I'm supposed to eat what???

So, I want to say first and foremost, the staff at the hospital was beyond great!.  So nice, so helpful, so considerate.  I have no complaints at all with their care.  But as the stay progressed, what was apparent were the contradictions between what we're told to eat for health, and what was available.  Not just with what I was given, but what was available.  This is a hospital!  I mean really?  There is a popular restaurant in this hospital, and though the same restaurants in public have healthy alternatives, this one did not!  You'd think they would have made a point of this one having more healthy alternatives than the public ones.  Just my opinion.

The day I was admitted I did get a dinner; baked chicken, green beans, and brown rice; all with no salt.  UGH!  I got really sweet tea cause it is the south, and i'm not diabetic soo..., a dinner roll (made with white flour)and MARGARINE, and lemon pudding made with lord knows what.  So I can't have salt, but I can have margarine, and highly processed other foods.  The chicken, rice, and beans were fine, but I would rather have the salt and get rid of the margarine.  Full disclosure, I ate the pudding.  I mean why not?  I was starving!  Past midnight I was to eat nothing til I had my heart cath the next day.  The nurses were great in allowing me a late night snack prior to midnight; boxedcereal with skim milk, or peanut butter graham crackers.  I figured the lesser of two evils was the peanut butter and graham crackers.  My cath was supposed to be in the morning, but it got bumped to afternoon.  They gave me a snack, and again I had to choose graham crackers and peanut butter (you know the processed kind with hydrogenated oil).  I was hungry though, so I took what I could and was grateful for it.  I had my heart cath and it was clean, no blockages.  Yay!  I can have what I want to eat!

"NO!"  I'm told. I'm told I'm still on the cardiac diet.  I did still have a heart attack.  So my dinner when it came that night was....wait for it.... baked chicken, brown rice, and just to change things up, carrots!  Again, no salt, again, margarine and sweet tea.  The day I was discharged was the first day I ate breakfast.  Eggs (good), cantaloupe (also good), then it went down hill from there.  There was the ever present margarine; two of them actually.  I had white grits, white french toast, skim milk, pancake syrup (which was High fructose corn syrup mixed with various chemicals, and , oh yea, salt), and coffee with soy creamer.   I ate the eggs and the cantaloupe.  Just about everything else I had been actively avoiding for years.  Check out this article with Health line.  See if the list doesn't look familiar.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/6-foods-that-cause-inflammation#section6


We are told by the medical powers that be, not to eat hydrogenated foods, but given margarine.  We are told to eat whole grains, but given refined flours.  We are told to avoid High Fructose corn syrup/ highly processed foods, but there they are!  BUT NO SALT!  Can't have that.  You're heart attack has now relegated you to a life of tasteless food.

Now they were consistent putting skim milk on my plate.  This is where what they recommend and what I believe part company.  I stopped eating low fat a long time ago.  I eat full fat cheeses, yogurt, milk.  I just eat less!  Check out this article in Medical News Today.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322452.php

In fact, full disclosure, we've begun to drink and use Raw milk and/or non-homogenized milk.  It's what we choose to do.  We buy local and know our farmer. We had a friend that recommended the raw milk because of it's cholesterol lowering properties.  Ironic huh.

The very nice cardiac rehab counselor was in the room that morning when my breakfast came.  She appreciated my dilemma.  With a chuckle she said "unfortunately, dietary guidelines haven't caught up with current info".  In some ways I agree,  but looking at my tray that morning I thought "some of these dietary guidelines haven't kept up with dietary guidelines"!  I assured her that though I ate full fat, I ate less and kept my fat intake under a certain range.  She was fine with that.  So that is what I'll continue to do.

This is what we choose to do.  You have to do what works for you, but be informed about what plan you are going to follow.

And the saga continues.....

Once I was cleared I was like YIPPEE life is back to normal!

 Aaaaannd I got on the treadmill the next day at 3 mph and 2% incline (LETS NOT GO CRAZY RIGHT!).  I did that for 45 minutes.

Aaaaaand I then went and did yard work outside.

 Yea....never said common sense was a strong characteristic of mine.  Come Friday, the next day, the nice folks building my deck (the wife is a nurse Thank God) ended up taking me to the hospital for chest pain.  Yay Me!  Fortunately it wasn't a heart attack, but the ER nurse caring for me, when she heard what all I did the day before, admonished me and said I needed to get back into it gradually!  So over the weekend I went back to being a slug.  Unfortunately what that set in motion were panic attacks.  I think Friday's issues might have started out as over doing it, but ended up in a panic attack.  Monday definitely was.  3 hours this panic attack lasted.  I had a few small panic attacks over the weekend, but didn't recognize them as that.  I thought it was"you overdid it" pains.  It wasn't until the doozy one on Monday that the nice nurse on the other end of the phone assured me I was having a panic attack.  I would be fine.  It isn't cardiac.  My Dr prescribed an anti anxiety pill.  Yay...another pill.

I didn't want another panic attack so I took the pill the next day.  I was told the medicine would take a week or so to get into my system so I needed a way to cope with these attacks until then.  To the internet I went!  I found that walking can help.  So I walked (no incline; 2 mph)on our treadmill to help get thru them. Walking and praying!  It worked! Whenever I felt an attack coming on, I would drop what I was doing and get on the treadmill.  Sometimes I walked 5 minutes, and sometimes it could be 20 minutes.   I could literally feel the attack hit, and fall off.  The best way to describe is a wave hitting me.  All was fine that day.

Then came the nausea.  Next day, nausea like you wouldn't believe, curled up in a fetal position afraid to move, nausea.  The Dr cut my dose by half and that helped, but by the next day, I guess the half dose had accumulated back up to a full dose (you know 2 days x half dose) and the nausea came back.  I talked to my Dr and told her I would rather walk thru the attack and deal with them without meds.  She encouraged me to try.  So I did.  It worked. Since the time I came off the meds,(a week ago yesterday), I've only had one more decent sized attack and that was last Saturday night.

I think another thing that helped alleviate the attacks is the stress test I had this past Monday and, once I got thru that, I felt my confidence returning.  I'm happy to say I passed the stress test and am cleared to start rehab on Monday.  I'm looking forward to rehab.  I've found I'm too nervous to confidently workout on my own right now.  I never thought of myself as a skittish type, but this has proven me otherwise.  I'm anxious to get back to where I was physically, and even better.


Things I learned from this event:

1) HEART DISEASE IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH AMONG WOMEN!  Let that sink in.  In fact more women die from heart disease than all other causes of death among women combined.

2)  It doesn't matter how well you take care of yourself.  If you have a family history of heart disease, you are at a higher risk of a heart attack than someone who doesn't.  Now that doesn't mean don't take care of yourself.  Because of the way I was eating, the weight loss, etc, my heart attack was mild.  There were no blockages to remove, no stents to place, no open heart surgery.  My dad's on the other hand, ended up in a quadruple bypass. 

3) The dietary guidelines for cardiac patients is woefully inadequate.  I'll go into that more later.

4)  Even a mild heart attack is a traumatic event as far as my mind is concerned.  I never, ever want to feel that kind of pain again.  And the not knowing why I had a heart attack kinda messed with me.  It's like "But you didn't fix anything....".

5) And finally and not least by any stretch of the imagination; God was there with me through it all.  I never felt him leave my side.  For that reason I thank Him.  Not just for being there, but I thank him for this situation so that I would have the opportunity to feel His presence with me, and to have to lean on Him.  Powerful stuff.

Talk about a motivator!

I know, you thought I abandoned this blog, and you would be partially right.  It has been a busy, busy spring and summer.I figured my little Etsy shop would fade back during the summer months and give me time to leisurely sew up some things for when the Christmas shopping season started.  That wasn't the case.  Add to that my normal gardening season (and we went a little nuts with the planting), helping my mom with cleaning out the basement of her house (Big basement),preparing our previous back deck area to become a porch, only to find out we couldn't get a concrete truck in there so it's back to a deck, and so forth and so on....It was a little crazy.

I have managed to keep my weight at 168, which is good cause it's been hard to eat exactly on plan.  Activity is what saved me.  I would like to say things have slowed down, but that is not the case.  As we speak I have about 5 outfits and 4 sets of diapers, all custom ordered, in the works.  The deck is being built, though not by us.  Some wonderful friends are helping us out.  But I still have a long list of things that need addressing before the weather turns off cold.

 And I had a heart attack.  Not a big one.  It was mild.  Didn't feel mild when it was happening.  I can say I would rather have a baby than feel that pain again.  But, there were no blockages, and my cholesterol is good.  They actually have no idea why I had a heart attack.  I have a family history, so I'm sure that's part of it, but with no blockages they don't know what it was.  I could have passed a small clot thru my heart.  That's what my endocrinologist thinks (and my nurse Hubby).  Nobody knows!  Well except God!

Even though my cholesterol was good and there were no blockages, they put me on a cholesterol lowering med, and I reluctantly agreed.  From the time I was discharged two weeks ago to the night before my follow up, I took this pill at night as prescribed.  Every morning I would get up and have twinges of chest pain.  It's a little nerve racking to have that after a heart attack, but by lunch there was no problem and I felt normal.  Finally the night before my follow up with the cardiologist, I decided not to take it and see what happened.  Yep, woke up the next day and felt like my old self.  No pain.  I brought this up to the nurse practitioner and asked her why they wanted me on it when I had good cholesterol and no blockages.  She said that while my cholesterol was good, in heart patients they want the LDL (bad) cholesterol to be in the less than 70 and mine was in the 89.  I asked her, since I'm so close anyway, couldn't I use diet and exercise to get it where they want it?  She said I could.  So no cholesterol pill!

She seemed surprised, and it made me wonder if maybe she hears more patients just want a pill instead of making any changes.  In all honestly, I'm not making many new changes except using more Extra Virgin olive oil, eating more cholesterol lowering foods, and just getting refocused on what I was doing before.  But having a heart attack gives you real motivation to stay on track.  First of all, I never want to go thru that again, and second, I never want to have to take a pill to fix something with my body.

I'd love to say all was right with my world after that...It wasn't.


This is going to be long, so I will end the heart saga here and save the rest for another day!