Six Weeks After the Stent, I Was Frightened of My Own Stairs

I was forty-six. I had a heart attack on a Tuesday evening and a stent by about eleven that night. I was home by Friday.

Everybody involved was excellent. I want to be clear about that, because what follows is a complaint, and it is not a complaint about anyone's competence.

Coming home

The thing nobody explains is how quiet it is.

In hospital there is a monitor. There are people who look at the monitor. If something is wrong, an alarm goes off and someone comes. Then you are discharged, and you are in your own kitchen at two in the afternoon on a Friday, and there is no monitor, and it turns out you have spent three days learning to outsource the question am I about to die to a machine.

The first night home I went upstairs to get something. Normal stairs, thirteen of them, I had gone up them maybe forty thousand times. Halfway up I noticed my heart beating hard.

Of course it was beating hard. I was walking up stairs. I know that now. I probably knew it then. It made no difference at all. I sat down on the top step and I stayed there for a long time, and I did not call out to my wife, because she had been crying on and off for three days and I could not be the reason she started again.

I sat on my own stairs at ten o'clock at night doing arithmetic about whether an ambulance would be an overreaction.

The next six weeks

I did not go up those stairs more than once a night after that. I worked out that if I took everything up in one trip I would only have to do it once.

I did not drive. Nobody had told me not to drive, as far as I remember, but nobody had told me I could, and I was not going to be the man who has a heart attack at the wheel with his kids in the back.

I did not go back to work. The letter about cardiac rehabilitation came and I did not go, because it involved exercising, on purpose, in a room, and at that point the idea of deliberately making my heart beat faster was about as appealing as deliberately putting my hand in a fire.

I lost a stone and a half without trying, mostly because I stopped doing anything.

Why I did not tell anyone

People keep asking me this, and I understand why, but the answer is boring: nobody asked, and there was no obvious moment to bring it up.

What I got, constantly, from everyone, was how lucky I had been. How quickly they had got to it. How well it had gone. How good my numbers were. All true. All meant kindly.

The cumulative effect of six weeks of being told how well it had gone is that there is no conversational opening for "I am terrified all the time". It sounds like ingratitude. It sounds like you are arguing with the facts. And there is a particular thing that happens to men my age where being frightened is not a thing you volunteer, especially not to a consultant who has a queue outside.

What changed it

At my six-week appointment the cardiologist asked me how I was and I said fine, because that is what you say.

Then he asked what I was doing with my days. I said not much. Then he asked what I had stopped doing since I came home.

That question I could not answer with "fine". I had to actually think, and the list was long, and hearing myself say it out loud was the first time I understood how far things had gone.

He did not seem surprised, which helped more than I can explain. He did not tell me I was being silly. He told me that what I was feeling was extremely common, that the hard heartbeat on the stairs was my heart doing exactly what a working heart does, and that he would be more worried about me if I stayed on the sofa than if I got out of breath. Then he told me specifically, in numbers, what I was allowed to do.

I went to cardiac rehabilitation the following week. Being made to exercise while attached to a monitor, surrounded by people in the same boat, in a room where nobody panicked when anyone's heart rate went up, undid in about four sessions what six weeks on my own had built.

The one thing I would ask for

Tell people what to expect from their own body before they go home.

Not "take it easy". "Take it easy" is what I was told and I have no criticism of the words, but I heard them as a warning that I was fragile, and I organised a month and a half of my life around that warning.

Say: your heart will beat hard when you climb stairs and that is correct and expected. Say: you will probably feel frightened the first time and here is why that happens. Say: here is the number to ring, and ringing it is not an overreaction.

Somebody could have given me that in two minutes in a hospital corridor. I am back at work now and I am fine. I still count the stairs, though. Thirteen.

My own story. I have not named the hospital or any of the staff who treated me, and my wife has read this and is happy for me to include her.