My heart attack story, Part 6 - the aftermath

 Since the last post, I have been to a follow up visit with the cardiologist. She answered all of my technical questions and even made sketches to explain things better. The important news is that she cleared me to go back to work and to lift whatever I need to lift as long as I promised to pay attention to whatever signals my body tries to send to me.

Then I went to the cardiac rehab intake meeting, where they grilled me about every aspect of my life for a couple of hours, wired me up to monitors, took blood pressure several times, and had me walk laps around the various gym-like rooms there for a certain amount of time to see how many laps I could do and what sort of reaction my vital signs had to walking.

Here's the funny part: I did this timed walking on two broken toes! A day prior to the rehab intake, I woke up in the wee hours to pee and Jinx the cat was all curled up between my legs and the edge of the bed. Jinx's story is a long complicated one, but I'll just say that the little guy was happily purring in his sleep and I didn't want to disturb him.

Therefore, I rolled the blankets in a different direction and climbed as wide as I could over the stupid cat....and missed the edge of the bed. I went crashing down onto the floor, slicing up my left arm as I smashed through the wicker trash basket, giving myself a big welt on my ass as I slammed into the heavy iron of the antique bed frame, twisting my left foot and left leg in directions they are not designed to be twisted into, and knocking the wind out of me.

My poor wife was awakened by me crashing out of the bed, and since I had the wind knocked out of me and couldn't immediately reply when she screamed "ARE YOU OK!?!?!", she assumed I was having another heart attack and fell out of bed as I thrashed around dying. A few seconds later I caught my breath, blurted out some obscenities, and started laughing at how ridiculous the scene was.

I got to my feet then limped my way to the bathroom. Meanwhile, the cat yawned, stretched, and followed me to the bathroom in case something interesting was going to happen there. That means I broke two toes, wrenched my knee, and pulled a thigh muscle for nothing because the cat would have woken up anyway. Next time I'm just going to shove him out of the way and get up.

Rehab is both really interesting and really boring. I've never been a gym person. I'd rather climb the mountain or stack firewood. Three days a week, I go in there, change to indoor shoes, they wire me up with a telemetry monitor that tracks my heart's electrical impulses, and check blood oxygen & blood pressure. First I go into the room where the treadmills are and they play 1960's & early 70's music. On Friday they played ABBA...yes, I said ABBA. Where did they find an ABBA CD? And WHY did they find an ABBA CD? Today they were playing Creedence Clearwater Revival. That at least makes sense.

In the 60's/70's music room I walk on a treadmill with looking out the window to entertain myself. The therapist keeps showing up to take BP readings. Everything is doing what it is supposed to.

Then after a certain amount of time, I go to the 80's music room where there are assorted contraptions like recumbent exercise bikes and things that I guess are supposed to simulate walking up and down hills, but you do it from a seated position. Lacking a window there, it is especially boring.

Then when that phase is done, more BP checks and I get to peel off the sensors that the therapist has stuck all over me, ripping out hair each time. My guess is that by the time I am a couple of weeks into this, there will be bald spots for them to stick and thus suck to remove a little less.

When I got home from my hospital stay, stuff was basically where I left it when I made the decision to go get the weird pains checked out. The big chainsaw was still sitting on the floor of the shop by the door. There was a ladder leaning against the reloading bench. There were cases of ammo where they had been plopped in random in-the-way places as they had been delivered prior to the fateful day, waiting for me to have a chance to put them away where they belong. That chance never came because for several weeks after returning from the hospital, I was not allowed to pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk.

I had instructions to walk 3 times a day for 10 minutes each time. What I'd do is leave the shop, turn right, and walk for 5 minutes then turn around and come back. Sammy the dog followed me at my heel, herding me because her humans are not supposed to wander off down the road. Those little walks were tiring. While the plumbing to the heart muscle had been repaired and no permanent damage was done to the muscle itself somehow, it had still been beaten up pretty good and wasn't running at full capacity yet.

After being home for 2 days, I came down to the shop and fired up my computer. There were 3079 emails in my inbox. I had been away from my desk for just 10 days.

Thankfully, a lot of it was endless "Black Friday" sale emails that I could "sweep" out of my inbox. Of course there were a dozen or more dumb "are these real guns?" emails because people refuse to read info that is written for them on the webpage.

In the midst of it all was a series of frantic emails from a jackass in Florida who was demanding order status info. The guy had also tracked down my home phone number and left a series of voicemails for my wife to have to deal with. I sent him an email telling him to NOT call my wife at home and how to check on order status, that I had just returned from the hospital and would update the work list ASAP. He replied that it was no way to run a business and wanted to cancel his order.

I canceled his order and refunded him per the contract. Honestly, if the guy is a jackass, I don't want his business anyway. A couple of days after his refund was processed, the guy, Robert Jacob of Palm Harbor, FL, who dresses up and plays pirate but took his fantasy a little too far and became an actual thief, used credit card fraud to steal an additional $990 out of my bank account. $990 is $10 shy of my being able to press felony charges against him. Yeah, after filling out reports and doing a bunch of paperwork I was able to get my money back, but the point is that in a time that I was supposed to be convalescing from a serious medical incident, I had to spend hours defending myself against a thief.

Also in that mix of emails was a couple of crazy screeds by a nutjob we call "crazy ice fisherman guy". He sends me these crazy, hate filled rants but doesn't sign his name to them. The email does not appear in our database, so it is unclear if he is an actual disgruntled customer or just a crazy stalker. The reason we call him crazy ice fisherman guy is because his email address is some numbers and the word "icefisherman". He goes on and on about lawyers, drops names of people who actually are customers, and talks a lot about him sitting around camp as a broken man. It really seems like schizophrenia. I've got at least a dozen emails from the guy.

The cardiac rehab people asked me about stress in my life. I should just show them my inbox some time.

So after being home for two weeks but not allowed to actually do anything, a follow up visit with a doctor (not a cardiologist) resulted in my getting permission to carry TWO woodstove logs at a time instead of one. (we heat with two antique wood stoves) That seemed like a big victory at the time.

One interesting thing that is different since I came home is that instead of watching nothing but documentaries on TV over meals, I've been watching fiction. Sure, it tends to be historical fiction, but it is still a different thing from documentaries. I have not yet begun to explore the psychology of that one.

My diet hasn't really changed because I eat mostly whole foods anyway. The cardiologist approves of what I eat, so that is one less thing to be turned topsy-turvy by the whole thing.

One last thing...in the first installment of this story, I mentioned that as I drove to the hospital, I had some little thing telling me to look around at the world as it was a very real possibility that it was my last look at it. One of the things I saw was some Christmas reindeer set up by the bandstand on the common in Claremont, NH about a mile from the hospital. It was a family of three of them, a buck, a doe and a fawn. The buck had fallen over and was laying on his side in the grass. It made me sad.

I didn't see it the symbolism at the time because I was busy trying to not die, but that silly, tacky reindeer represented my family. The buck was down, leaving the doe and fawn behind.

On a trip to a follow up appointment, I pulled the car over by the common and stood him back up, then reattached his antlers that had broken off in his fall. Now the family of reindeer is whole again. He is back on his feet and so am I.