9 weeks out from open heart surgery: Losing my noodle

I'm back to normal.  How do I know?  Answer:   I keep losing my noodle.

I don't understand why I have such difficulty with my noodle.  When Adam was here visiting I lost two of them.  Two.  Who loses two noodles?  Who loses one?  Who even uses one?  Who even HAS one?  Who has THREE?

Fortunately, we do have three.

But the third one led to a lot of ridicule from my wife.  She said it looked like I was carrying around a dryer vent hose. 

We have been swimming and cycling every day, about two hours total.  Some days, when we have appointments, we do a lot of walking too.  We enjoy it, but most importantly these days it is also part of my rehab.

At first I used the noddle the entire hour when swimming.  Now I am down to using it for 20 minutes of every hour and "swimming" for 40 minutes.  My "swimming" is kind of a joke, as I am a terrible swimmer.  So I do a combination of treading water, doing the backstroke with my head out of the water, and the dog paddle.  The advantage of being a crappy swimmer is that I get more exercise--nothing I do is efficient.

I get stronger all of the time.  Exercise is the key.  And the critical exercise didn't occur after my open heart surgery.  Instead it was the exercise that we did before it.  We knew about three years ago that I would need this surgery, so prepared for it the same way an athlete might prepare for a marathon.  We looked at it as being 'in training" for my heart surgery.

Why not?  You train for a marathon or for any other endurance activity, so why not look at open heart surgery the same way:  It is an endurance activity, so train for it.

And it has paid off.  I am not back to where I was before surgery, but if my upcoming ablation procedure pays off, I should be back to my pre-surgery levels by the first of the year.

And I am also quickly getting back to being forgetful as well, which is why I keep losing my noddle.

Here I am with what Vicky calls my dryer vent.  Fortunately, I didn't need to use it because there, in the locker room on this day, were BOTH of the noddles I had forgotten and accidentally left there.

In my defense, I've never used a noodle so never had to remember one.  Is that a good defense?  Works for me.