Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Life after our heart attack….

Our life has changed since January 10th, when my love, my Danny, had his heart attack. When he died and came back to life for me.  

The medication that his heart doctor prescribed for him after the heart attack has been decreased to six pills that he has to take each day.  Each of these pills has many side effects and most all of them are energy suckers. But they are keeping his heart beating regularly, fighting plaque buildup in his heart, and preventing his body from rejecting the stent that was put in his heart to keep his artery open after the heart attack.  In other words, these six pills that Danny takes, three in the morning and three at night, are keeping him alive.

Included in these pills are blood thinners, which means that if he is injured or has a bad fall, we have to get him to the hospital immediately to stop the bleeding.  This could include internal bleeding that we may not even be aware of until he grew faint or passed out or died.

Since he is on blood thinners, he can’t take anti inflammatory pills to combat the pain from arthritis throughout his body and the constant ache in his surgically repaired foot.  So when we cycle, walk, or hike he is often in an incredible amount of pain.

Some of Danny’s pills slow down his heartbeat, and not just a little bit. His average heartbeat is now in the low 50’s—the low 50’s not only at night (where it often dips into the 40’s), but during the day too.  This low heartbeat steals energy from my dear husband. Another result of an extremely low heartbeat is that he is cold most of the time.  So I am continually bundling him up in long underwear, sweatshirts, and blankets.  Luckily, I have knitted many, many blankets!

Since my Danny is often robbed of much of his energy and is in pain when we do many of the things that we have done together during the years and that we dearly love to do, we have decreased the intensity and length of time that we hike, cycle, walk, and even dance.

Amazingly, my dear Danny doesn’t complain.  Often, I don’t even know that he would rather stay at home and not go out into our beautiful mountains to hike or cycle.  He is so sweet.  He goes hiking, walking, and cycling with me, because he knows that I love it and that I need to get out into nature every day.  It is who I am.  So he does it for me.  I am so lucky to have this man loving me. 

Today, we went on our first spring hike in the mountains near our cabin.  It was a day that was difficult for him to leave our cabin.  But he did, and he left the comfort of our home without telling me that he would just as soon not go hiking. 

We started our hike through the chaparral and pine trees just a mile south of our cabin.

We ended up crossing a beautiful meadow that we have named Graybill Meadow, since we happened to discover it last spring by following an obscure, unmarked trail on the edge of town.

We had a lovely time today, hiking together.

Surprisingly, my Danny had more energy climbing up through the trees back to our car, than he did at the start of our hike.  There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how he feels, and I believe that this unpredictability is part of the frustration for him.

I said that our life has changed since his heart attack, but it has also remained much the same.  It is the same because we both continue to love each other so very much.  In fact,  I believe that we even love each other more since we almost lost our life together on January 10th.

I would perhaps venture to say that our life and marriage is even better than before the heart attack. At one time we believed that we would be together for at least 30 years…until our early 90’s.   We both now realize that at any moment one of us may die.  Our years together may not stretch out into decades.  In a blink of an eye, this life may be over.  So we treasure each day that we have together.  Today was a gift that was given to us…another day together.

Amazingly and fortunately, the one thing that has not been changed since Dan’s heart attack is our dancing.  He is always excited to take me in his arms and dance with me.  And there is nothing that I like better!

We met at a dance, fell in love on our first date when we went dancing, and I expect that when we are so old that we can barely walk, we will still float gracefully across the dance floor…our bodies close together, gazing into each other’s eyes.

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