Three Months In
It was a good morning this morning, perhaps even a great one. The grass in the yard was that perfect shade of verdant green that shows up early in the springtime, holds for a month or so and gradually starts to dull out in early summer. My dog Trixi and I were greeted on our daily walk by creamy white flower blossoms strewn all over our yard from the blooming dogwood next door. I’m sure the dog paid no attention to them, but I thought it was a grand touch, icing on the cake of a springtime morning as it were. The breeze was refreshing and the sky was a pellucid blue with those white puffballs of clouds decorating the atmosphere. I know they’re called fair weather cumulus, but puffballs will suffice. These observations occurred during my daily dog walk with Trixi and she was obviously enjoying herself, sniffing at interesting smells about every twenty feet, darting here and there on the end of her leash and generally acting glad to be alive. Dogs are like that. They live in the moment and think little about yesterday or tomorrow if at all.
She was enjoying the perfect spring day and so was her master.
For those inclined to check the calendar and to count days, today marks the third month anniversary of my open-heart surgery back in February. How am I doing? Actually pretty good. I’m out every day walking the dog as you might have gathered from the first part of this blog, about three quarters of a mile. I go to my cardiac rehabilitation three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and huff and puff on the exercise machines. I’m active around the house, am able to walk around the stores while shopping and am very close to being almost as fit as I was before I got sick. There is still a bit of soreness in my left leg where they stripped veins, I still haven’t totally regained my stamina and I still enjoy an hour or so with my eyes closed in the afternoon to “recharge” the batteries. My mood is usually happy although I can be a bit snappy from time to time. Some say that comes from the surgical anesthesia and will gradually fade.
It could be a lot worse.
I’ve talked to friends and relatives who have gone through the same sort of procedures that I have gone through and got a lot of feedback. Most of it has been quite positive. Most have talked about actually feeling better than they had previous to their illness. Most say their heart attacks, surgeries and recoveries have allowed them be much more appreciative of life than they were before, more able to see how wonderful it actually is. I like to believe that’s where I’m heading and I think I’ve got a good shot at it. A few folks I chatted with were not so fortunate and have never recovered back to their previous health, but they might have had much more damage to their heart than I did.
I was lucky.
I’ve already talked about how thankful I was for all the good wishes from friends and relatives and the technical expertise of all the medical staff that took care of me in a previous blog, so I won’t go into that again. But being able to walk around on a marvelous day like today, watching the dog frolic on the end of her leash, pain-free and able to dig the world around me just underscores how fortunate I am.
A bit of news that might be of interest: I’ve been asked to participate in a clinical trial of a drug. I fit the patient profile the study was looking for by being a diabetic, having suffered a heart attack and gone through bypass surgery. The drug they’re studying has been used for many years as a pain medication for rheumatoid arthritis patients. Doctors have noticed a marked lessening of cardiac and vascular problems of those patients taking this medication as compared to the general population and are trying to determine if it was the drug or some other factor as the causative agent. I’m in the pre-acceptance phase right now, having my blood checked for anything that might disqualify me and soon they’ll test me to make sure I can tolerate the drug. Then, if all goes well, I’ll be issued the study pills and they will either be the medication or a placebo. I’ll be checked frequently and my results will be added to the many other patients in the study to derive some more definitive answers. Should be interesting.
It might even help me!
As I mentioned before, my cardiac rehab is going well. I have finished visit 19 or 20 already and am well on my way to the goal of 36 visits. The staff at the hospital where the rehab occurs takes very good care of us while we are there, monitoring our heart rhythms closely as we exercise along with our blood pressure (checked three times) and blood sugar (checked twice). They want us to exert ourselves but not to exhaustion, so they constantly check how hard we are working on each machine we exercise on and back us off if it gets too strenuous. Each visit starts with a thirty-minute lecture on various aspects of heart diseases, heart physiology, diet, smoking, medications and everything possible you could imagine about your heart. It is quite the education. Hopefully I’ll be more of an “expert” in my condition after these visits.
I guess the main takeaway from the previous three months and something to ponder on the ¼ year anniversary of my surgery is the fact that “life goes on”. After the drama and hullabaloo of the illness and the pain and uproar of the recovery, things eventually go back to just about where they were before. The trash still goes out on Tuesday nights, friends still drop by occasionally, you still get crank telephone calls, day follows day and all the old aches and pains you used to have you still have. With maybe a couple more to enjoy. But most stuff is same, same.
And… maybe… that’s the best news of all.
