Getting to the heart of the matter (My Experience of Coronary Heart Disease)

Member Name: rosebud2001

Product:	My Experience of Coronary Heart Disease
Date:	27/04/09 (317 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Surgery advances with time

Disadvantages: Can strike anyone at any time

My knowledge of coronary heart disease is limited to the experiences I had living with my husband, who developed serious heart disease at the very early age of 31, resulting in him having to have a quadruple heart bypass at the age of 32.

I met him a year after he had undergone this operation but he spoke frequently of it and how heart disease had affected him before the surgery.

First a little family background however. My husband was born in London in 1956 to two Irish immigrants. His father was a big man who dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 43 when my husband was 3 and a half years old. The family had just disembarked from a ferry arriving at Wexford for a holiday and my father-in-law was holding my husband's hand at the time when he just keeled over.

This memory was one of the few my husband had of his father and I honestly believe it scarred him for life. Years later he told me he believed he had a form of post traumatic stress disorder from the experience but of course back in 1960 bereavement counselling wasn't something that was offered, particularly to children.

My husband's father had gone to the doctor a couple of weeks before he died complaining of chest pains. The doctor had informed him he just had indigestion. However back in 1960 open heart surgery did not exist so there was nothing that could have been done to save my father-in-law.

My husband had been a sickly baby and had developed pneumonia as a toddler that nearly killed him. This damaged his heart, although the symptoms were not spotted at the time and did not become apparent until years later.

It wasn't until he turned 30 that it became obvious to my husband that his health was failing. He found it increasingly difficult to carry anything heavy, to walk up stairs or walk very far at all and he developed acute angina resulting in crippling chest pains.

Heart disease had turned out to run in his family - my father-in-law was one of 9 children and it affected 5 of them resulting in either premature death or open heart surgery for those who were affected later in life.

As a result he was fast tracked for his operation but he still had a couple of false alarms including getting as far as being told he was going in for surgery that day before the operation was cancelled at the eleventh hour.

Heart bypass surgery is something you have to psyche yourself up for - I will be utterly honest here and say when he told me what it involved I wondered if I would ever be brave enough to undergo it.

It involves an incision in your chest and in your leg - veins are removed from your leg to replace the furred or damaged arteries around your heart. My husband told me that his heart was stopped during the operation too.

My knowledge of the medical procedure is limited to what he told me and what I have read, as is the recovery period. My husband told me that when he woke up he felt he had only been out of intensive care for half a day before the physiotherapy began, but this is a necessary part of the recovery process.

My husband's recovery process was slowed down somewhat by an infection in his leg - the stitches hadn't been properly done and he was left with a really bad scar, something that both angered and embarrassed him.

However, all that aside, it gave my husband a new lease of life. I wish I could tell you that he lived a really healthy lifestyle from there on in, as one is supposed to do, but he didn't.

For 9 years he tried, and failed, to stop smoking. He ate a very low fat diet but enjoyed visits to the pub. Strenuous exercise was out and he still suffered periodically from angina. His situation was further complicated by the fact he developed Type 2 Diabetes after he had his surgery, resulting in a prescription for 12 items every 8 weeks.

He finally stopped smoking after a night out where he could barely walk and he fell to the floor in exhaustion after a few steps. He had to have an angiogram to check his heart function not long after. This isn't a pleasant process either - an incision is made in the upper thigh and a tiny camera is inserted through a vein that leads to the heart, allowing doctors to view the heart function.

Luckily his heart was functioning reasonably well, ruling out further surgery, but this was the shock my husband needed to stop smoking and with the help of nicotine patches, he finally broke the habit.

I am convinced my husband would have been dead before the millennium if he hadn't stopped smoking, such was the difference in his health once he finally quit. He found walking far easier and his angina was considerably reduced. When I first met my husband in 1990 he frequently could be seen clutching his chest in pain but this became a rarity after he stopped smoking.

Heart disease affected my husband in many other ways. Stress was something that could both make and break him. He thrived on stress at work, but hated it any other time and did not cope well with it. He had a very short fuse which those who knew and loved him quickly learned how to deal with. In hindsight I put this down to the fact he knew he wasn't going to live into old age and quite simply he had no patience whatsoever as a result.

A combination of all the drugs he took and the lack of oxygen to his brain from his weakened heart also affected his personality - he could go from being happy and entertaining one minute to being quite belligerent the next. Those who understood the situation would stand by him but several times I had total strangers inform me that my husband was the most obnoxious person they had ever met.

My husband passed away in his sleep in March last year and the cause of death was ischaemic heart disease - the disease that had caused his arteries to fur and block back in the late 1980s. Time had finally caught up with him at the age of 51.

I am concerned that our daughter may inherit coronary heart disease from her father's side of the family and have taken her to a specialist who has been relatively reassuring but the fact of the matter is they can't actually do any tests until she is 18, so all I can do is wait and hope.

Heart disease is something that doesn't seem to get as much coverage in the media as cancer, but its reach is just as wide as cancer's. It can strike at any age and while our lifestyles can be a factor in developing it, equally you can get it purely on genetic grounds.

Living with a person with heart disease is a challenge as you have to understand how it affects not just the body, but the mind too. Much as I miss my husband every single day since he died, I have never regretted the time we had, despite the knowledge I had that we probably wouldn't get the chance to grow old together.

I learned a lot from him about bravery, about when it's right to complain loudly and when it's best to be stoic, and most of all about how even when physically your heart is weak, you can still have a big and strong one in the way you live your life and how your life touches other people.

Summary: My husband and heart disease.