off across the bay. We were really moving and I seemed to have full control of the craft. I was weaving in and out of other boats and I had somehow managed to avoid everything and everyone in the water.
Outside of the bay about a mile off-shore was a beautiful four-masted schooner and I told my wife that on the way back I was going to go out and have a look at it. Lorraine insisted that it was too far off-shore but of course, I wasn’t listening. As we continued across the bay, I was convinced that I had suddenly become a contender for the Great Britain sailing team. Not realising that all my new-found skills were down to the fact that we had the wind with us on the first leg of the journey, I headed off for the schooner with Lorraine screaming at me to head back to shore.
I honestly thought that I was in complete control of the boat and one minute we were looking at this schooner about a half mile in front of us and the next minute it was a mile behind us and was swiftly disappearing from view. I believe it is called ‘becalmed’, but all of a sudden we stopped moving and as if that wasn’t bad enough, there wasn’t a thing in sight. We were out in the Atlantic Ocean and were drifting further out to sea. Lorraine was shouting at me that she thought “we should be heading back now” and, whilst I couldn’t help agreeing with her reasoning, for the love of me I didn’t know how we were going to put the ‘suggestion’ into effect.
I believed that we were pointing the right way and I thought that I deserved some credit at least for this but Lorraine was in no mood to recognise my achievements. In front of us on the horizon we saw a speed boat crossing from left to right. Lorraine was screaming at it whilst flailing her arms about trying to attract the driver’s attention whilst at the same time ‘issuing instructions’ for me to do the same. I was quite proud of the fact that I was remaining calm and collected, which I am sure was making Lorraine worse and I tried to explain the futility of shouting someone who was over a mile away from us and had a massive engine drowning out any noise he might be reasonably expected to hear.
Much to Lorraine’s annoyance, he eventually disappeared from view. This made her even more determined and she sat down astride one of these ‘canoes’ and started to paddle with her hands. Lorraine tried to demand that I do the same but I refused, reasoning that at any time in the imminent future I might need all my strength for swimming. This just got Lorraine even madder and as she turned to shout at me, a wind came and blew her new hat off.
Then we suddenly started to move again and in all innocence and believing that once again I had full control of the situation, I offered to turn around and go back for the hat. We really hadn’t travelled that far and as the hat was bright yellow you could see it quite clearly bobbing in our wake. Lorraine didn’t answer me and as the offer was genuine, I really don’t believe that there was any call for the look that she gave me, but I quickly abandoned the idea.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, it started to rain. Now, rain itself was no great threat but in the two weeks we had been at the hotel, I had noticed that every time it rained it got windy and the more it rained the windier it got. Not only that, but when it was really windy, I had seen these hobbycats ‘turn turtle’ in the water. By now I was beginning to realise the predicament we were in and whilst I was sure that our craft wouldn’t sink, I was worried that if it turned over we could get split up.
So, being the ever-caring father, I took off my life jacket and placed it on my young son, over his own jacket. I thought that I was doing the right thing but in reality, what I had actually done was let Lorraine know that I was worried. She hit the panic button and started to scream, which caused Nathan to do the same. I was trying to calm them down when I noticed in the distance that a boat was moving quite fast straight towards us. It was pretty obvious that it was the people from the boat rental company searching for us and the screams of hysteria changed to, well to screams of hysteria but for very different and very obvious reasons. I don’t know if you have ever noticed but nearly all speed boat drivers are poseurs. Not a one of them can cruise to a stop.
For some reason they have to go around you in circles like a deranged apache circling a wagon train while they shout at you... as he was doing. I turned to Lorraine to tell her we were saved but I couldn’t see her, she had disappeared completely. There was nowhere on the hobby-cat that she could go to, so I quickly ignored the boat still circling around us and frantically scanned the water for my wife. I couldn’t see her anywhere and looked to the driver of the other boat to tell him to be careful as my wife was somewhere in the water. I couldn’t believe my eyes, sitting alongside him with a face like a farmer’s backside on a frosty morning was Lorraine.
This ‘frail little woman’ who can’t even negotiate a set of step ladders on her own had somehow managed to jump from a moving catamaran into an even faster moving speed boat! To this day, I swear that if the driver said I can only take one of you, it was going to be her! None of this “take my baby”, “I’ve led a full life”, she had staked her claim to a seat and she wasn’t going to be moved.
Eventually the other driver stopped his boat and threw a rope to me instructing me to tie it around the mast. As I passed Nathan to his mother, the driver said that he was going to tow us back to the boat house but said that someone was going to have to stay on the catamaran to steer it. Lorraine repeated the look she had given me earlier, and said “You!”… I didn’t argue.
But, the vacation which most shows the rewards of tenacity has to be when I went to Mauritius with my wife and our youngest son. Again, we had chosen an all-inclusive holiday and we were really looking forward to a trouble-free holiday on a paradise island. We had chosen a really nice hotel and had paid a considerable amount for the vacation. You would have thought that nothing could go wrong but it just shows that you can’t take anything on face value.
We had requested a room near to the reception. Previous experience had long since taught us that young children continually have to keep going back to the room for something or other that they had forgotten. When we checked in, the receptionist gave us directions to our room. We were in the far corner on the top floor and couldn’t be any further away from the reception if we had tried. Obviously we asked for a move but we were told that the hotel was full and that we couldn’t be moved (sound familiar?). We decided that it wouldn’t be too much of a problem so long as we were organised and remembered to take everything that we needed for the day every time we left the room. But when we got to the room it was filthy. There was a scum line around the bathtub which had obviously built up over a period of weeks, if not months. We complained and cleaners were sent to the room to sort out the mess.
The cleaners didn’t do a particularly good job and we registered our thoughts with the Management but we were told that they couldn’t come back until the following day. The cleaners were particularly inept and this complaint actually carried on for the following week.
Whilst our son was still young, we always tried to choose vacation hotels which had a ‘kids club’ as we were guaranteed that he would be entertained and meet kids his own age. What we didn’t know and what we weren’t told was that the kids club at this hotel had only opened that week and wasn’t particularly equipped to deal with children. The fact that kids might actually turn up seemed to take them completely by surprise. Not only that but our son was the only child booked in to the club, so the organisers had decided to cancel the itinerary which was advertised and instead they issued Nathan with a packet of crayons and a colouring-in book and left him to his own devices. One night, when he was supposed to be in the club, we actually spotted him walking around the pool on his own. He had left the club because he was bored and when we stormed around there to take them to task, they hadn’t even spotted that he had gone!
The first day at the hotel was spent lounging by the pool just relaxing and having a few drinks, (if I’m being honest, the following few days were pretty much the same). While we were having dinner on the third night, Lorraine remarked that she was a little bemused by the strange practice at the pool bar whereby, if we ordered three drinks, then they would have us sign three separate receipts. I remarked that I had noticed the same thing and not only that but they also put the receipts on top of each other with just the signature box showing. The following day by the pool Lorraine went for the drinks and again the three receipts were stacked on top of each other. This time Lorraine separated the receipts and found a whole list of drinks on our bills that we obviously hadn’t had but which they were expecting us to sign for. We complained to the Management and were told that they had suspected this was going on.
It turned out that the bar tenders were duping ‘all-inclusive’ guests to sign for drinks which they hadn’t received but were then sold-on to other guests and the bar staff pocketed the money. The holiday continued in this vein until the end of the first week, by which time we were completely fed up with the way in which we were being treated.
We decided that we had had enough and requested a meeting with the hotel manager. Without his actual knowledge, the Manager ‘had agreed to see us’ and the meeting was confirmed for nine o’clock the following morning. That night we sat down and compiled a list of our complaints. The list was exhaustive and actually covered one side of a sheet of A4 lined paper.
We met the Manager at nine as arranged and presented him with our list of complaints. He obviously wasn’t ready for this and was taken completely by surprise. He requested that we give him the day to consider the complaints and we all agreed to re-convene at his office at six o’clock that night to discuss the list. We arrived back at the Manager’s office at the agreed time and I witnessed what was probably the best piece of man-management that I will ever see. Stood to strict attention behind the Hotel Manager were seven or eight Heads of Departments.
The Manager was quite forthright in his explanation when he said to us “I’ll be honest with you, I am too busy to deal with this” he said, waving our list at us. “So, I have gathered the heads of every department that you have complained about and we are all going to listen while they explain what they are going to do to put things right”.
It was brilliant. One-by-one each Department Head took a step forward and profusely apologised for their failings, before listing everything that they were going to do to put things right. We were immediately moved rooms and given the best suite in the hotel, with a room make-up service tailored to suit our itinerary. All of a sudden the kids club discovered a list of activities for Nathan like you wouldn’t believe. They even put the Hotel Manager’s young son in there to keep him company. And so it went on. The bar staff that were using us to steal from their employers were dismissed but that particular problem continued for the rest of the holiday.
We took it up with the Head of Department responsible for the bars, but he wasn’t particularly interested so we just refused to sign for anything that we hadn’t had. But it was pretty obvious by the spaces they were leaving that they intended adding drinks to the receipts after we had gone. So we decided that as it was an international chain of hotels, we would take it up with the hotel Group Managing Director when we returned home. If I was going to give anybody one piece of advice when making a complaint, it would be to make it to the very top of the chain. You see, the lower down the chain of command that you go, the more people there are who will try and hide the complaint from the top brass.
For many years I have suffered from diverticulitis and the last couple of days of the holiday I took ill, pretty seriously. My wife (I love her to bits, but she has always had delusions of grandeur) had always wanted to fly first class. She saw this as the ideal opportunity to give it a go, under the guise of convincing me that I needed the extra leg room. So at the airport we asked to upgrade to first class and were quoted what we thought was a reasonable price and accepted. We took our seats and it turned out that we were the only people travelling in the first class cabin that day and as such, had twelve seats between the three of us. Sounds great doesn’t it? No such luck!
Because the airline hadn’t been expecting anyone to travel first class, the cabin crew weren’t prepared for us. The ‘trolley dolly’ served the lunch menu to us and the three of us decided that the lobster sounded very tempting. Unfortunately, because the airline weren’t expecting us when they loaded the food on board, they only had one lobster, so my wife and I agreed to have steak whilst our son had the solitary lobster. Once again, they only had one steak. My wife won this time, so I had to settle for third choice. Once was bad enough, but this happened at every meal served and was compounded by other issues such as no choice of wines with the meals, no snacks etc.
When we got home we took our complaint to the very top of the hotel chain. We also decided that while we were at it, we might as well complain about the ‘first-class’ treatment which we had received from the airline. Naturally both parties tried to fob us off with pretty weak explanations which we refused to accept until eventually the airline refunded the whole return air fare. Not only that, but as a result of our dogged complaining, the hotel refunded the cost of the entire fortnight’s stay.
As a result of our tenacity, we had just had a two week stay in Mauritius and flew home in relative luxury all for the cost of our outbound flight… So you see; it does pay to complain.
Mind you, tenacity can sometimes backfire on you. I remember one particular vacation when we were travelling to Orlando. We had to fly from Manchester to London and then London to Orlando. We never travel light and I hate to admit it, but it’s not all Lorraine’s fault – I am just as bad, if not worse.
We arrived at the check-in at Manchester and started putting our multitude of cases through. As they were being checked in, a chap arrived at the check-in desk next to us and it turned out he was taking the same two flights as us. As ever, I was more intent on his conversation than ours and although we had arrived well before him, because we had so many cases we both finished at the same time. The young girl handed him his tickets and said “there you go sir; you won’t see your bags again now until you pick them up in Orlando”. Our ‘lady’ handed us our tickets and said “there you go; you need to pick your bags up in London and transfer them to the Orlando flight”.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa” I said. “How come we have to pick up our bags in London, and that guy doesn’t see his bags until he gets to Florida?”, “well you never asked” she replied. “You never told us” I retorted, “Why can’t we have the same treatment” I asked. “Well, you could but it would mean me putting all your bags through again” she whined. “Well then that’s what you are going to have to do” I said.
I continued, “If you had told us about the option we would have jumped at it, it’s not our fault if you didn’t tell us”.
The check-in girl dragged our cases back, tore up our tickets, and started to check them in again. But all the while she was doing it her face was like thunder and she was snorting like a wounded bull. “I’m sorry” I said to her, “but you have a serious attitude problem”. She didn’t answer but the look she gave me said it all. Finally she gave us our tickets and said through gritted teeth “there you go sir, you won’t see your bags again now until you pick them up in Orlando”. I thanked her for being so ‘helpful’ but she had to have the last word. Her parting shot was “and I haven’t charged you for the extra luggage, even if you do think I have an attitude problem”. Once again I thanked her for all her ‘help’ and we left.
It was an early flight to London and as the flight attendants started to hand out the breakfasts it smelled, and even more unusual, looked quite nice. And while it was no gastronomic feast, it was certainly far better than the normal airline gruel. The flight attendants continued to pass out the meals but for some reason, kept passing us by until finally we were the last ones to be served.
I peeled the foil back off my tray and couldn’t make out what they had given me. I looked at Lorraine and Nathan’s meals and theirs were the same as mine. I wasn’t quite sure what it was but it certainly didn’t even resemble the bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and toast which everyone else had been served. I called a flight attendant over and asked what it was that they had served me. “It’s what you ordered at check-in sir, the vegetarian option”.
At the time I was really mad but looking back I have to admit that the check-in girl had got her own back!
Chapter 3: No Wonder I Don’t Feel Well
I tell you, my wife and I can’t even be sick without it causing trouble for us! At the time of writing the first draft of this book, I was sitting up in my sick bed after an operation to rebuild my shoulder. I am not the type of person who can sit around doing nothing and the operation was a pretty big one with quite a long and drawn out recovery period. It was actually my wife’s idea that I write the book to stop myself from going ‘stir crazy’.
Ten months ago I was learning to ride a horse. I suppose that I must have been doing OK, because the horse decided to take my training up a notch and give me a practical lesson in ‘the other way of getting off’. My own stupid fault I know but I hadn’t intended staying on long (I should point out however, that I had actually intended staying on longer than I actually did) so I didn’t bother wearing a body protector or a safety hat. I cracked my head and my back when I landed but apart from actually knocking myself out for a couple of minutes, I didn’t think that I was particularly hurt. After a couple of weeks I developed a severe pain at the top of my back and it was getting worse as every day passed. I booked a course of appointments with my GP who was giving me pain numbing injections in my back.
On one visit there was a locum on duty who decided that the problem might be my neck and suggested that I see a neuro surgeon. I saw the neuro surgeon who was a really nice guy and after an MRI scan decided that the problem was actually my shoulder and referred me to an orthopaedic surgeon.
From the very start, the surgeon and I didn’t exactly ‘hit it off’. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was something about him that I didn’t like. Lorraine knew exactly what it was but wouldn’t tell me. You see, I had checked him out on the internet and his credentials were top notch. Of all the orthopaedic surgeons at the hospital he seemed to be the most qualified and I was of the opinion that if anyone had to operate on me, I wanted the best. So, until she thought I was ready to hear it, Lorraine decided to keep her mouth shut. On one visit to his rooms he decided he was going to ‘test me’ to see if I actually needed an operation.
The test was a ‘nerve block’ which I had witnessed being done on a horse. Basically they inject anaesthetic into the nerve in whichever area is causing you a problem and if, all of a sudden you can then use the area which had been injected, then there is a problem which needs investigating. For me, it was the shoulder that was causing the problem and so that’s where the injection went. Now I pride myself with the fact that I’m a big brave soldier when it comes to needles and told the surgeon this, but God, this one was hurting. Basically he was botching it. In fact he was so ham-fisted that towards the end of the injection the anaesthetic shot out of the back end of the syringe and squirted all over Lorraine who was sat about two metres away. The nerve block test showed that I needed an operation and a date was set.
When we came out of the surgeon’s room, I commented to Lorraine that the injection had hurt and she decided that now was the time to tell me her feelings. She told me that in her opinion the surgeon didn’t believe that there was anything wrong with me and said that the look on his face when I told him that I wasn’t scared of needles proved it. Any man reading this will remember at some point being punched in his arm and getting a ‘dead arm’. Well, within an hour of the nerve block I had the mother of all dead arms, it felt like I had been kicked by a dozen mules.
Lorraine telephoned the surgeon who said that he had never come across this before and couldn’t understand it. He told me that it should go away and advised me to take some pain killers. This was on a Friday and I spent the whole Saturday climbing the walls from the pain from the injection. By Sunday I couldn’t stand the pain any longer and Lorraine took me back to the hospital.
There was only one person waiting in front of me so I was very lucky and only had to wait a little over two hours to be seen. The doctor I saw carried out a very thorough investigation for a couple of minutes and then asked me to wait outside for a while. After waiting another thirty minutes I was called back in and was told by the doctor that she had contacted the surgeon who was actually away at a seminar.
She put me on the phone to him. He reiterated that he had never come across a reaction like this before and he had questioned his peers at the seminar and they were of the same opinion. However, he graciously acknowledged that I was in pain and decided that the pain warranted me being prescribed morphine patches. The problem was this was a Sunday and finding a chemist that was open, was a nightmare. We eventually found a supermarket with a pharmacy and Lorraine left me in the car while she ran in as it was getting late and the supermarket was about to close. Eventually I saw Lorraine walking towards the car but the look on her face told me that I didn’t want to hear what she was about to tell me.
It appeared that the doctor had reinforced our faith in the medical profession and used the wrong prescription pad to prescribe the morphine. And to make matters worse, because of the time we had been kept waiting at the hospital, by the time we returned with the right prescription, the pharmacy would be closed. Lorraine stormed back into the doctor’s office and gave her a piece of her mind. What’s more, where a lesser person would have shrugged their shoulders and agreed that it was now going to be Monday before we would be able to get the prescription filled, Lorraine went into ‘attack mode’ and demanded that the doctor telephone the hospital’s pharmacist and bring them into the hospital to issue the morphine.
By now the doctor had realised that a ‘full-on’ Lorraine isn’t something that you want to cross swords with and agreed to her request. See what you can achieve when you want it bad enough?
Anyway I reported to hospital at my allotted time for my operation, and the surgeon came to see me as is the norm. He told me that the results of an MRI scan had shown that I had a spur on one of the bones in my shoulder which was cutting into the bicep muscle and so had to be removed.
The operation was carried out and afterwards the surgeon came to my room to see me. He threw a piece of paper at me and said “I’ve got some pictures for you, and they prove to me that you weren’t being ‘mard’ (a Cheshire word meaning that you are acting like a baby). He explained that the pictures were of the inside of my shoulder and that they showed quite a lot of damage to the bicep muscle. He went on to say that he should have actually removed it, but, because he hadn’t got prior authorisation for that procedure before the operation, then he couldn’t actually do it and that it would require another operation. But; he said, there was a chance that now the spur was gone, the muscle could repair itself. I did a bit of reading on removing the bicep muscle and this causes something called ‘Popeye syndrome’ where you end up with a big lump in your arm similar to Popeye’s muscles. I didn’t particularly fancy this much and decided that I would work as hard as I could on my rehabilitation. I did this and in record time the surgeon was ready to sign me off as being completely cured.
As I got up to leave his office he said to me “should I let you into a little secret?” “Go on” I said. He went on, “I didn’t believe you when you came to see me and I told the anaesthetist as they wheeled you into the theatre that I thought you were kidding us”. Score another one for Lorraine. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, or as I was a private patient, that I was actually paying someone to say it and told him so. He justified his comments with; “well we do get some people who put it on, but to be fair, they are usually the National Health patients”. The pomposity of his answer astounded me and for once, left me speechless.
In keeping with the way my life has always gone, over the next few months my shoulder recovery made a complete u-turn and it was becoming pretty obvious that I was going to need the second operation. But, I was damned if I was going back to the guy who didn’t believe me so I did a bit of searching on the internet. Not too far from where I live is a highly respected hospital that specialises in sports injuries. I researched their list of surgeons and found that one of their guys was the main orthopaedic and physiotherapy consultant for one of the top rugby league clubs in the country. Working on the assumption that rugby players are going to hurt their shoulders now and then, I decided that he was the man for me.
I got the referral from my GP and made an appointment and went along armed with the x-rays, MRI scans and the pictures taken by the surgeon while he was inside my arm. This guy talked to me for all of ten minutes and then turned around and told me that it was all in my head! I was dumbfounded. I knew that I wasn’t imagining the constant agony that had dogged my life for the last five months. I had had one operation and besides all that, I had the x-rays and photos to show the extent of the damage. “No, you are imagining it” I was told. “You haven’t even looked at the x-rays” I said. “Don’t need to” was the reply. “But the pictures” I said. “They don’t show anything” he interrupted, “everything looks normal in them” he concluded. “I am going to refer you to a pain clinic” he went on, “I think if anything, it is a problem with the nerves in the arm but they will explain it to you at the clinic”. I looked at Lorraine and she looked at me. It was pretty obvious that we both felt the same way so I got up and bade him farewell.
By now we were both beginning to realise that ‘the bigger boys’ were trying to take over my life again but neither Lorraine nor I were about to take it lying down. So, back at the computer, I started the search for someone who dealt with the nerves in the arms. They weren’t exactly thick on the ground but I managed to find one about one hundred and twenty miles away. My GP is a fantastic guy and has always been extremely supportive towards me and my family, so getting a referral to another surgeon wasn’t a problem.
We got an appointment to see him and he checked me out and agreed that there was some nerve damage but he felt that the bicep was the main problem. He reckoned that if the bicep was repaired, then the nerves would repair themselves and referred me to a colleague of his in the same hospital. This was another orthopaedic surgeon and from the second I met him I knew that I didn’t like him and that I was going to have trouble with him.
Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who sits there smirking at you the whole time? Well I have… now. I could just hear it, had my dear old mother, God rest her soul, been there, “Get that smirk off your face, before I knock it off” she would have said. And that was exactly what I wanted to do. He just had one of those faces that you never get tired of kicking.
From the outset it was obvious that he didn’t believe me and he just kept saying “I think we should leave it a few months and see how it goes”. I wanted to cry. By this time I had been in agony for over seven months now and to be quite honest, it does start to wear you down. I told the guy that I needed something doing now, not wait a few months but he wasn’t having any of it. I left his room feeling utterly dejected, so during the trip home Lorraine and I formulated a plan.
We would go back and see the nerve guy to see if he could lean on him a little bit and move things along. This was what we did but unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan. We sat in his rooms, put on our saddest faces and pleaded that the other guy wanted to wait a few months. “Well that’s what you are going to have to do then” came the unwanted reply.
Before I did the job I do now I used to be a carpenter and thinking I was really clever, I sprung up with a fantastic analogy. “Look” I said, “I am a carpenter and if your front door won’t close, you call me up and I turn up with my tools and make it work – simple”. “Yes but, front doors can’t fix themselves” he said. Then came the bit that really pee’d me off, “and anyway, you ought to be glad that you haven’t got cancer”. Can you believe that we were paying these so-called ‘educated’ people to talk to us like this?
That was it, back to the computer to find someone else. Then I had a brainwave. An acquaintance of ours is a famous international rugby union player who has had more than his fair share of injuries. Not only that, but he had recently had a shoulder operation. I told Lorraine and she got straight on the phone to his dad and asked him who had carried out the surgery. He gave us the name of a guy in Manchester so once again we got a referral.
When we finally got to see him in his rooms, I couldn’t believe the difference. He was quite young but the professionalism just oozed from him. He had a female assistant with him and when I showed him the pictures he immediately pointed the bicep out to her. “Is there a problem with that?” I asked. “Yes, it’s completely lacerated” he said. “If you don’t mind, I am going to do my own ultrasound” he went on. He opened what I thought was a briefcase but turned out to be a portable ultrasound machine. He did the ultrasound there and then and went to great lengths to translate what he was seeing into words that Lorraine and I could understand.
He showed me that the bicep had a hole in it covering more than fifty percent of the muscle. He then went on to say that on the ultrasound it appeared that there was quite a lot of arthritis in the shoulder. Feeling cock-sure of myself I proclaimed “no there’s not”. “I have the x-rays here that the first surgeon had taken to look for arthritis and he assures me that they don’t show any”. This new surgeon put the x-rays on the light plate and switched it on. Because he had done such a thorough job explaining the ultrasound to me, my eyes immediately went to the affected area. “That’s arthritis isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes it is, quite a lot of it” he replied. I asked, “Can you do anything about these two problems?”, “of course I can” came the reassurance I had waited so long to hear. It wasn’t just like music to my ears, it was a symphony.
Before he turned the ultrasound machine off, he downloaded the findings onto a credit card size flash drive and gave it to me, “that’s your copy of the ultrasound” he said. He then gave me a brand new book which he had personally produced and pointed to separate sections. “These are the two operations that I need to perform”, “and if you go to this website, you can actually watch examples of the operations being carried out”.
He then gave me another brand new book which he had produced, “this one is for your physiotherapist” he said, “it explains all the exercises you will need to do during your recuperation”. The only bad part was that this was the end of November and he was fully booked until the 2nd January.
Lorraine and I skipped out of his office finally realising that not only had we found someone who believed me but that he was going to put it right and after ten long months of constant agony, I finally was going to be free of pain.
The second of January came and I went into hospital for my operation and after it I was recuperating in my room when the surgeon came to see me. He explained to me that when he had got inside the shoulder it was a complete mess and he actually had to carry out eight different procedures, each one an operation in its own right. I couldn’t help but think back to the sports ‘specialist’ I had seen just a couple of months earlier who had told me that it was all in my head.
Lorraine too has suffered more than her fare share of illness. Until five years ago, the training company we were running together was doing quite well. We employed thirty five staff and had beautiful offices and training rooms.
Then we did some business for customer who was a really big and powerful organisation. The contract was completed fully and to the letter but before we received payment the customer wanted to audit the contract. We had nothing to hide and so welcomed the auditors with open arms. The audit was to take place at our offices and would last three days.
My wife and I used to travel into work together in my car but because of other commitments, on the third day my wife had travelled in her own car. My wife had a nice little black sports car and I had bought her a personalised registration for her birthday. The auditors obviously got jealous when they saw it and decided to give us a hard time. Until then the audit had proceeded as smooth as silk but now, talk about chalk and cheese! What followed was four years of sheer hell and we have lost everything. Our offices, our training rooms and worse still, all of our staff have lost their jobs including our own son.