Hold Tight! - End of the road
 
Chapter 7
 
Page 66
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Hold Tight!
Chapter 7
City Transport
57 A different world
58 Portswood
59 Decisions
60 Home and away
61 Shirley routes
62 Football
63 Emergencies
64 Centenary
65 Driving school
66 End of the road
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Chapters
1 Beginnings
2 Learning
3 Getting Away
4 Winchester
5 Freedom
6 Southampton
7 City Transport
 
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All good things come to an end, but it would have been nice to have chosen when. In the spring of 1982 I became unwell with flu like symptoms. I took a few days off and went back to work. A couple of weeks later the same thing. This kept happening and eventually in July I went to the doctor. He found nothing wrong.
In September I had the worst attack yet and realised that I was having problems walking. My knees had become extremely stiff and painful. Again I went to the surgery. My own doctor was not there, a locum was standing in for him. How he came to be a doctor I have no idea. He did not have a clue. First he gave me a prescription for pills, before he had decided what was wrong and claiming there were no side effects. No side effects? It would be the first drug ever. I asked the pharmacist and he said there were several possible side effects.
By October I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I tried going to work but after three days I was forced to give up. The doctor now sent me for tests. These proved nothing. He came out with two comments that I thought were quite extraordinary. One was "I don't know what the future holds for you", very reassuring. The other was "I think your best bet is to throw yourself in the river". Was he mad? I lived downstream from a sewerage works.
And so it was that without knowing what was wrong with me and getting no help from the medical profession, at the end of June 1983 I had to leave the job that had changed my life. I had frozen on unheated buses in winter and baked on crowded buses in summer. I had directed traffic and tried to put out car fires. I had had a passenger die on the bus and I had somehow avoided having someone give birth. So many things I had done that working in a factory or an office I would never have dreamed of.
Now I was going to have to start again somewhere else. What new adventures awaited me? First I had to learn to walk again. After that, well that's another story ....
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