The next step is to go to the hospital for rehab, which is about fitness, education and relaxation,
apparently. This means driving the car on my own. During the first trip I again monitor my mobile phone for signal strength, in case I need help, and I watch for places to pull over if my heart stops, assuming that I have time.
I arrive at the hospital and look for the old church where rehab sessions are held which is easy to find, unlike a parking space. Eventually I park the car on pile of mud and walk to the church. Inside it looks like a village hall, it is a bit run down and cold. There are stacks of chairs and exercise equipment around the wall and people milling around
A woman (nurse?) says hello, she is enthusiastically cheerful and sympathetic. It is funny how
uncomfortable I am when strangers try to be kind, it makes me angry then guilty for being angry.
I take in the people around me, there are the obvious medical people but the rest of the crowd all seem to be twenty years older than me. I notice that some of them know each other and it becomes apparent that they have been here before. I hear people swapping stories of their second heart attacks, symptoms and surgery. It is all depressing and I do not want to be here. I decide to leave but as I get to the door a man, younger than I am arrives. I’m not sure why but that makes me feel a bit better. This is a bit like the first day a school, looking for allies.
People start lining up to have their blood pressure checked, in the queue people get to know each other. After the check we are paired off for exercising and I find myself paired up with Martin, the younger man. We chat and it seems that he has had two heart attacks and so he has been through rehab before, reassuring, not!. We have the forces in common so we swap stories while we wait to start A fitness trainer introduces herself and then explains what with happen, around the hall are a number of exercise stations. For example station A is two sets of steps for stepping up and down, station B is a pair of rebounders, station C has exercise bikes and so on.
The plan is that we exercise hard for a minute at an exercise station, after the minute we all walk slowly on the spot to recover then we move on to the next exercise station, travelling clockwise. This sounds simple but there are a number of confused people here and things go wrong very quickly. In our pairs we go to an exercise station, my pair starts on station F. The whistle blows and off we go, I am not sure how to describe the sight of twenty people who are afraid of having heart attacks pretending to exercise, it is not frenetic!
I minute later the whistle is blown and we walk slowly on the spot as we recover. The whistle is blown again and I head for my next exercise to find a white haired old lady already there, she has forgotten where she had started. This was repeated around the hall as confused people headed for exercises they liked the look of ie the sitting down ones. I am ashamed to say that I cracked up at the sight of a little old lady on the steps, she had gone up all four steps and was bobbing up and down like a demented parrot obviously considering jumping rather than walking down backwards.
This was the pattern for much of the six weeks, confused people not understanding where they were going, where they had been or what they should be doing, but eventually we work together and you can see people gaining confidence and fitness and there is more laughing.
After the exercise we each lay on a mat for a guided relaxation, An old fella (his words) drops off, this is my first introduction to meditation but I do not recognise it as such, but I do enjoy it.
Following the relaxation we get a cup of tea and a chair and sit for a lecture, we have one of these each week about drugs, nutrition, anatomy of the heart etc. The old fella (his words) manages to sleep through many of the lectures, gently snoring. I am pleased that I did not leave during that first session. As the weeks go on I settle in and gain fitness and confidence. Being able to regain confidence in my heart and not expecting to stop at any moment is a life changing thing. It would have been easy to believe that I could never return to normal and live only half a life.
I am grateful for the kindness, patience and dedication of the people who run the rehab courses.
