I shared some of my more bare-knuckle adventures with mortality last week and it has brought me back more memories.
Back to the consulting rooms we go, back for one more adventure in health care, and back once more to my medical notes for the purposes of analogy, and also for the purpose of saying to certain news media types: How could you?
A couple of years on from the heart attack, when any unnerving twinge would set me on edge, the doctor referred me to a general specialist.
A what now?
Someone who considers what else it might be, he explained.
Off I went to to the oak-panelled consulting rooms in Mt Eden, shook hands, returned a warm smile, took my seat, told him my story: the heart attacks; the recovery; the fitness regime; the chest twinges; the nausea; the worry that another heart attack might be arriving; the giddiness; the faintness and so forth.
He smiled at me and said, I've been listening to you talk for a few minutes now and I think I see the problem. You have shallow breathing.
Shallow what now?
I had never given it any thought. You just breathe in and out, right? The oxygen comes in, the carbon dioxide goes out, what else is there to know?
How about: everything? If you don't use your diaphragm correctly, if you're only breathing from the top part of lungs, not all the carbon dioxide is being expelled, no sir.
If, say, you're stressed, experiencing anxiety — that would be me — you may be taking rapid, shallow breaths, and not expelling that poisonous carbon dioxide.
This can lead to stress, which can cause more shallow breathing, which can increase stress, and down into the spiral you go, more and more out of balance.
What you want to be doing is taking a deep breath, filling your lungs all the way with nice fresh oxygen, and then having an even longer exhale to get rid of all the carbon dioxide, because you don't want to hang on to that stuff.
Breathing only from the top part of the lungs delivers less oxygen, can impair your thinking, can make you feel sick, then off goes the spiral maybe all the way to panic attack.
Good breathing slows the heart rate, brings down the blood pressure, relaxes you, gives you clarity of thought, makes you feel better.
Well alright then! By the end of that year I had learned breathing exercises and Transcendental Meditation and was feeling vastly better. The only thing that could possibly derail me now would be drinking too much for another thirty years and getting stressed and completely forgetting what was good for me.
We don't always do what is in our best interests.
Come with me now as I drag my analogy across the street, up the hill and pound angrily upon the front door of the media entity known as NZME.
At the end of last week it took a lazy swipe at one of the objects of enmity it has confected, namely a decent person doing admirable and dedicated work for the public good.
An odd target for enmity, you might think, but when you work in a clickbait frame of mind it becomes entirely possible to perceive a public health issue as fair game for fomenting division and polarisation.
Before you know it, you've made a cartoon villain out of a blameless person: pink-haired, so obviously a weirdo, and a public servant who has the gall, the temerity, to sometimes express an opinion. The cartoon outline then gets coloured in with any old scrap of a story, devoid of any context and imputing questionable motives where none exist. But never mind that, she’s obviously on the side known as Them. And They are enemies of right-thinking all-of-the-taxes-paying-New-Zealanders.
OMG, ran the story in the Herald and in NewstalkZB they spent 20K on a documentary about SiousxieBloodyWiles when our hospitals are desperate for money.
Because this was clickbait confection rather than journalism, it was left to the victim to provide the actual details and context.
Siouxsie tweeted:
So the filmmaker hangs out with me for three days in the lead up to what turns out to be NZ taking the elimination strategy and locking down. What results is an eight minute doco called Siouxsie and the Virus.
And:
To be clear, I wasn’t paid for being involved in the doco. The funds are to support local film makers in NZ.
Others amplified the point that this was the subject a funded documentary-maker had switched to when her planned work was suddenly derailed by the borders closing, and what you had here, wrote Jonathan King, was a small local film that had the prescience to pick — at the start of the pandemic — that Siousxie Wiles would be an important figure in its story.
This, of course, is a thing we have been doing for as long as we have had television in this country: spending public money to get our interesting and important stories recorded and told.
Bernard Hickey joined in to note the $8.6m of wage subsidies given by taxpayers to NZME in the Covid crisis, who kept it in their pocket after it was clear the crisis was over and nice big profits were coming their way, and then gave that cash to shareholders rather than back to taxpayers.
Oh sweet 8.6 million! Shall I compare thee to a 20k?
Because this was particularly poorly done, the Herald and NewstalkZB got particularly pilloried, and by the afternoon the stories had been taken down. But not before every angry uncle in Aotearoa had read or heard the story and had their enmity massaged.
So, a bit unusual in that sense; but business as usual in the sense of an endlessly rotating selection of targets: Māori, cyclists, Nanaia Mahuta on a bike, whomever the audience tends to perceive to be to blame for everything, or a threat to their great privileged comfort. Click, click, click. Never mind the journalism, get a load of this traffic, man these are some sweet numbers guys.
Oxygen comes in, carbon dioxide goes out. But only when you’re doing it right. How much fresh oxygen would we say we’re getting get from media organisations like NZME? Are we having our knowledge broadened as much as we’re having prejudices and objections deepened? All this cynical clickbait stuff looks like an accumulation of CO2.
I always feel better served when I look elsewhere: The Conversation, NZ National Geographic, E-Tangata, Wilderness all offer me something fresh, surprising, fascinating, full of possibility. Oh, and Loading Docs. Bizarre that it even needs saying that funding documentaries about our society is desirable, and that accusations of political agenda or capture invariably prove to be cynical acts of bad faith.
My newspaper publisher client in Mexico puts the greatest part of the editorial direction of his newspapers in the hands of a large board convened fresh each year and drawn from the community; people with knowledge, experience and a vast diversity of perspective.
They feed all their insight and knowledge into those newspapers, so much fresh oxygen. The agenda is to draw out fresh thinking, new ways to tackle the country’s many problems, to foster innovation and inspired thinking.
They leave it to other media to do the scandal and the toxic clickbait. The newspapers thrive, the readers throng to them.
I wish to stress that I am not a physician. But if you're feeling chest twinges, nausea, dizziness, or fainting, you might want to ask yourself if you're inhaling the right sort of media.