Richard “Dr. Gonzo” Lewis shares his derailed train of thought with the wider world in his regular column feature, Gonzorreah.

Read Richard's last column "That's Not A Knife"HERE

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.






If ever there was confirmation needed that I was indeed too old for this shit it would probably be the events that transpired over the weekend. Nothing to do with e-sports, although I will throw some of that in somewhere along the line just for appearances sake. There are rough weekends, and then there are rough weekends. The one I just got through takes the biscuit and a lesser man would seriously start to question things around him and maybe exactly where he was headed. Not me though… While a strange experience it was there will be no finding God, Allah or Odin and there will certainly be no serious alterations to the lifestyle. Just enough to make it through the immediate future…

I would certainly have preferred to have ended up like this (Picture courtesy of JoeMonster.org)

The weekend was set up to be a good one. A friend’s 21st represents not only a chance to party, but for some bizarre societal reason it is an excuse to get sloppy drunk and put the birthday boy in hospital, something deemed as “ruining” any other birthday. That is how it should pan out at least, but my attitude is always that of wanting to raise the bar and push things beyond the usual. It was going well, but I think the plan went sideways round about the same time I woke up in A & E with an adrenaline needle hanging out hand. At some point between four o’clock and five o’clock my body decided I required a small heart attack. Not bad for someone still in his twenties.

As was explained to me when I got to the recovery ward I had asked a taxi driver to take me home, blacked out in the cab and when he couldn’t wake me up, he took me all the way to the nearest hospital. Some of you may well think that gentleman is some kind of saint or saviour… I’m just disgusted the rat bastard took a twenty quid note out of top pocket for the privilege. Either that or it was the nurses… Nothing would surprise me this day and age, but at least they were trying to keep me alive over the weekend, something I’d be willing to tip for.

But yes, it turns out I was in some bad shape. My heart was pounding at something beyond 200 beats per minute and I was tensed up to the point where I couldn’t even be pulled out of position. Then the heart rate suddenly dropped to around 30 – 40 and I was barely breathing. I’d like to tell you some shit about lights at the end of tunnels, but none of that was there. Just the dark, until the magic life giving juice took hold and brought me back round sucking in huge gasps of air and spontaneously causing a short bout of joyous dry heaves from the rush of it all.

If you ever need a new perspective on the frailty of the human condition I recommend you spend some time in a cardiac ward. I have slept in hospitals before with rugby injuries and on a night time it is difficult to sleep for the snoring of drunks or the wheezing of the elderly. In this ward you lie awake not only because you are probably too apprehensive to sleep, but also because of the constant beeping of ECGs and the pumping of machines that are keeping people alive. You would react to the terrible scenes around you, but you are outside of yourself, unable to move or communicate effectively.

Your typical cardiac ward... Not a nice place to have to visit but a great place to leave

The ward had only six beds, the extra space around the patient at any time potentially being required for resuscitation equipment. I was the youngest guy on the ward by about thirty years and the older guys were all giving me some weird looks in between lapsing in and out of consciousness. Did they think I was a grief tourist, or some escapee from the mental ward? They couldn’t comprehend I was in the same boat. Or maybe it wasn’t that… Maybe it was because they didn’t understand how someone comparatively young – I add the caveat “comparatively” simply because I am always being told I am an old man by 16 year olds on this very forum – could end up in that sort of shape. Or maybe it was some sort of misplaced hatred because they felt my chances of survival were better. Not that I was entirely convinced when the late night shift wheeled in the defibrillator just before lights off.

The first night was the worst. The chest pains were still pretty excruciating, more like my chest and back were in a vice and my heart beat and blood pressure kept fluctuating between high and low. They monitored me every hour, pulling syringes of blood out of me for further tests to see just how bad the situation was. I woke up in the small hours and half turned to the bed next to me. The guy was making a low moaning and trying to flap his arms around, attempting to fight off invisible assailants. Then he went limp and his machine started making a loud noise and he was quickly surrounded by running nurses and porters who wheeled him away. At about six in the morning I was woke by the sounds of wailing from his relatives in the corridor and a nurse casually came in and erased his name from the whiteboard above his bed. He didn’t make it.

The next day brought a healthy dose of humiliation when I had to go for my angiogram to see if there was any permanent damage to my heart. For some reason, even though I was pretty sure that they would be looking at my chest, they wanted me to shave off all my pubes. That’s par for the course, even for a Welshman, but when I told her I was already suitably groomed she insisted on having a look. She decided the undercarriage could have received some closer attention and proceeded to give me a further trim. Then I had to get into a pair of underpants made out of paper and be wheeled to the other side of the department. I looked like a homeless Jesus.

After returning to my bed I was sleeping off the procedure doped up on painkillers and still hooked up to my ECG machine I had come to refer to as “ol’ bleepy”. A new guy had been moved into the depressingly newly empty bed. I thought it best not to tell him that being in bed number 3 was bad news. Bad news for him maybe, but come on number two… The doctor came and told me that there was no damage to my heart, I’d require no surgery of any kind, and would just need to make a few changes. What followed was a dreary drone that anyone has been to a doctors has heard before. Improve your diet, no more boozing, avoid all stressful activites…All I could picture at this point was a death certificate that would have said “Cause of Death: Partying” – what a tombstone that would make. She was recommending I have total bed-rest for a week minimum.

The i-series is a grueling test of endurance for anyone (Picture courtesy of cpu3d.com)

I tried to explain to her that the i-series was coming up and the likelihood is I would be awake for a four day weekend. She didn’t look impressed. I turned to the nurse who was updating my chart and tried to explain what it was like at Cadred. She could identify with it surely. “You know how it is… The expectations placed on nurses. The doctors never give you enough respect, the patients expect you to put up with all their shit. Even the family of patients get involved. Yet, in the face of unreasonable demands you absolutely have to deliver, and for the most part you do, even if it half kills you in the process. So it is with Cadred.” They just looked at me like I was insane, and maybe I was at this point… I certainly had moved on from a fevered panic to a delirious euphoria. Clearly the experience had changed me at least a little. That was confirmed when I looked at the News of the World, saw a picture of Janine from Eastenders in a basque and actually found her attractive. Ye Gods that is shameful.

“On a scale of 10 your heart attack was somewhere between a 1 and a 2” the doc explained to me in layman’s terms. It was comforting but anywhere on that scale was a shit state of affairs. One more day and I could get out, but they wanted to observe me for just one more day. I asked if there was anywhere in the hospital I could maybe catch the Chelsea versus Man United game, but they looked at me dumbfounded. “Today is Monday” said the nurse “What day do you think it is?” – of course I had lost some hours, but I tried to play it cool. They wrote something down on the chart. The only option at this point was to flee before they started testing my brain, so after a couple hours of sleep just to get the rest of the drugs out of my system, I discharged myself, much to the doctors disdain.

“Enough of the Rock ‘N’ Roll for you young man” said an old ex-steelworker as I hobbled out of the ward.

He’d obviously been listening each time I had a consultation. I said thanks and wished him well, but really I thought “fuck you… No compromises” then I sort of nearly fell over prompting a nurse to put me in a wheelchair. “I’ll show you Rock ‘N’ Roll, just as soon as I can walk again old man” I thought to myself as I was wheeled to the discharge lounge. A doctor had a final go at making me agree to stay in for one more night, but I declined, so they gave me a bag of drugs, a phone number and I went home on the bus with track marks up my arms from the blood tests and the drip. People on their bus nervously shifted away from me muttering “junky” under their breath. Wearing a short sleeved shirt was a bad choice.

But I thought all this would amuse you both regular readers and haters alike. It proves two things. The first being that the voodoo dolls are obviously having an effect, so I’d recommend keeping that up. It also shows, that for now at least, I am still tough enough to deal with the challenge that simultaneously covering an I-series and joint co-ordinating WCG coverage, while also trying to plan ahead to MaxLAN. I’m sure the same people will find some grounds to criticise, even though as my colleagues Paul and Corin explained the site has been tricked out to provide better performance in the face of increased traffic demands, but at least you know – ho ho ho – my heart is in the right place. Expect to see me at i-series fellow attendees, although I may be slightly more subdued than normal. Even now I write this column from a recovery bed on a laptop, with my housemates insisting I keep the door permanently open at all times. It is no way to live, but it will take more than a heart attack for me to miss a deadline. And maybe this is nothing worth reading at all, but under the circumstances I found it impossible to try and write about anything else. To my good friend Derek “Deek” Cameron, as I know he will ask, no I did not go to these lengths because I ran out of ideas for the column.

The London Trocadero, where the MW2 launch will be held tonight

Incidentally – just to try and make it e-sports relevant – many of you will already know that it is the launch party of MW2 tonight, a game many of you have rallied against on these forums and might well be expecting to fail. Ahead of the event the national press reported that the game is set to break the record for sales in an opening weekend by shifting 160 million dollars worth. That is more than the opening weekend of COD4 and the opening weekend of the film “The Dark Knight” combined. I say the national press… The Daily Mail filed some bullshit about the game being a terrorist training tool. Those predictable swine.

But the point of that is, if it indeed turns out to be true, just goes to show you what a drop in ocean the competitive community is currently and for that to change you’re going to have to start getting your smart heads on. Why? Because there is strength in numbers, and while I was surprised at over 100,000 gamers signing a petition, it is still clearly nothing to IW, as proven by their disdainful answers when approached by potential buyers in the form of competitive players with an axe to grind. So everything you do that either fractures, divides, or drives people out of e-sports allows companies to do things the way they want without opposition. And what IW have done is a dangerous precedent, because if they meet those targets, it shows you pretty much ignore the competitive community entirely and still make a game that will allow you to roll around in cash like hogs in the mud. Let’s hope that either the figures are wrong, or that no-one is watching that closely.