I continue readjusting to what I can and cannot now do. I cannot for the moment, install the new decorative fence on our patio, that I'd been constructing over the last few weeks in my workshop. Its finished, and I was hoping to move it out, so I could set too tiding and reorganising the workshop. That fence is a cumbersome heftly thing, I'd defy a full gale force wind to shift it a millimetre. But I cannot move anything when I have a body, hands and arms that currently have weight limits placed upon them.
My neighbours are being very attentive and considerate. I'd gone out for a short ten minute walk, and not taken my phone with me. David couldn't get in touch. So he asked a neighbour if they'd go looking for me, which they did. Between our two neighbours they have agreed that I'm not to put the bins out or take them in, for the time being. Making that very clear to me. I am very grateful for their kindness and consideration.
My medications are heavy hitters on the blood pressure and cholesterol front I have to take a tablet just to protect the lining of my stomach. I'm often feeling bloated, heady or nauseous after taking them, eating isn't my favourite thing these days. But they are doing a job of work, that's helping keep me alive. Everyday is now punctuated with pill popping. As the days since the heart attack turn into weeks, I'm managing my pill taking by spacing them out better, so it's less of a drug mega dump first thing in the morning.
When you're discharged you return to wrestling anew with your usual habits, lifestyle and preferences. Loaded with leaflets and health apps, that are meant to guide you through the period of readjustment that follows any heart attack. I initially found this a bit overwhelming. So it took a day before I started making more than mental changes, with help from Hubby.The main thing is adjusting what I eat, to whatever is less artery clogging. I'm rapidly discovering how fat free can just mean -this will taste of very little at all - as though air were being given solid form. A line has to be drawn between what is heart healthy and yet remains still enjoyable to eat. There is only so far you can go with achieving your fat free and sugar fee ideal. To so impoverish your taste buds and your life as a consequence, you lose the will to live.
I come from the Lumb lineage where 'no meal was complete without a cake' and my thin tiny blocked Cx artery I consider is a fitting memorial to that legacy. I find I have to cut things out cleanly and completely, lest vagueness allow too many exceptions to be made, eventually corroding the resolve. I'd already stopped eating cakes and confectionery in the New Year. There are two, and only two, things for which I'll make an exception - Cornish Bakeries Raspberry and White Chocolate Pudding and the White Chocolate Peanut Butter Blondie from Stiffkey Stores. An encounter with either of these is now a rare delight. Made more enjoyable by that infrequency.
I'm getting accustomed to pacing myself. I can think my energy is improving, then I'll have a day where I feel drained to the core. Because I had the experience during my heart attack of my consciousness being swallowed up in my shallow breathing. I cannot, at the moment, stop myself from trying to consciously control my breathing. As soon as my breathing eases or looks like resting in a shallower state. I have this high alert response, really pro active jerk response. In meditation I have to keep letting go of this anxious tendency, and gently breath out the worry and flurry of it. Its not been helped by having caught a chest cold the moment I left hospital. So my chest is ruttling with mucus, my coughs are like dog barks, and my breathing hangs like the whisper of a wee timorous beasty.
There is nothing like a heart attack to put mortality back at the top of the agenda. Everyone operates on the basis that one's death is some way off yet. A heart attack says - It could be soon - how about right now? Having rationalised the chest tension that led to the heart attack. I am, if anything, a little too hyper sensitive to bodily signs of discomfort Though I have to remind myself, that I'm a 67 year old man, I have many aches and pains that are simply to do with my body creaking with age. Not everything is a sign, or a portent of my heart being about to explode.
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