The personal battles of the man who fights for others
Taken from the Impartial Reporter (Thursday 18th September 2008).
By Rodney Edwards
e-mail: rodney@rodneyedwards.co.uk
Outspoken Enniskillen man Phil Newton has fought hard for what he believes in all his life. But fighting his own ill-health has become one of his biggest challenges so far – yet he still manages to beat the odds.
On September 21, 1996, the day before his wife Joy’s birthday, Phil was working in Scotland and didn’t feel well and went to the Ninewells Hospital outside Dundee – he woke up seven days later.
Phil had suffered a heart block that lasted 55 minutes and had less than two per cent chance of surviving. “The heart block cut off messages going to my brain. I was in ‘resus’ with nurses jumping up and down on my chest, the bag being stuck in my mouth to keep my lungs going and ten jumps of a defibrillator. Once they got a slight response from the heart they shipped me to cardiac intensive care,” he says.
Phil then took a cardiac arrest which killed 60 per cent of his heart muscle before taking a small stroke. He was just 36 years old. His young family (wife Joy, son Andrew and daughter Amy) travelled over within four hours - they were told to expect the worst.
He was fitted with a £17,000 pacemaker and defied the odds; “It was very rare for someone to go through that type of illness and survive. They put it down to stress. My body was fairly fit but six months prior to that I was working 17 hours a day without a day’s break for months.”
When Phil fully regained consciousness, he was able to recount in amazing detail, his “near-death experience,” to his wife. “I looked up to Joy and said, I’ve just seen my dead mother.”
“There was the white light, the corridor and there was my mother in front of me. She wore a floral piny with the pockets in the front, she had her arms folded and looked at me and said; “Pip, it’s not your turn yet, get back down there.”
In the months to follow, Phil went through serious bouts of depression; “I didn’t want to be a burden on my young family. Do I pack my bags and leave during the night or do I take all of my tablets? But I saw a pyschiatrist in Belmore house, and it was a long, slow path to normality. I had a quick wake-up call.”
Phil was 13 years old when his mother Elsie died in his arms. “I can remember it as if it was yesterday. The kitchen windows were all steamed over because we were having boiled potatoes for our dinner – then mum collapsed. I went over to help her out; she was a white colour with blue lips and everything. She died of coronary thrombosis - a massive blood clot to the heart. She was only in her early forties.” he says.
It was a difficult time for the rest of Phil’s family (two brothers and a sister) “I give my old man credit because he kept the family together, he had the opportunity to put us into the British Rail Children’s home which is just outside London but he didn’t.”
Money was scarce and so it was an extremely tough childhood. His father Herbert worked on the old steam engines and was a rag and bone man. Phil left school at 15 with half a CSE in art and became an outdoor pursuits coordinator in Wales. “We gave the kids the very sharp, short treatment. You receive all these raw ingredients and at the end of the course, you have an end product. You could then say that you had an input into that person’s life.”
Phil and his family moved to Fermanagh in 1991.
From 1998 onwards, Phil joined others campaigning to retain acute services at the Erne Hospital. “I am an argumentative git, so I got on my soapbox. I don’t pull punches, if a question needs to asked, I’ll ask it and I expect a straight answer,” he says.
In recent years, the Newton’s have brought children from Chernobyl over for regular visits. It was in July 2007 when Phil and his family were gearing up for the children coming back over that his health deteriorated again. He was suffering from Viral Hepatitis B and water retention from the kidneys. On the 18th of December, he went to casuality and underwent treatment for major kidney, liver and heart failure.
Doctors said he had just one hour to live but incredibly Phil survived another near-death experience; “The fact I lived is put down to my attitude that nothing’s going to bite me or drag me down.”
Phil is now on the waiting list for a heart transplant and with the help of his hugely supportive family, he plans to fight on the way those who know him have learnt to expect,
“We knew it was on the horizon. We just didn’t know it was going to be so bloody soon. It’s just one of those things, I’ve nearly died twice. If I said I’m not scared, I’d be lying, I am, but my wife is my biggest inspiration. My legacy will be on my tombstone which will be on top of the compost heap in the back of the garden in Chanterhill. It’ll say, are you sure I’m gone?”