Thriller fiction and Non-fiction
A short video of my return to diving following open heart surgery. Just over six months after my surgery, and a few days after my 49th birthday, I returned to diving. Better yet, I was able to dive with my dad a few days before his 78th birthday.
Visit the Heart Disease and Diving page to see the entire story of my diagnosis, recovery and getting back in the water.
Today is my 49th birthday.
I’m not telling you that to get attention. Realistically, my mom did all the work this day 49 years ago, so thank you mom!
I bring up my birthday because six months ago I was in the hospital waiting on open-heart surgery. I had absolute faith in Dr. Figueroa and wasn’t worried about the surgery itself. What I realized then is a little more than a week before that I had been shoveling snow. A month before that I had a heart attack that I denied. If things had gone differently, I might never have made it to the hospital for that surgery. From there never gotten the chance to celebrate this birthday.
A few days after my surgery, while I was recovering in the hospital, my youngest daughter Jamison told me that some people regard times like that as a new birthday. It’s a chance to restart and look at everything with a new eye. When I got home from the hospital, my friend Danny Boyd welcomed me to the Second Chance Club. I liked where both of them were headed. I was given another shot and I’m not about to waste it.
Before I left the hospital, I determined I was going to get in shape to be given permission to scuba dive again. I got that letter signed a couple weeks ago. I haven’t been diving yet, but I will soon. That goal met, it’s time to shift gears and set my sights on a new one. Without something to shoot for, it would be too easy for me to backslide and lose the gains I’ve made.
My next target is to jog a 5K race. Not just walk it, but I want to jog the 3.1 miles at a decent pace. That said, I don’t really care if I am the last one to finish. This is about me pushing myself, not competing with others. The Charleston Heart Walk is September 10. I’ve set up a team on the Charleston Heart Walk website called Team Second Chance and hope to get some friends to join me. (You don’t have to jog with me, if you don’t want. Just come out and walk.) You can search by team names to join me.
My goal is to give more people a second chance at life, and hopefully spare some of those people the pain of open-heart surgery. Maybe we’ll all celebrate a few more birthdays as well.
We’ll call your participation a birthday present to both of us.
I’ve always heard it said that the most militant anti-smokers are former smokers who have quit. I assume that’s because they understand what smoking does to you, but also because encountering someone smoking is like dangling a steak in front of a hungry dog.
I’m still very much in the middle of my own health journey (and it will never end) following my open heart surgery earlier this year. I’m trying very hard not to be like a militant ex-smoker when I see people around me who are obviously unhealthy, but it is difficult. We are in trouble and if we don’t do something about it, it’s only going to get worse.
Just a few weeks ago, I saw that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had released new numbers on obesity from the 2015 National Health Interview Survey. It showed three states had populations with higher than 35 percent obesity. You guessed it, the states are Arkansas, West Virginia and Mississippi. Another 22 states were above 30 percent. Obesity is one of the major risk factors directly tied heart disease. Smoking is another one, of course.
The problem for most people, I think, is the concept of obesity. It’s based on height and weight from the Body Mass Index tables. BMI is an abstract and easily forgotten, or ignored, when it comes time to choose a dessert after dinner. One simple question I learned during cardiac rehab might help. It’s not full-proof, but it is a good indication of whether or not you are at risk of heart disease.
What’s your waist measurement? If it’s over 40 inches for a man, or 35 inches for a woman, you are at an elevated risk for heart disease. (Smaller framed races should have smaller measurements.) For the record, I’m not talking about your pants size, either. Your true waist is halfway between the top of your hips and the bottom of your ribs. For men, this is usually an inch or so above your belly button.
This isn’t an automatic one way or the other. Being a quarter of an inch below 40 inches doesn’t mean you are safe and can eat all of the bacon you want, and other risk factors like smoking and family history come into play, but if you are over 40/35 inches, you definitely need to get to work on your health.
Time to pull out that tape measure.
This week, I’ve completed my cardiac rehab and I feel ready for the next phase of my life.
As a reminder, in January I failed a stress test miserably and bought myself a stay at CAMC Memorial for open-heart surgery to repair five coronary artery blockages. It was a scary, frightening time. But even before I got out of the hospital, I knew I was going to write about the process. My first column, written from my hospital bed and published the day I was released from the hospital (to the amusement of my surgeon), was “Don’t Make the Same Mistakes I Did.”
My hope in writing about my recovery is that some of you might read my story and make some changes in your own lives, or at least go see your doctor. (A number of people have written to me to tell me that they did just that.) I also thought some of you might read my story and have a better understanding of what would happen if you got the same diagnosis I did, making the process not so scary.
A few people have asked me if I feel better than I ever have before. I doubt I will ever feel as good as I did in my 20s so that’s not going to happen, but I can safely say that I feel better now than I did before I went into the hospital and probably better than I’ve felt in at least a year. It’s amazing how we can accept slight decreases in our health, justifying them away without realizing there was an underlying cause.
Now that I am done with cardiac rehab, I’m not about to slow down. I’m planning to diversify my home exercise some more, adding in some more swimming and biking, but I am not about to slack off. Any time I think I don’t feel like exercising or if I want to eat something I shouldn’t, I just rub the scar in the center of my chest and I get motivated and back on track. My goal is to be able to return to scuba diving status in the very near future.
I have to send out a big thanks to everyone who took care of me, from my cardiologist to the hospital staff and then everyone at cardiac rehab. You’ve put me on the right track and I won’t let you down.
I am self-aware enough to know that I don’t know everything, even when I think I do.
When I was at Marshall in the late 1980s there was a required class called Religious Studies. I watched a lot of Freshmen sign up for that class, thinking “Hey, I went to Sunday School. This class will be a breeze.” And they failed it. They assumed they knew everything so they didn’t apply themselves to it. That lesson has stayed with me for more than 25 years.
For the last month or so, I’ve been going to cardiac rehab, following up on my open heart surgery. Exercising in a controlled environment is nothing new for me. I’ve been doing it most of my life. We had a home weight set with concrete-filled weights when I was a kid. I was about 16 when I joined the local Nautilus and have worked out in, and even worked in, gyms for years.
I really haven’t “worked out” all that much in the last few years, however. Work, pressure and other priorities took over and I didn’t make time for it. Back “in the day” weight lifting was a much higher priority for me than cardiovascular exercise, anyway.
So, I entered rehab with an open mind and did my best to put my preconceived ideas away. I’m glad I did. The exercise has been useful and is helping me gain a better understanding of how to push my limits and gain heart strength in exactly the same way I used to push my other muscles. It’s also nice to know someone is watching me very closely while I’m pushing it, to make sure I don’t push it too far.
The best part of the program though is the education components. I’ve gained something from nearly every session; probably the most from the discussions about stress management. If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have told you that I really didn’t feel stressed. These discussions have opened my eyes to a number of things I’ve been doing wrong and are helping me change my attitudes so I don’t end up back in rehab.
In a lot of ways, I consider myself fortunate to be going through all of this. I could have had a heart attack and never made it to the hospital. Catching my problems when we did has given me the opportunity to make a number of changes in my lifestyle; eating, stress management and exercise that will (I hope) keep me around for a long, long time. There are people depending on me to be here and I plan to do it for them.
That’s probably the most important lesson of all. But I knew that, already.