Brief Encounter

There she sat, perched upon the edge of my bed as I gazed into her eyes.
My heart missed a beat, half a dozen he or so in fact as I waited for her next words, I could hardly bear it no longer.....................

No not a page from a romantic novel, but rather yours truly waiting for a Coronary Care Unit doctor to confirm to me that, lo and behold, at the tender age of 46 I needed major heart surgery....or it was curtains.

This was in 2012, and it's fair to say that up until then that this really was my biggest crisis in life, apart that is from the evening I was preparing to sit down to watch Brief Encounter and suddenly realised I had run out of teabags!!

Now, that fiasco was bad enough, but this latest message of joy was a different proposition entirely. I can remember lying in Coronary Care and to paraphrase Oliver Hardy thing to myself "Well Stephen, this is another fine mess you've got yourself into!''

The aforementioned surgery took place on Thursday 27th September, within four weeks of the 'Brief Encounter' (see what I did there) with my pretty doctor, and I am now at around 60% of where I was before my 'argument' with the surgeon's oscillating saw and all manner of tools he had at his disposal, and from which I came off decidedly second best.

Apart from a collapsed lung during the surgery, everything went ok. 
When I first got home I could barely walk 100 metres, that then became 200 metres....then I managed 400 metres and so forth, and within a week I was walking half a mile.
During that winter of discontent, my aim was to get up to about 5 miles which, despite the best hindering intentions of a bit of fluid on my lungs and unbelievable muscle ache in places I never knew existed, I managed to achieve. However, my biggest focus was getting back on the bike.

Approx. 4 months after my op I decided I would have my first cycle 'sortie' down the road. 3 miles was my absolute limit that day but that didn't matter, I was back on the bike.
Over the next few weeks I put the bike on the turbo trainer and slowly but surely built up my strength and stamina, yes there were complications along the way but nothing that couldn't be overcome and by the summer of 2013 I was up to 150 miles over a 3-4 day weekly schedule and I continued to build from there.

The accompanying photo was taken in 2014, exactly two years on from that day back in September 2012, when trivial things that seemed important suddenly weren't so important.
It is a third of the way through a 50 miles bike ride and hopefully it will give encouragement to others who are facing or who have just come through a similar problem with their ticker, to tackle it head on and come out the other side.

Fast forward if you will to 2015, and a lot has certainly gone down since. I have lost good friends along the way, some to heart disease, and I have also been re-acquainted with, and made some wonderful friends through my heart journey and also my new employment at Tesco Bridgewater Extra in Banbridge, where quite frankly the support and depth of care has been both staggering and humbling, and something for which I will always be grateful.
This year two of my grafts had the audacity to block and had to be dealt with very quickly (see previous post) but you know what, these things only make you stronger.

Now I am not for one second going to say that, open heart surgery in particular is a walk in the park, it most definitely is not....your body, and mind for that matter, go through a pretty brutal ordeal.

But if you are fortunate enough beforehand, as I was/am, to get warning shots across the bow, there is no question it is life-saving surgery and, despite what at times may seem like a mountain standing in the way of recovery and progress, the road does flatten out and things do get better.