A DEATH TO DIE FOR

A DEATH TO DIE FOR

A true story

Geoffrey Wilding

Copyright © Geoffrey Wilding 2013

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,  by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

The moral right of Geoffrey Wilding has been asserted.

Dedicated to Lesley Helen

I had always liked owning my Mitsubishi Shogun but the only reason I could warrant having two cars was to tell anyone who asked that I needed the four wheel drive for the bad winters that we sometimes get and living in our rural location where the roads are the last to be cleared it meant that I could still travel to meet Clients, so it was with some glee that I heard on the television weather forecast that we could expect overnight snow.

It was late November and still dark when I got up, but a quick look out of the bedroom window confirmed that we had indeed had a good covering of snow so I prepared for the day while my wife Helen, her name is Lesley Helen but I have always preferred to call her Helen, who had happily got up at the same time as me prepared a hot flask of my favourite Heinz tomato soup and some bacon sandwiches for me to take with me in case I got stuck in the snow while on my trip into the Welsh hills where I was to meet a new Client who wanted someone to take on the health and safety management of their proposed new housing development.

We said our goodbyes in the warmth of the kitchen and I set off excitedly like a schoolboy on a great adventure, particularly pleased that few other vehicles had driven in the overnight snow and with only the odd slip and slide I managed to safely drive the sixty or so miles to my destination.

Having concluded a successful meeting I started on the way home and decided to stop in a layby high in the hills to have the soup and sandwiches that Helen had made and take time to look at the wonderful snow covered landscape sparkling in the low winter sunlight which was set out before me, I sat there with the engine running and the heater on and counted my blessings, there are probably only few times in my life that I had been any happier than at this moment.

Knowing that the sun would be setting early and not wanting to arrive home in the dark in case some snow clearing was necessary or the log baskets for the wood burning stove needed to be topped up for the evening I set out again and was probably about half way home when the car phone rang, I had been having difficulties with a Client trying to get their Construction Health & Safety application accepted as along with many others they had not done the necessary background work and the CHAS assessor was picking several holes in their safety management systems.

This was not the first time the application had been rejected and the Client was on the phone making disparaging remarks about the level of service they had received so when the phone call ended and even though I had done my best with the documentation I was given, the phrase making a silk purse from a sows ear comes to mind, I was very annoyed and could feel that my blood pressure was up.

Just then I sneezed, I don’t know what caused it, whether it was the rock salt from treating the road coming through the heater vents in the dashboard or some dust within the car itself but it was a very energetic sneeze, the first of three which is a family trait, my younger brother and I always have to have three sneezes, one has never been enough.

I thought no more about the sneeze but after a while the side of my throat started to feel sore and having recently got over a case of ‘man flu’ I thought to myself that I must have picked up another bug from someone, just what I needed with my heavy workload and the Christmas break coming up, but I thought that at least if it starts now I would probably be over it by Christmas and I should still be able to go for the annual get together at Colley’s supper rooms down south and meet up with our usual group of friends which we had done for the past more than twenty years.

By the time I arrived home the soreness had abated a bit but was still there and I mentioned my concerns about another cold to Helen and she agreed that it was probably best if it started now and then I would be over and done with for it Christmas.

Luckily no snow clearing was necessary, but I did top up the log baskets and then got cleaned up for supper, Helen had a W.I. meeting to go to during the evening so I settled down to watch the telly in front of the log burning stove.

I had a couple of glasses of wine during the evening but stopped drinking as I had started to get a headache which, by the time Helen had got home was a real thumper, so much so that when she started to empty the dishwasher in the kitchen and accidentally dropped some cutlery on the floor I yelled at her to stop making such a racket, I seemed to be really sensitive to noise and light.

Helen had been upset by my outburst, so once I had said sorry for yelling we decided to have an early night, I took some soluble aspirin to try and clear the head ache, but by now I was already starting to have a tickly cough.

As the night progressed the coughing became more of a nuisance and I was keeping Helen awake so I decided to put on my dressing gown and take a blanket down stairs to the warm lounge and try and sleep in the winged back armchair, being upright seemed to help and I managed to get some fitful sleep.

The latch on the lounge door gives off quite a click when used and at about 6.30am I was woken up by our son Jim coming into the room, he had a part time Saturday job packing sports clothes with a local company.

He was surprised to see me in the chair with my dressing gown on and a blanket over me and asked if everything was OK with Mum, but by now my throat felt like it was starting to close over so in a very croaky voice I managed to assure him that Mum was fine but that I thought that I was going down with a cold again, he gave me and the armchair a wide berth and hurriedly left for work.

Helen came down around 7.30am, she asked me how I was feeling I said that the coughing seemed to be getting worse but that I did not feel I had a high temperature or other cold or flu type symptoms such achy joints or a headache but that my throat although not sore seemed like it was closing over, a bit like croup, she said that I certainly had developed a sexy husky voice.

She asked me if I wanted any breakfast but I said that I only really felt like having a cup of tea however when I tried to drink the hot tea I had a huge coughing fit, it was so bad that in between the coughing, the gasping for air I spat tea all over the kitchen table which didn’t go down too well with Helen who rushed over to the kitchen sink and then busied herself with a hot cloth wiping away the offending mess.

Once I regained some composure I decided to have a shave, clean my teeth and have a shower all of which were problematic, the shave because every time I tried to lift my chin to shave my throat I nearly choked, a problem which became even more of a trial as I tried unsuccessfully to clean my teeth and then the steam from the hot shower seemed to top the whole event off by causing more uncontrollable coughing, spluttering and copious amounts of snot.

I finally managed to gain a modicum of control during the process of drying and dressing myself which passed off without too much of a commotion but I was now starting to feel that something was definitely wrong, so when I went back down to the kitchen I said to Helen that I thought I needed to see a doctor she realised that for me to be asking to seek medical advice meant that not only was I starting to worry but that she ought to be concerned as well.

As it was a Saturday we did not have access to our usual local GP surgery and so Helen telephoned the NHS Direct service and she was told that we needed to visit the emergency surgery in Hereford, which was some fifteen miles away.

Helen ensured that I wrapped up warm with jumpers, a winter coat, gloves, scarf and a hat plus the essential box of tissues which I carried on my lap. We drove in her car to Hereford, but as expected once at the surgery we had to sit and take our turn with quite a few others. I still kept all of my warm clothing on in the waiting room including the hat but by now my constant coughing was drawing looks from the other assembled ‘ill’ people no doubt worried that they might catch what I had on top of their own ailments.

Eventually my name was called and I moved toward the examination room as directed, I found that I was in the presence of a male doctor of foreign extraction, possibly Eastern European with broken English and the typical forthright approach.

Following some general information questions he asked me to remove my heavy outer clothing, a thermometer was placed in my mouth but because of the problems I was having with my throat it was very difficult for me to keep it under my tongue or keep my mouth shut and in fact I had another coughing fit and nearly spat the thermometer straight back into his face, luckily it just dropped into my hand.

After some prodding of my neck glands and looking down my throat during which I had the feeling that I was nearly going to drown and was coughing so much that tears were starting to roll down my cheeks from having to screw my eyes shut. The doctor wrote out a prescription for some penicillin capsules which I had to take four times a day and instructed me to make an appointment to see my own GP as soon as possible the following week.

Relieved that the trial was over I put on my outer clothes again and met up with Helen in the waiting room, I showed her the prescription and she looked on the notice board to see where the nearest open dispensing chemist was situated, once she had found the address we left the surgery, you could almost feel the sense of relief from those still waiting who wanted to be free of the guy with the constant cough.

Exhausted from lack of sleep and the constant coughing we soon arrived at the chemist, Helen took the prescription to get it filled to save me having to get out into the cold air which would have made the coughing worse again. Fortunately it didn’t take long and when she got back to the car I decided that I would start taking the capsules as soon as possible so that they could begin working on whatever malevolence I had contracted.

There was a half used bottle of drinking water in the car so I took the box of penicillin out of the chemist bag, removed one of the bubble strips and popped a capsule into my hand, I placed it in my mouth and took a good sip of water from the bottle

This proved to be a bad move indeed, no sooner had the water hit the back of my throat when my whole body seemed to convulse uncontrollably as an involuntary muscle spasm tried to stop me drowning myself by taking the water into my lungs, unfortunately the result was that the penicillin capsule ricocheted off of the dash board into the foot well and water splattered all over the inside of the passenger windscreen.

Helen looked across from the drivers seat, not sure whether to laugh or not she said I looked a dreadful sight with tears rolling down my cheeks and water and other unmentionables streaming from my nose and mouth, she pulled the car over to the kerb, took the box of tissues from my lap and started to wipe me down and then turned her attention to cleaning the windscreen and dashboard, she thought it best for me not to try again until we got home.

The rest of the way home I continued to cough and cough, so by the time we got back home I felt really wretched, it was now about 2pm and I had hardly slept the previous night and also had not had anything to eat or drink now for nearly 24 hours, so I decided it was kill or cure time and that I just had to get one of the penicillin capsules down my throat somehow so that they could start fighting off this dreadful bug.

Leaning over the kitchen sink I took another capsule from its bubble strip and with my finger pushed it as far back along my tongue as I could manage without wretching, then I took a sip of water but rather than swallow it straight down I twisted my head to the left, stretched my neck out and swallowed all at the same time, it set me off coughing again but I could feel that the capsule had gone down my throat and so I felt quite relieved that I had at last started the fight back.

The rest of Saturday was spent sat in the wing back chair with a blanket round me, the telly was on but it was just for background noise really, Helen busied herself with housework, it’s a big house and the weekends are the only time she gets to have a good go at it, but every time she passed through the lounge she checked on me to see that I was comfortable.

Jim got home from work about mid afternoon and wanted to know how I was, I managed to croak that I wasn’t too bad, probably just a case of man flu, he said that he had plans for the evening and went off to his room to have a rest after work before getting ready to go out.

I sat and dozed, occasionally getting out of the chair either to go to the loo or put more logs on the wood stove all the time continuing to have bouts of coughing and then around 6pm I determined to try and have another capsule and following the same procedure as before I managed to get one down my throat and as it proved not such an onerous ordeal as the first time I started to convince myself that things might be improving.

Helen ran through a whole list of food she could prepare for supper but I said that I couldn’t face anything and just wanted to sit in the chair and let the capsules do their work. She got herself and Jim something to eat and after clearing away the supper things and seeing Jim off she came and spent the evening with me in front of the telly regularly checking that I was OK and asking whether she could get anything to make me more comfortable.

At around 10pm I just about managed the capsule swallowing technique again, Jim wasn’t in yet so I said to Helen that I wanted to go to bed to try to get some sleep, because by now I was absolutely knackered, she said that she was sure that in the box room we had a ‘V’ pillow that I could use to prop myself up in bed which would probably help me not to cough so much and went off to find it, by the time I had got ready for bed she had arrived with the pillow and helped to make a comfortable pile of pillows to keep me semi upright.

She said that she would wait down stairs for Jim and turned the light off as she left the bedroom and I settled down as best I could to get some sleep.

Probably because of my state of exhaustion I did manage to get some shut eye but around midnight Helen, having seen Jim in, came to bed but the disturbance set me off coughing again and it would not stop so I gathered together my dressing gown and slippers and once again headed back to the chair in the lounge where I spent another night of fitful sleep.

Around 3am I tried to take another capsule but it was proving more problematical than before and I gave up after the third attempt and got the towel from the front of the Aga and dried myself down before returning to my self imposed confinement in the wing back chair.