In my head, I've felt like an old man since I was 16 in 1986, when pop music went all shit and I threw myself into the 60s and 70s, avoided dance clubs, holidays in Ibiza and fashion. And I maintained my old man outlook on life as I moved from young adulthood into middle age, intolerant of anything fast, fatuous or fun (in the youthful sense, that is). And no doubt, you all might have noticed this. But in one important respect, I had NEVER felt like an old man. And that was physically.
Despite avoiding gyms like the plague and viewing jogging as a modern version of Dark Age monks' penitential self-flagellation, I maintained a reasonable level of fitness and healthiness that is underserving of my lack of effort in that regard. Which is why, on my first post-heart attack long walk - from hospital ward to car park - I was appalled to discover that physically I had become, albeit temporarily, I'm assured, a slow and feeble OLD MAN.
The car journey home - with my wife at the wheel, as I'm not allowed to drive just yet - brought with it the stark reality that I had better not gesticulate at other drivers with my routine sarcastic hand-clap or more occasional wanker wave, because, should anyone get out and come looking for a fight, unless they are under 4 stone with the strength of a lettuce, I 'd get a right hiding. Even that Stu Francis from 'Crackerjack' could beat me up, based on the fact that he could at least 'crush a grape'. I can't. But then it occurred to me that I'd probably get a right hiding from a good proportion of fellas on the road anyway and yet this has never stopped me reacting provocatively to selfish, arrogant or aggressive drivers. Having managed to avoid proper fisticuffs since the one time when I was about 8 (which I won, hence my faultless fight record of 1-0-0), I have acted with complacent impunity both on the road and public transport (where, as it has been documented, I often trip up rude people). I suspect, that as I'd had a similar attitude towards my health, this will one day catch up with me just as the heart attack did.
My first 'practice walk', on the day after my discharge from hospital, I managed 200 metres up the road, before feeling the need to turn back; and again, this was at such a pace that by the time I passed by the neighbours' plastic recycling bins for a second time, they had started to biodegrade. Yesterday, my wife kindly dropped me off at the cinema to watch the 1pm matinee of '1917'. If you ever go to the cinema for a mid-week matinee in school term time, you might notice that it's full of pensioners. I was the only one in there who hadn't lived through 1917, the year, never mind the film. And yet, I was still getting overtaken on the stairs. Anyway, I got a bus most of the way home, but this still left what would normally be a 15 minutes walk, but which ended up taking me 30 minutes. The embarrassing thing was, it required me to walk past a school after home time. Embarrassing, because I wasn't walking any faster than someone who would be seen as 'loitering' outside the school. And because I don't look like an old man who should be strolling that slowly, I assumed that I looked like someone very dodgy, in the 'Not On Normal Courtyard Exercise' sort of way.
The other key feature of my recovery that I feel the need to share with you, is the slight adjustment to my diet. I was reading the little booklets published by the British Heart Foundation that the hospital gave me, full of advice on changing your lifestyle to avoid a repeat incident. The problem is, it had case studies. And the photos of the people in the case studies looked nothing like me. I read about Paul and his heart attack and how he changed his diet; and I looked at the picture of Paul and I thought, 'Of course Paul had a heart attack, look at the fucking state of him.' Despite not being like Paul, I have acquiesced to some key changes in my diet - limiting dairy products, cutting down on red meat (especially the bacon, as it was the bacon that done for me) and on chocolate and avoiding saturated fats, animal fats, all that sort of stuff that gives you bum cheeks to inadvertently knock things over with in shops.
You'd think as well that this lifestyle change (and life changing event) would be a topic of conversation when I went to see a GP a couple of days after my discharge, as directed. You might even think that she'd open the conversation with "How are you feeling?" given that she had my notes in front of her. You might even think that SHE would lead the conversation with a series of questions to explore how I'm getting on, what I'm doing to look after myself, how it might have affected me mentally, etc. As it turned out, she did none of these things. She said, "What brings you here?" (which she knew, she had the notes on her screen) and I replied, "A heart attack" and she joked, "What? Now?" before we entered an awkward silence while I expected her to ask me something. I had my list of what to say and thus skipped over the section on how I was feeling to my list of questions, all of which she answered monosyllabically with no follow-up questions of her own. I asked about the theoretical likelihood of a person being stressed without knowing it and if that could have been a contributing factor to the attack. Short answer and no follow up to conclude if I had been stressed or what might have caused me to be so.
Maybe I'm being an intolerant old man, but this appointment was late Friday afternoon, the GP was young, she was probably distracted, thinking about getting home and going out that evening. To a dance club. For a fast, fatuous and fun night out.
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