I’m still here! Thank you so much for so many kind messages

At the moment a certain amount of flippancy about what’s happened to me feels okay, because at some point I am going to have to start processing it all and face up to things. I have asked enough questions of the wonderful people here at the Torcross cardiology department at Derriford hospital to know that I am pretty damn lucky to still be here, and the simple fact is that I want to spend as many years as possible with my awesome family because I love them to bits. Tuesday morning was a close call and on some heart attack scale they use I had a really bad one……………

Sorry for the awful selfie by the way. I don’t really understand how to point a phone at me and snap a photo! It’s me though.

At some point soon I will talk you through what actually happened, but for the time being I wanted to say a huge thank you for so many extremely kind and thoughtful messages of support. A number of you here have also had serious heart issues and you have been incredibly kind to share some of your experiences with me and how you have come back strong. I am waiting to hear how much damage has been done to my actual heart from the heart attack, but I am going to do everything possible to recover fully and come back stronger. Don’t laugh but I can’t wait to get back to running. I don’t need to tell you how much I want to go fishing, but that might have to wait a while.

In an emergency procedure I had a stent fitted on Tuesday morning while I was actually having the heart attack, and then yesterday afternoon in much calmer circumstances they fitted a second stent. The daft thing is that I am actually feeling pretty good here in hospital - hopefully going home this afternoon - but I need to start facing up to the fact that the recovery process could be fairly lengthy. I am itching to get going and start walking etc. as much as I am allowed - very little to start with - and I need to find out where my current limits are and how much I can push things to help me get better. I am going to do exactly what they tell me to do and I am not going to be stupid. I have had a serious scare and I can’t ignore the simple fact that I was incredibly lucky that enough things went my way for me to still be here. A few differences and it could have been very different. I am going to need to start working through that at some point in the future.

Thank you so much again. I will get back to yapping about fishing at some point soon because I don’t want to bore the pants off you with my various trevails. It does help me to write stuff down though so I hope you will indulge me a little bit. As with my skin cancer stuff I have to also hope that what I have been through and will be going through might help a few other people out in different ways. I can definitely do things to lessen my chances of this happening again, but it’s looking very much like my heart issues were a genetic thing and something was always going to happen at some point. They have told me that getting properly running fit and losing some weight would have delayed the inevitable and helped me get through when the shit hit the fan, and they are encouraging me to carry it all on when I have properly recovered - which might take a while and patience isn’t exactly one of my super powers! You all have a good weekend and I am crossing fingers that the England v Wales game is somewhat better than the turgid pile of poo it was last weekend. I don’t think how badly we played helped my stress levels at all! Thank you from a hospital bed in Derriford…………..