CHAPTER 1
OUR HEARTS
‘I early learned that from almost any stream…the great secret was this, that whatever bait you used, worm, grasshopper, grub, or fly, there was one thing you must always put upon your hook, namely, your heart. When you bait your hook with your heart, the fish always bite; they will jump clear from the water after it; they will dispute with each other over it; it is a morsel they love above everything else.’
‘But Paul said we did have a reason: the jeopardy! One of us might die on the bankside, and if it was filmed, then that would be a feather in the BBC’s cap. They’d be able to use it on the news.’
Paul: It’s worth saying upfront: we’re very competitive about our heart health issues.
Bob: Well, as always, you trump me, Paul.
P: I do, because I had something really seriously wrong with me a long time before you, Bob.
B: You are the senior patient.
P: That’s right. Shall we begin with my near-death experience?
B: Oh, God help us.
PAUL
About 12 years ago, I was on holiday in Somerset with my daughter, just sitting watching the telly or doing something just as wonderful, when BANG!
One minute, I was fine; the next, I thought I’d been shot in the stomach. It was so dramatic and powerful – the sort of indescribable pain where your first and only thought is ‘Oh! I’m going to die!’ Just brutal.
Apart from knowing this was the worst pain I’d ever been in, I had no idea what was happening. I knew I had to get me and my poor little girl back home, so I left the car there and got on the train with a huge suitcase. It was a Friday night, so the train was packed, of course.
Over the next couple of hours, the pain in my stomach settled down a bit – I mean, it was all relative, it was only slightly less agonising than it had been right at the start – but then I made the huge mistake of eating something. Well, everything you’d imagine would happen to you, if your stomach had basically exploded inside your body and you tried to use it, immediately started up all over again. I’d eaten some crab earlier in the day and even though it had nothing to do with what was happening inside me, I won’t eat crab even now. The bad memories are too deeply connected with crabmeat. Never again. If you’re a crab, you can bugger right off.
As soon as we pulled into London, I went straight to the hospital. They gave me the once-over, said they thought it was probably appendicitis, but decided to call the MRI operator back into work – she’d gone off for a night out, probably just opened a bottle of wine and about to go off to some party when that phone call came in. She must have been furious. Her big night out gets scuppered because someone wants her to come over and have a look inside a screaming man’s abdomen.
It was just as well she did, because the scan showed there was something much more seriously wrong with me than appendicitis. It turned out I’d had an abscess that had exploded in my colon, deep in my large intestine, and it had caused all sorts of chaos. You know the phrase ‘busting a gut’? That’s what it was. I’d literally busted a gut.
They kept me in the hospital that night and I got all the bells and whistles – tubes threading in and out of me, one up me nose, one up me appendage and one into the abscess leading to a catheter. I wasn’t about to have any particular procedure – it was an attempt to try and calm me down ahead of draining the bloody thing the next day. But these first hours are the most dangerous ones, as there’s a real and constant danger of something suddenly splitting and then everything inside your body instantly ending up in one great pus tsunami. If this happens, what it boils down to is – and I’m going to use a medical term here – you just die.
It’s not an over-exaggeration to say there’s a high fatality rate with this sort of thing. So despite the horrendous pain, the gallons of vomit and the near-constant internal examinations, it turns out I was actually one of the lucky ones.
In the end – and this may not come as a huge surprise – I didn’t die. Instead, the doctors managed to drain the abscess and then put me on hold to see if it would stabilise, because the abscess had also caused all sorts of lesions and problems inside the small intestine. After a few months of hospitalisation just trying to calm it all down, they told me they were going to do a laparoscopy – a keyhole surgery technique where they go in through the abdomen to stitch your insides back together.
If you can’t have a laparoscopy, then you get the more drastic alternative: they open your torso up like a human sports bag and perform a colectomy. And even if the colectomy goes perfectly, you’ll end up with a colostomy bag for three months until everything inside starts to calm down.
In the event of anything going wrong with the laparoscopy, there’s a standby emergency team waiting to wade straight into your belly and then tie you off – in which case, you’ll end up having the colectomy and the colostomy bag.
They went as far as marking me up for it, just in case the worst happened: ‘Which side would you like the bag, Mr Whitehouse?’ Well, it wasn’t something I’d given a great deal of thought to over the years, but in the end, I went for the left. Seemed like the obvious choice.
Even when you get to this stage, a lot of people don’t survive the rejoining operation, and considering how many of the various steps along the way lead directly to instant death, I was pretty lucky not to die. The doctor even told me a couple of times, ‘How you’re still here, I don’t know,’ (which is right up there in the list of things you don’t really want to hear a medical professional say to you when you’re not well).
I was really in a lot of pain and I realised that the speed at which they rushed me through the hospital was a sign of how dangerous things had become – but at the time, you’re being gripped so hard by the sheer brutality of the experience, you don’t really comprehend how risky it actually is. Even now, I don’t like to look back on this time too much – it’s much easier to use my inherent shallowness and block it all out. But I know I was very, very lucky. So far, so funny, eh?
I remember waking up the morning after the operation, the general anaesthetic slowly wearing off, and the sun was shining and I just thought ‘Yeeeeeeessss!’ But it wasn’t a feeling of triumph or joy – it was more an all-powerful sense of pure and utter relief, because the three preceding days had been beyond awful. Admittedly, I was also completely morphined off my nut, so that probably added to the sensation.
That was my first proper brush with mortality. But it didn’t stop there (maybe because I knew one day I’d have to beat Bob). It was while I was being monitored in the aftermath of all that when the doctor noticed my blood pressure was consistently high. I was put on blood pressure medication for a couple of years afterwards, but since it didn’t really seem to go down, they brought me back in, did an angiogram and told me, ‘Oh, you’ve got one artery that’s only got 10% function.’ So, more as a precautionary measure than anything else, they decided to put in a stent.
To put in a stent, they push a camera in through a vein, have a look around, take the camera out, and then the stent gets pushed in along the same route. It goes in deflated and once it’s inside and in place, they blow it up with a little balloon. That opens up the steel mesh and then they pop the balloon. Bingo. You’ve now got a stent leading into your heart. Didn’t even leave a scar.
I had three stents put in, which is such a routine procedure I wasn’t even knocked out: you get sedated rather than given a general anaesthetic. But having a stent put in is, of course, a delicate and extraordinary procedure. An artery can end up being punctured at any time, so they’ve got the open-heart team on standby with their hands hovering over the old circular saw. You know that team must be secretly hoping things go wrong so they can start that big saw up. One of the perks of the job.
I stayed overnight because they went in through my femoral artery and an artery can’t be stitched, so they had to give me a silicon plug. There was actually more concern about the silicon plug coming out than there was about the heart, and I had more discomfort from that plug than anything to do with the heart.
So I was a bit ahead of Bob in that I had my heart done first. But my operation was fairly precautionary.
It wasn’t like Bob’s.
For him, it was very nearly all over.
P: Harry [Enfield] and I were on tour, and Bob and Jim [Moir, AKA Vic Reeves] were about to go on tour and we heard – I think Charlie Higson told me – that you’d presented, hadn’t you? You presented, didn’t you, Bob? Who knows what he presented.
B: It all happened very fast, Paul. It took a day from presenting to my GP before I was standing in front of the consultant to see if he could put in a stent.
P: I’d been in touch with Bob by this time. ‘Stents? Oh, you’ll be fine. You’ll be back on the beer by tomorrow.’
B: When they told me I had to have a serious heart operation, my main memory is standing in my kitchen and thinking what I was really going to miss was my little tea towel. I also had an egg cup I was going to miss.
P: When you say you’d miss your egg cup and your tea towel, that’s a really poignant and interesting observation – but everyone you say it to always goes ‘ha ha ha ha!’ And actually no, you do really mean that – ‘I’ll miss these tiny little things.’ And it’s so difficult for you, Bob, to express that without everybody just laughing.
B: It really struck me that not for one minute did I think, ‘Oh, I’m going to really miss performing, I’m really going to miss working.’ The things you’re going to miss are your wife, your egg cup, your seat that you sit in to watch TV…
P: Sorry, your wife? You’ve never said that before.
B: What would you miss, Paul?
P: Nothing. What do you think I am? An old softie?
BOB
I actually have a really good heart, sweet as a nut. I have it checked every year, all the valves. My heart is fit – it has a beat so regular and intense that it is often sampled by dubstep and grime artists when they need a more natural sound – but I’ve got heart disease. Paul’s the same.
Heart disease is nothing to do with your heart, as such: it’s about the pipes that go in and out. It’s genetic. And I think I’m right in saying, if you haven’t got the heart disease gene, you won’t have a problem whatever you do. If you do have it, it seems to store bad cholesterol in your arteries and in the neck.
Back in October 2015, I had a little pain in my chest. Nothing spectacular, no worries as far as I was concerned – my mum would have said, ‘You’ve got a cold on your chest, have some hot Ribena and a Beechams Powder.’ But in three weeks Jim and I were about to head off around the country on our 25th anniversary tour of Reeves and Mortimer, so I thought I’d better have it checked out in case I needed any antibiotics or anything.
The doctor listened to my heart, looked a bit anxious, and sent me straight to a heart consultant the next day. The consultant put me on a running machine for an exercise stress test. This involves running as fast as you can for ten minutes with a number of electrodes attached to your chest. If there is any narrowing of the arteries this will show up on an electrical tracing they record during the test.
The consultant looked at the results and said, ‘Right, you need something. You’re going to need something done.’ Well, my heart sank and the qualms invaded my stomach. It was serious – I wasn’t just going to be able to pop some pills. Next step would be an angiogram at the hospital. Just like Paul, this is where they insert a camera through an artery in your wrist and have a good rummage around the arteries surrounding your heart. It’s very much like when they put a camera down your drains when they are blocked only in my case the smell is potentially worse. His guess was that I would need a couple of stents to open up narrowings in my pipes.
Three days later, I went to Pembury Hospital with Lisa, my partner of 25 years. I wasn’t overly worried. I had spoken to Paul, who had reassured me that having stents inserted was a perfectly simple and pain-free procedure. The stents would be put in as part of the angiogram procedure and I would be as right as rain in a week and ready to go on tour. The room where I went to have the stent was amazing – the most efficient, military, humans-working-at-their-full-capacity room I’ve ever seen. This was the first time I got scared: it suddenly felt very serious.
After about two hours the procedure was over and the camera was pulled out of my wrist. The consultant, Mr Lawson, explained that I had significant heart disease and some of my arteries were 95% blocked. These blockages could not be stented. He said, ‘You need a heart bypass. You’ve got to have open-heart surgery.’
That was the moment. And I shit myself.
There is a theory in showbiz circles that mentally you remain the same age as when you first tasted fame, and I think there is a grain of truth in this. I had been living my life like a bloke in his mid-thirties, drinking, smoking, having a daft laugh and messing about. As I lay on my gurney being wheeled back to my room, I suddenly felt very old and very vulnerable. I became pathetic.
Knowing what I know now, it’s not terrifying at all in terms of the risks of the operation – but I think I was so terrified because heart operations were such big things, back when I was young. They were these massive operations that a lot of people didn’t survive.
Back home, I spent the evening crying and hugging Lisa. My whole world had suddenly shrunk to include only those things that really mattered to me. Just the sight of little everyday things such as my favourite egg cup or a tea towel that Lisa and I had bought years ago would set off the tears. I became hyper-aware of every little beat and twitch of my heart, convincing myself that it was about to blow. Every time I looked at Lisa I thought of the thousands of kindnesses she had done for me over the years. I asked her if she would marry me and she said yes.
The next day I got down to sorting everything out. I booked in for my operation the following Monday. I phoned up Jim and broke the news that we would have to cancel the tour. Mr Lawson reckoned that if it went ahead, I would have dropped on stage at the Southampton Mayflower Theatre, about ten nights into the tour.
I made a will and went to the registry office with Lisa. The registrar told us that we could not get married without giving 21 days’ notice. I explained about the operation and the registrar said, ‘Well, you can get an emergency licence if you are literally at death’s door.’
So I phoned up my consultant and said, ‘Hello, I’d like to get married but I need to prove I’m about to die.’ He faxed over a letter to them immediately and he sent a copy to me, but he phoned me up to say, ‘Please don’t open that letter. Please. The information I’ve put in there is purely to get you your wedding.’ He must have laid it on thick. I’ve still never seen what he wrote; I reckon Lisa scurried the letter away. That’s fine, I’m not sure it’ll do me any good to read it.
The registry office had to send his letter up to London for some big senior registrar to sign off. The next day the registrar telephoned to say that a licence had been granted and she could marry us on Monday morning, the day I was due in hospital.
I remember it was a wonderfully crisp and sunny winter’s day. A perfect day for some winter pike fishing. It was just me, Lisa and her best friend Roma and my two sons, Harry and Tom – that’s it. I was wearing the cleanest jacket I could find in the cloakroom cupboard and my sons wore nicely clashing checked shirts. Lisa, as always, looked beautiful. I cried throughout the ceremony. It was one of the happiest occasions of my life.
Afterwards we went to a local café for a fry-up. It would be the last pieces of bacon and the last sausage I would have for a long time. Lisa drove me straight to London after the breakfast meats and I checked in for my operation.
The operation itself took about four or five hours. There are five or six arteries going into your heart and they all branch off again and again. If there’s a block in one of those branches, they have to bypass it. They don’t get rid of anything; they just skirt round the blockage and join up the working bit with another little working branch. It’s ring-road technology, basically.
I had three bypasses in total, using arteries harvested from my leg and the right side of my chest. Basically, they open up your chest with a saw, clamp it open, deflate your lungs, pull out your heart and stop it beating by injecting it with potassium. A machine takes over the functions of your heart and lungs. The bypasses are sewn in and everything put back in place before stapling your chest bone back together. I was in surgery for about four hours and my heart was stopped for 32 minutes. My surgeon, Chris Young, had saved my life. I’ve thanked him on a number of occasions but it never seems enough.
After the operation I was placed in intensive care for two days. Unfortunately, when they reinflated my lungs they had displaced 40 years’ worth of smoker’s tar that had built up inside me. I couldn’t breathe. There was a TV in my room showing a live penalty shoot-out between my beloved Middlesbrough FC and Manchester United. Just as Grant Leadbitter scored the winning penalty a huge slug of tar trapped in my throat, and the IC nurse shouted at me to ‘BREATHE, BREATHE’ … and I was gone.
The next thing I remember is waking up with Lisa by my side. She said, ‘Hello, you idiot.’ The relief was incredible; I had a second chance. Only ten days after first going to my GP, I was sitting in hospital, recovering from the surgery. An amazing ten days.
So much of your life is unmemorable when you get to my age. Can you remember many days from, say, two years ago? I wouldn’t normally remember much six months after: ‘Got up, watched telly, went to a meeting, bit more telly.’ You might remember, what, five specific days in a year? So, in an odd way, it was quite nice to have a really intense experience.
The second half of the Reeves and Mortimer tour was due to start in 12 weeks. My surgeon and consultant said that I was able to do it if I got exercising and eating properly as soon as possible and, above all, stopped smoking. I’m glad I had this target to aim for as it would have been all too easy to sit on my couch feeling sorry for myself.
Bob: Here I am during my recovery.
I was discharged from hospital after a week. My lungs were still a bit deflated and I would panic at the slightest twitch in my chest or creak from the staples in my sternum. Gradually, Lisa got me up and moving. At first I could only walk the 20 feet to my front gate, but soon enough, we could walk to the park together. Paul would text me every single day, carping on about ‘exercise, exercise, exercise’. A month later, and we were slowly jogging together around the lake in the park. And 12 weeks later, I was back doing the tour with Jim.
By then, I basically had a clean bill of health. My lungs were clear, my chest staples had welded to my bone and I no longer craved a cigarette. My cholesterol was down from 8.5 to 2.7 – that was through eating seeds. I’m basically a chaffinch now.
P: It affected you a lot afterwards, didn’t it? It did me, big time.
B: It was a hammer. Let’s say males die at an average of 73 or something – before this happened to me, I’d never thought, ‘That’s only 15 years away.’ It never even crossed my mind. Now, it crosses my mind not far off every day. You know, I think, ‘God, if I’m unlucky, that’s only six years.’ You think about it in the funniest of circumstances – like, if I die, I won’t see what happens with Brexit, or I’ll miss the next World Cup.
P: That was your biggest concern, wasn’t it?
B: It really was.
P: I remember you were terrified you wouldn’t live to see another one.
B: You do think about all these things. I’m forgetting them a bit now, but for a year, I was quite intense. The thought of dying just makes me really sad. I don’t feel scared about death, I just feel so frustrated and sad to think I won’t see how stories end. My children’s story. My wife’s. The football. All the stories going on in the world that you’re going to miss the end of. It’s just so sad.
P: So we had to get you out of that state, didn’t we, Robert? And what did Dr Whitehouse recommend?
B: While not a qualified doctor, he prescribed the application of fish. And it worked!
Paul: The pre-Gone Fishing days: one of our first trips together following Bob’s heart bypass.
Bob: For a man approaching 75 years old, Paul’s very youthful isn’t he?
__________
* OK, I know I’m referencing myself and a line from Chapter eight, but it felt very apt.