A personal story about heart disease and music.
2012 Grand Final
“They say being a
Sydney Swans/Bloods supporter is bad for one’s heart, because of the thrilling
type of football the lads play. I watched them throughout the season, the
finals and play in 2012 AFL Grand Final against Hawthorn in singer-songwriter
Tex Perkin’s Post Office Hotel in Cobourg, in my hometown of Melbourne. I believe I’m somewhat qualified to speak
about them in regard to the health of the heart, particularly after watching
them, with their gutsy, never-give-in style of football, win the Premiership
Cup.
You see, I shouldn’t
have been watching that game with my daughter Rachael, or her boyfriend Steve,
or my partner Trish, or my good mate Johnny Clearly. Nor should I be writing
this. I should be brown bread. Translating that good Cockney rhyming slang,
which has become part of the Australian vernacular, I should be dead. I say
this because of my jam tart, my heart. Thanks to modern medical science I’m
still here, and it’s been proved beyond all reasonable doubt that I have one, a
heart that is. To use the football term, I’m in extra time. But instead of a
few minutes, I’m talking about maybe three decades. I’m 54 years old.
On October 28, 2011,
I had a six-and-a-half hour heart operation. It was actually two operations,
one to replace my aortic valve with a mechanical valve and one to graph my
aortic artery (the main trunk from the heart that connects all the arteries).
If I did not have these jobs done I would have been a dead man walking, the
victim of a coronary aneurysm and certain heart failure ten months later.
That grand final was a heart thumping event for me and the millions of
other people who watched it…….”
Clementine, Lolita-Luella & Jarrad McVeigh – 2012 AFL Grand Final
Jarred McVeigh and his wife tragic loss
“In 2011, supporters
of the Sydney Swans/Bloods, members of the AFL community, and people across New
South Wales were sadden by the death due to heart disease of the baby daughter
of Sydney co-captain Jarred McVeigh and his wife. In McVeigh’s absence, his
team mates responded by defeating the Geelong Cats at their home ground,
Kardina Park, also known as the House of Pain. It was Sydney’s first win against
the Cats there in twelve years and, like everyone else who follows Sydney, I
was gob-smacked. This was the first time any team had beaten Geelong on their
home turf in four years. The death of the McVeigh’s daughter made me feel
humble about my own heart problem and it showed the need for further research
into early infant and child heart disease…..”
On alcohol
“I made the choice to
give up alcohol as of June 15, 2012. I did this for a number of reasons, but
the main one was that I want to be totally aware and alert about using the four
medications that are part of my daily life now
There have been three
occasions on which I must admit I’ve weakened. The first was in the Post Hotel,
where I had one glass of champagne when Sydney won the grand final. I had been
there since before noon with our little tribe of Sydney Swans/Bloods
supporters. The second glass of champagne was the next day in Melbourne’s
Altona, to celebrate my friends Natalie and Stuart getting the keys to their
new home. We ate a take away feast of fine Sudanese food from Footscray’s
African Town Cafe Bar & Restaurant. The third glass of champagne was at
Sydney University, when my daughter Rachael graduated with her Bachelor’s
Degree in Health Science. Apart from these three indiscretions I have not had a
drop. Seriously, if you can name the three places in more than six months where
you had a drink, you’ve given up the grog…”
On smoking
“Education campaigns
against smoking need to be expanded. They actually work. The Sunday after the
2012 AFL Grand Final, I was at the old South Melbourne Albert Park Oval, the
spiritual and ancestral home of the Sydney Swans, with my daughter Rachael and
her boyfriend, Steve. We and about six thousand others were there to see the
team with the AFL Premiership Cup before they flew back to Sydney. One of my
fellow Bloods supporters made the comment, “You know what? I haven’t seen
anyone smoke a cigarette. The Swans anti-smoking campaign is working.” Rachael,
Steve and I had been there since 7.30am and as we left at 10.30am I realized
that in all that time we had not seen one person in that red and white army
light up.”
On the Irishman
Champion Tadhg Kennelly
“This tiredness was
starting to hit me physically. At home I couldn’t walk the 500 meters to the
shops without catching a taxi back. I was hit by it when I went to the last
Sydney Bloods/Swans game for the 2011 season, against the Brisbane Lions at the
Sydney Cricket Ground, with Rachael and Steve. It was the last game played
there by the great Irishman from Kerry, Tadhg Kennelly, the only holder of both
an AFL Premiership medallion (2005) and a Senior All-Ireland Championship medal
(2009). That’s the Holy Grail for any
player in both football codes and competitions. Trish and I had seen both of
them at Canberra’s National Museum during its More Than Just Ned Exhibition about the Irish in Australia.
Kennelly’s last game for Sydney was in the Semi-Final defeat to Hawthorn at the
Melbourne Cricket Ground, which ended Sydney’s 2011 Finals Campaign.
As we were walking
away from the SCG along Cleverland Street to find a pub in Surry hills for
dinner, the exhaustion and tiredness started. I was trying to keep this symptom
of my heart disease hidden from Rachael, a sort of stupid machismo on my part,
yet here I was keeping pace with two twenty one year olds. Rachael had never
seen me in a frail state and I wasn’t going to start then. It was a foolish
thing to do on my part, but fortunately we soon found a good pub to have a feed
in, the Dome Bar in Crown Street.”
2005 Grand Final
“The recovery time in
Randwick was good. In the mornings I went to get coffees from Coluzzi’s Café in
High Street. I met Luigi Coluzzi, the champion Italian boxer who brought real
espresso coffee to Sydney at his first café in William Street, Kings Cross, in
the 1950s. Luigi had a Sydney Swans 2005 premiership win poster up on the wall….”
Don Scott,with the two other Hawthorn
champions Lance Franklin and Dermott Brereton, he's shared the Hawthorn
jumper twenty three with. Don Scott is one reason why I wrote this book.
”In writing this
account I want to encourage people, especially men, to get their hearts checked
out. There are many men who are not aware that they have a heart condition, let
alone one that can kill them. There is a general reluctance among men to take
our health issues seriously, not only in relation to the heart, but also other
health issues that have a high fatality count, such as prostate cancer. As
prostate cancer survivor and Hawthorn football legend Don Scott pointed out,
men don’t take the same serious attitude to our health problems that women
generally do.
The scariest moment
for me before my operation was waiting for my daughter Rachael’s examination
results to come back from my cardiologist. She was clear, reflecting the fact
that heredity heart disease is largely passed on through males, father to son,
not father to daughter. In saying that, if she has a son it could be passed on
to him through her….”
You can order a copy of Singing Johnny Cash in The Cardiac Ward from WritersandEBooks
e-Book: AUD$4.99 & Paperback: AUD$9.95 plus delivery.
About the photo on the front cover
Russell Crowe, Amanda Dole and myself outside Radio Redfern on May Day 1989. Russell had just performed a few songs on my show, Radio Solidarity. In 1988, Radio Skid Row was evicted from our studios in the basement floor of Sydney University’s Wenthworth Building. We were taken in for eighteen months by the Aborigines/Kooris at Radio Redfern, who now broadcast across Sydney through Koori Radio, until we built and opened the Radio Skid Row studios in Marrickville in 1990. Photo by Frances Kelly.
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