I've been wanting to take a few minutes and write this post and today is as good a day as any.
My husband had open heart surgery almost 4 years ago. Most of my local friends were there reading my emails and listening to me as I attempted to be sane and not totally whig out over the whole event.
It is a life changing surgery for the patient and family. Ray is doing great. We were blessed. He went and had an EBT scan (Electron Beam Tomography) that shows the calcium deposits in your arterties. His score was really high and because of that test it saved his life. He had 5 heart bypasses. Most of the arterties were 90-95% blocked. After this we started to read more about foods, what's in them and family history. So, now for my little speech. If you have a parent who had heart problems before 60 years of age you as a child of the parent have a greater chance of developing similar problems. Don't ignore that, don't blow off pains or funny feelings. It's much better to be silly and find out it was nothing than to ignore symptoms and then have a major problem or something that causes you to die.
Ray's older brother just had heart bypass surgery in Florida about 1 month ago and he had 5 bypasses. Ray called his little sister who had been going to doctor and being treated for acid reflux to no avail and told her "sis, get someone to look at your heart". She did and ended up having 4 heart bypasses 2 weeks ago. Genes are against us if we have bad ones. Don't put off getting a good checkup from your doctor. Don't wait.
I know nothing of my father's family or history of health issues except for his death at 57 from a heart attack. This has bothered me for a while and I went to my family doctor, expressing my fears and so I had a stress test with Nuclear added. It turns out that as I suspected, I'm in terrible shape for walking but I did manage to do the treadmill and the pictures showed nothing abnormal. That gave me a feeling of relief because we tend to ponder on the worse case scenario. But it's done and I am glad I did it. I know that I must learn to do the bad word "Exercise" but at least I can. Now to just get motivated and start. That's the hard part.
Anyway, the whole point to this is pay attention to your body, learn it's little aches and pains and learn to distinguish from things that aren't normal and GO TO THE DOCTOR. Don't put it off.
Finally, Food...if you haven't heard of the movie, FOOD INC go to the internet and search it, read it and learn what is happening to our foods in this country that is ultimately the ruin of us all. You will be shocked, sickened and mad at what the government and corporate greed are doing to our health.
I promise my next post will be about gardening or something fun.
Do something fun today for yourself, you deserve it.
