A giants life: November 2019

18 weeks down the line from a few heart attacks and quintuple bypass surgery and, on the whole, I feel pretty good. What? You didn’t know I’d had a heart attack? Where have you been? If you had been following my blogs you would know all about it. So go back and read the previous couple of blogs, but be warned, I have been told that they made a few people cry. Anyway, back to being 18 weeks on.

I have spent the last 8 Fridays at Cardiac Rehab. Basically, for people like me, heart attacks, bypass and heart failure, it is 8 weeks of exercise and talks. Exercises to help with the recovery and beyond, and the talks to give me the information I need to be able to live a life that doesn’t see me having another heart attack and shuffling off this mortal coil.

Week 1 was a bit of a shock to the system. I turned up to find that I was the youngest there, 54 and the youngest, who’d have thought it? But I wasn’t the fittest, by far. The first set of exercises took me 3 days to get over. Everywhere ached. I was shuffling around like the old man I thought I was. Georgina, 84, was fitter than me! It was explained that the amount of muscle mass and stamina lost is considerable during the 8 weeks post-op, that time when I can do nothing but let my body try and recover from what is some serious butchery. Over the following weeks I gained some stamina and a little strength. It was a real surprise to me as I never thought I was unfit. Fine, I could not run a marathon, or even sprint 100m, but mere weeks before the heart attack I was carrying railway sleepers on my shoulders. Suddenly I was as weak as a baby. Mind you, I still pulled… Georgina, 84, and Jill,69, seemed to like me, oh dear! By week 8 I was running and using weights. Not a Charles Atlas yet (I bet that not too many of you are old enough to remember him!) but improvement nevertheless.

Talks were about things that affected us, drinking, smoking, diabetes, medication, exercise, etc. The whole process from surgery to this point had seemed to fly by. And there were things I should’ve known that I didn’t. One of those things was the medication I was now taking for the rest of my life. And that was stupid. We should all understand what we are putting into our bodies, and why. We all know that smoking and drinking are bad for you, I think that is a given, as well as the fact that exercise is good for you. But what were Ramipril and Bisoprolol doing to my body? Why was I taking an aspirin in the morning and a statin at night? I know now. I know why some of them are having their doses increased and why I will, eventually, stop taking Furosemide. The practitioners who ran the rehab program ensured that all of us had the knowledge and tools to live the best life we could from this point. And we were like a little family. Having had a shared experience of the heart attack, regardless of whether we were stented or, like me and Georgina, cabbaged (Cardiac Artery Bypass Graft or CABG, cabbage.) and as had been explained me at the beginning, in A&E, there is no such thing as a mild heart attack or severe heart attack. There is just the heart attack, it can kill anyone, or act as a warning if you are very lucky. I will miss Fred, Frank, Mark, Georgina, Jill and all the rest. I wouldn’t say it was fun but we laughed quite a lot. Megan, the practitioner who got us moving was a tyrant. But she was good. By the time the sessions ended I was knackered and sweating, fit for nothing else, but improving.

Another thing I have learned, and this makes me seem very ungrateful, is that I am still looking for an upside to all of this. I have yet to discover the fun. Everything I eat I have to investigate to make sure that there isn’t too much salt or sugar or saturated fats. Alcohol still reacts with my meds to affect my blood pressure. Sneezing still hurts my chest, as does coughing. Rolling on to my side in bed still makes my ribs ache. And all sorts of other things. I should be grateful to be alive but I am still pissed off that I didn’t get to Canada. When I finally get the money back from ATOL (Thanks Thomas Cook!) I will have spent £12000 on a holiday that I haven’t been on. Yes, full grump mode has been restored.