My heart attack - how it happened (please indulge me while I work through this, it really helps me)

I can’t shy away from the fact that last Tuesday morning I had a very major heart attack and in many respects I am lucky to still be here. I am going to have some mental processing to deal with at some point, I know that, but for the time being it’s the sheer joy at getting home to be with my family which is overriding anything negative. My first morning back home was Saturday and I woke up at 4.45am (early to bed the night before, knackered!), but instead of jumping out of bed and getting on with whatever I would usually do, I simply lay there in bed for an hour and a quarter and listened to my wife sleeping beside me. I cannot tell you how good that felt…………….

If I lose some readers and subscribers by boring you about my heart attack then so be it, but I want to explain to you what happened if that’s okay. I am not remotely embarrassed about it, I am happy to talk about nearly anything - specific bass marks not on the agenda of course! - indeed I need to talk about it, and at the end of the day I see similarities to my skin cancer I got a few years ago. If anything I talk about or share with you about what has happened to me can help any of you out in any way then that’s more than enough for me. So here’s what happened to me last week. I am going to make it very matter of fact because later on in the week I will break down some of the warning signs and what-ifs and so on. I did have a bit of good news when I got home. I got the results back from what they cut out of my back in June and it’s a benign something or other and it’s sorted.

Went for my first 5min (slower!) walk after my heart attack this morning!

About early afternoon last Monday I got back home from a few days in the Isle of Wight seeing my lot who spend a couple of weeks every summer down there with my in-laws. I managed to get an earlier ferry off the Isle of Wight in the morning so when I got back home I literally jumped into some waders, grabbed my fishing gear, jumped back in the car and went out fishing for a few hours with Storm. I caught a few bass and with the weather and tides over the next few days I was making various mental plans to fit in a good bit of fishing around my work.

But I hadn’t been running for a few days because I had been getting some pain in my left knee - there’s a lot of me to move around a 5k! While I was in the Isle of Wight some brand new and rather nice looking running shoes had arrived at home and I wanted to give them a go - much as we like to try a new rod or reel or lure out of course. So I went for a 5k run early on Tuesday morning. I won’t go into how I felt because it has a lot of relevance for some of the warning signs I had been getting and will talk about later in the week, but I did my 5k run with Storm and then did my 1km warm down walk back home. I fed Storm and then had breakfast myself. Pretty quickly after having breakfast I felt some sharp pains in my chest but I put it down to indigestion and it got a bit better.

I then went upstairs to have a bath and do my teeth etc. After my bath I started to feel stronger and stronger sharp, shooting pains in my chest but I was still putting it down to indigestion. It very quickly grew into that horrible sort of pain you really want to get away from but you can’t. Then both arms suddenly started to feel like they were going numb, my fingers started to tingle really strongly, and I really started sweating heavily. I am no medic but I suddenly realised that I could be in real trouble and I had to get some help. I was just about able to make the logical decision that getting myself to the local surgery was the right option because they’d be able to find out what was happening to me.

I got myself changed, stumbled downstairs, locked Storm out in the garden, then drove myself the five minutes to my local surgery. I know this was not the safest thing to do in the world, but self-preservation takes over and I got myself there in one piece. I managed to park my Epic Berlingo and get myself to reception where I said sorry but I don’t think I’m very well. They asked me to take a seat and I remember feeling bad for them because sweat was dripping off me and onto their nice clean floor. In no time at all a GP and I think a nurse came out and helped me into a room near reception.

I asked if I could lie down on the floor and they kept talking to me and started doing various things to me. After a while the lovely GP said that I was having a heart attack, and I distinctly remember asking if I could go home after the heart attack was finished because I was meant to be going fishing that afternoon. She smiled and said no Henry, you’re off to hospital in an ambulance. I tried to insist that this wasn’t necessary but as you might have gathered I am no medic and I think they know a bit more than me!

I was in a fair bit of pain but they got me to slow my breathing down while they stuck needles in me and gave me various things to help. I wasn’t really aware of time but it seemed to be no time at all until a couple of paramedics came into the room to take me to hospital. I offered to try and walk to the ambulance but they were having none of it and instead got me onto a movable bed thing and blue-lighted me to Derriford. One thing I need to do when I am strong enough is go to my local surgery and thank the kind people there for doing so much to help me when I was in serious trouble.

I managed to call my wife from the ambulance and she actually answered her mobile which to be fair is pretty rare. I didn’t particularly enjoy having to tell that I was having a heart attack and I was on my way to hospital for an emergency procedure, but everything was out of my control and I didn’t know where I might end up or whether I would pull through. My wife is awesome and she kicked into serious gear in the Isle of Wight, but if my heart could have broken anymore right then it would have right then at how distressing I know that phone call was for my wife and then my two girls when she told them. They managed to get an early ferry off the Isle of Wight and wade through bad traffic to come and see me in hospital that evening. I am getting ahead of myself though.

By the way, if you ever need to take your mind off something then dry-chew an aspirin. When I was in the ambulance one of the paramedics got me to dry-chew an aspirin and it was honestly so disgusting that for a minute or so I completely forgot I was having a heart attack. I have also lost a lot of chest and leg hairs last week because so many different things have been stuck to me and then ripped off! If I had known I was going to have a heart attack I’d have shaved everywhere to save me that side of things.

The two arrows point towards where the two stents have gone in, it seems like magic to me!

Anyway, there was a whole team of people waiting for me at Derriford and I was wheeled straight into an operating theatre where it was explained to me that they were going to do an emergency procedure to fit a stent. They would try and go in through an artery in my wrist but they also did a bit of shaving down below in case they needed to go in through my groin instead. The wrist worked though. I was awake the whole time and some very kind people kept talking to me and keeping me as calm as possible throughout the procedure. It was hurting in my chest but they obviously gave me some sort of pain relief and to be honest the worst of the pain was whatever was going on in my arm as various tubes and balloons and stents obviously went in and upwards towards my heart. It did hurt like bloody hell when they said they were removing the tube(s) from my heart, but in time that pain disappeared and I began to feel a whole lot better. It didn’t feel like that much later when I was moved off the operating table and wheeled onto the Torcross cardiology unit.

Which is where I stayed until Friday evening. I talked a lot with various nurses and doctors over the next few days, and not only was an incredible amount of kindness and patience shown towards me, but there was never any sense of rush when they were talking to me about what happened, the way forward, and when I was asking any number of questions. Honestly it was humbling how the NHS has come through for me again and I can’t thank everyone enough. I found out very quickly after my first emergency procedure that they were going to want to fit a second stent in me, but they wanted to give my heart a couple of days to recover from the actual heart attack. On Thursday afternoon I was wheeled back down to the operating theatre and the second stent was fitting in somewhat calmer and more relaxed conditions than what happened on Tuesday morning. I even got to see video footage afterwards of what they had done and it genuinely was absolutely amazing.

My blood pressure is good and my cholesterol is not high, but it has come out that there is a strong history of heart attacks on my dad’s side of the family and I didn’t know that genetics plays a big part in all this. It seems that I was always going to get hit at some point in my life and last Tuesday morning was it. Yes there are some changes I need to make and I am taking all their advice because I’d be bloody stupid not to, but a lot of things went my way to enable me to be sitting here typing this - and I will talk about it later this week. When I saw one of the consultants on Friday morning he said that with my age and level of fitness he expected me to be back to 100%+ fitness within six weeks, so I have something really positive to aim for. He wants me walking and running and fishing again, and he said that they have literally mended me so that my heart is going to work at 100% again when it obviously hasn’t been for a while. Again I will talk about that later in the week.

What I have to do is follow the recovery plan they have given me, so after a weekend of basically sitting on my arse and trying not to have another heart attack at how crap the England rugby was again, I went for my first 5min walk this morning. My wife and youngest girl were standing either side of me like I was about to collapse plus they made me time the “walk” so I couldn’t cheat and do more, the dog was wondering why the hell I wasn’t walking at my usual pace, but I did it. No adverse effects and I am still here and itching to go for my second 5min walk this afternoon. Thank you so, so much for so many kind messages and comments of support. I haven’t got a chance of replying to them all but please know that I read them all and I am beyond grateful. There is a bit more to this tale and I hope that some of you will indulge me as I break it down this week……….