Beware water!

On a previous visit to Cape Town, I would think about 10 years ago, I lost 5 minutes of my life. I was in the shower of the home we were staying in and Sue had just gone into the kitchen to fix some breakfast. When Sue came back I was lying on my bed totally dry with a towel modestly secured around my middle. As she came into the bedroom  I ‘came to’ and for a few moments had no idea where I was and absolutely no recall at all of coming out of the shower, drying myself off, wrapping a towel around my middle and lying down on the bed. I reckoned that there was certainly at least 5 minutes of my life that I had lost completely. The event was sufficiently disturbing for me to go to my doctor when I got home and tell him the story. He passed it off with remarks like, ‘it sometimes happens’ and ‘you were probably somewhat stressed at the time’. I was never really very happy with this as at the time I don’t think I was stressed at all.

After that I sometimes had moments in the shower when I wondered whether it would happen again and used to concentrate very hard on what I was doing in the ablution routine! There was an interesting outcome to this story which occurred about a year later. Sue used to read a medical column, always included at that time in the Saturday Telegraph and not surprisingly authored by a a qualified doctor. ‘Look at this’ she said to me. I read the column for the week which recorded how this doctor had himself visited a Scottish women doctor whom he obviously highly regarded. He went to see her because he had been swimming, came out of the pool and then, you’ve guessed it, lost part of his life - he simply couldn’t remember what happened after he left the pool, there was just a blank. The doctor he was visiting suddenly lit up with the cry,’ You’re the person I have been wanting to meet’! In her medical research she had discovered that there is a syndrome recognised in France, but not in the UK, where individuals having had some contact with water suddenly lose part of their life and cannot recall what they have done or what has happened. The good news (at least for me, but possibly not yet for you) is that this is something that only ever happens once in a person’s life, it never gets repeated. As you can imagine since reading that article I have taken my showers with a sense of complete freedom.

Anyway, all this came flooding(!) back to me in the shower this morning as I remembered that particular shower (though not the immediate aftermath) that I experienced in Cape Town  10 or so years ago. Then I thought of the time that I am aware of. We’ve already had 12 Sundays in Cape Town; though strictly one was in Dubai, and there are only 8 more before we return to the UK for Christmas. So time passes quickly on and those of you who promised to keep in touch by email and haven’t are running out of it! No condemnation…  More importantly it’s always sobering to think of using the time well that God that has given to us and which we can remember.  Meanwhile enjoy your shower tomorrow morning, but do beware the water.

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