 
Letting Go into Heart Disease
Foreword

This book is intended to be an honest account of my journey over the past 2 years or so. I was diagnosed with Coronary Arterial Disease in the May of 2012 and since have followed a path of non-intervention, neither through operation nor drugs, but have deliberately and consciously pursued active positive lifestyle changes. It is not meant as advice on what you should do, particularly if you find yourself in a similar boat. But of course what you do with the information contained within my story is entirely up to your good self. I hope you are free enough to think about it at the very least.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family and friends all the other wonderful teachers in my life.

Introduction

What on earth do I mean by 'Letting Go into Heart Disease'? Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure, and that's OK. 'Really?' I hear you ask. Well that's where we've got down to the heart of the matter (if you'll excuse the pun) straightaway.

You see a big part of the problem is rational thinking. Cause and effect. Reasoning. Now of course we need reasoning. It's great, if you're trying to work out the dimensions of a floor tile, there's nothing better, but as a tool for living your life, it's only so-so. There's just so much more. A whole world of emotional, spiritual and who-knows-what-else type of 'needs'. That's what makes us people. Ultimately, and I'm stealing my own thunder here, it comes down to love. We need it. To give it and to receive it. And if that ain't happening then all the logic and reasoning in the world ain't gonna do ya a whole lot of good. And I guess a lot of that is letting go or at least that's one thing that can be a bit of an antidote to too much logic and too much reasoning. And like it or not we all do it, even the apparently most emotionally aware of us. Just a bit less than others. So it, like many other things is all part of a fairly rough balancing act. It doesn't need to be perfect. In fact it's better if it isn't, it'll keep you on your toes. Good enough is, well, good enough.

Well so far I've managed to give you a whole load of vague statements loaded with slightly hippy-ish words that could have come from just about anywhere. Not that that diminishes their truth or relevance, it's just that they may not have grabbed your attention fully. You may be switching off, as it were. So why is this worth reading at all if I can get this stuff elsewhere? Well you see I've applied it directly to dealing with my heart disease. Yes I have been diagnosed with heart disease. A 70% stenosis (narrowing) of the Left Anterior Descending artery (LAD) and a 50% stenosis of the Right Coronary Artery (RCA) to be precise. Although I'm not actually convinced that the diagnosis was that precise but a fractional flow reserve (FFR) reading of 0.78 was, at least at that moment in time, precise. You may not know what those numbers mean and prior to being given them, I didn't either. Suffice it to say for now that they were not good news and quite a surprise for a supposedly fairly active 47 year old with a seemingly good diet who neither drank alcohol or smoked tobacco. I prefer the 'drank alcohol' phrase rather than 'drank', as I do drink, just not alcohol. The term 'drink' being used as an abbreviation for 'alcoholic drink' makes it sound familiar and therefore more normal. But why should it not be abnormal to poison oneself? Anyway I'm off at a tangent here. Why am I writing this or rather, more importantly to yourself, why should you be reading this? Well as I say it's my story. It's a journal if you like although not recorded as such, of my attempts to free myself of heart disease or at least the worst effects and risks of the same without using pharmaceuticals.

Why write this? Who is this guy anyway? I guess you'd ask yourself those questions. Do I care about him and do I care what he has to say? Well only you can answer the last ones. I think I'm writing this to try and make some money in a positive way, i.e. by helping to inspire others to think for themselves, to be brutally honest, but I do sincerely hope to impart some useful information too, particularly to anyone considering or already following a similar path. And to do it in a way that doesn't cause me more angst and literally, heart-ache. So it should be fairly free flowing and rambling. Great if you like that sort of stuff. If you're here as a result of over-rationalising your life then you might hate it. Sorry. Hopefully some nice side effects of my writing this are; that you get better, healthier and happier, but of course no guarantees, no promises, i.e. no lawsuits please. That would benefit everyone, especially you. More so than the few quid or whatever you may have paid to read this. So you could well be up on the deal here, but then hopefully so will I and everyone's happy. Well we would be anyway and we're the main players here. The drug companies and doctors will all do very well nicely for themselves financially at least regardless of whether we live or die. Ultimately, my feeling is that ultimately we must take responsibility for our own health and not expect others, i.e. doctors or drug companies to do it for us. They simply can't provide the same degree of care that an individual can for his or herself. I don't really like generalising across many people and especially as some doctors may genuinely care but the leaders of pharmaceutical companies don't even know our names. Nor I theirs I suppose. It would be difficult for us to be any more than a statistic to them I reckon. Not very inspiring.

Anyway, this is my story so far and if you find yourself in a similar position to that which I did or you're still in it now, it might be useful to you at least if nothing else to know that you are not alone. So how did all this start?

Chapter 1 - The Beginning

So where do I start? Well my first thought was to start with my diagnosis, in the Spring of 2012, but did the disease really start there? Of course not. Heart Disease is one of the main chronic diseases of the Western world. That simple sentence that is so commonplace you may not even bother to look at it again or even examine it at all but it says so very much. OK, so heart disease is a chronic disease. A really bad one? Well yes it certainly can be, but that's not what chronic means. Medically, chronic means 'that lasts a long time'. But I prefer a possibly older or different meaning in that it builds up over time. It's not like Cholera or Tuberculosis or Yellow Fever. You're not actually fine on Tuesday and have Heart Disease on Thursday. It just doesn't work like that. You might get your diagnosis on Thursday but you started getting heart disease decades ago, quite probably in your teens. When you went off on drinking binges with your mates or ate tons of sweets and cakes at that party, that's when you started getting heart disease. Did you wake up the next day and say, 'Oh I've got a little bit of heart disease now. I bet I'll regret that when I'm 55.'? Chances are you didn't, but it was there nonetheless. Those pizzas, steaks and desserts have slowly slowly been blocking up your arteries. More for some than others but essentially we are all subject to the same process. 'Ah, it's just diet' you say. No, but it has to be in the mix of causes somewhere. You are what you eat and all that. That said, don't just take all these familiar phrases as gospel. Some if it is just rubbish perpetuated by people furthering their own interests in my opinion. I understand the dietary recommendations in the US have strong links with the farming lobby, so question what you read and hear, including this book. But let's not go down the conspiracy theory route. People looking after themselves should not surprise us. It is one of the basic mechanics of survival.

So is this the usual, "eat a bit less cake, cut down on your sugar type thing? Do a bit of exercise? Keep fit?" If you want it to be, you could probably read that but it's not what I'm saying. If we go back to that simple sentence above. Why the Western world? Why not China and Cambodia? Well the more independent research (and there seems to be precious little of that these days) suggests that the way we in the West live is killing us early compared to those countries, although of course they are now moving towards a western lifestyle and starting to get our western diseases too! I personally think the weather has something to do with it. I'm writing this paragraph in the Spring of 2013 in England. We've had a long cold winter even by our standards. But anyway there's no research I've come across on weather and heart disease so that's just my theory and is likely to stay that way. There's not much money in weather research (although given our cultural predisposition to discuss it ad nauseum, I might look out for some). Anyway, that heart disease is more prevalent in the West shows me anyway that it is somehow systemic. Our diets, our lifestyles and the way our society works (or doesn't work) or something distinct to us must be at least partially to blame. Superficially we have 'nice cars and houses' or at least we can reasonably aspire to them but we lose heart and soul. We feel disconnected, sad, lonely and consequently, it appears, ill. So that's not so good is it?

I'm breaking off here for a joke. A man goes to the doctors wearing nothing but clingfilm underpants. The doctor says, 'Well I can clearly see you're nuts'. (Thanks to Tommy Cooper). I wanted to get back on to the hippy stuff at least briefly. That was me being light-hearted. Often our language gives us clues. Sometimes it doesn't. Heartburn seems a misleading term for indigestion to me. But anyway being light-hearted sometimes is good. So even in that example, we can point to 'balance'. Another 'hippy' word? Phew, I'm back on track.

So this systemic failure thing. The Western world construct. Is it the profit motive? Could be. I think it's more to do with caring. One of the things people anecdotally say with really serious illnesses is that it makes a difference that someone cares about us. It makes the pain bearable. Love is the drug as Bryan Ferry would say. Love is better than drugs in so many ways, so why are we not told this? Why do we (including seemingly many doctors) not act like this? I recall reports of orphaned babies in a war zone. The US medical teams came in with all the latest equipment and monitored them to keep the babies healthy and alive but there were simply more orphaned babies than equipment to look after them so the local peasants took in the 'excess' babies. Those babies with the peasants, although in with the 'less hygienic' animals, dirt and diseases but being loved and cuddled by other people had a far better survival rate (of course!). So why do we persist in letting a purely mechanical model direct our thinking while we discount softer, gentler, more human ways? Well I don't know. What did you expect, the answer to everything? Perhaps we're back to pharmaceuticals and the belief in the magic bullet, but as I said I'm just sharing my experiences of trying to reverse my heart disease with lifestyle, love and understanding rather than drugs. If I get any good ideas about anything else I'll be sure to let you know. I'm on about my fourth edit here and it occurred to me that love needs to include self-love. Possibly that's the most important kind. We need to be kind to ourselves. Gentle with ourselves. I was certainly a major culprit in putting pressure on myself. A book tip here. The wonderful 'There is Nothing Wrong with You' by Cheri Huber. An absolute gem on self-love and an easy read to boot! Back to turning the tide on the mechanical model of health. In the UK, we have Macmillan nurses now and hospices have been around a good time. I have a friend who works in one and another taking training as a death doula (to help people comes to terms with their own imminent deaths), so things are showing signs of hope but the tide may well be against it at the moment. Facebook may now be a real weapon against corporate greed, although can work for it too. Corporate greed really does support this breakup of community-style social setup in the West. I've worked for them. They can be insidious. Perhaps they pretend to care or even genuinely believe that they do. It might be better if they didn't. It might be better if they just said we don't give a damn. We want your money and we spend our time trying to get more of it. For that is ultimately the truth in my opinion. Sure it's laced with good and noble intentions at time but these always fall into second place behind the money.

I've strayed haven't I? The beginning, before my diagnosis. I ate meals advertised by corporates delivered via supermarkets in the name of convenience that had enough fat and sugar so that my kids would like the taste and hence eat them too. Superficially, it gives the family more time of course. To do what exactly? Well, work more so we have more money to spend on corporate products. Hmmm. Watch television more. Sure, it's better than working down the mines. They ate poor quality foods anyway most likely. Ah, food production. There's an issue. Organic, well that may have fallen away of late because during a recession we often feel we can't afford it. We can't afford to be healthy? 'I'd rather put some chemicals in my body, although I'm not really sure of their long-term effect than go without my Xbox or satellite TV'. Hmmm, again. Probably a case of us wanting 'bread and circuses' (Voltaire).

Then there's my emotional upbringing. Oh boy. It was Larkin who wrote ' They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad'? I don't believe my parents were particularly unemotional, more a product of their time. The war generation. We are lucky to be alive. That's so true in so many ways. I have certainly had my share of self-esteem issues. I maybe sort of bipolar on that one, but I suspect that's what good self-esteem does; balances out the highs and lows. I'm getting better and that's part of my journey so far. It may be that we all have some issues to deal with. I tend to believe that's true. My family may be no worse than yours it may be better. I don't know. They all have issues of some sort I dare say. But the point is emotional stuff affects your heart, well your whole body really. I was going to focus on the heart then but I stopped. Everything is connected. OK maybe that's a Buddhist concept, but it probably pops up elsewhere in other philosophies and religions too.

So the beginning is lost in time somewhere and has a gradual, imperceptible start.

Chapter 2 - The Diagnosis

So, we know it started a long time ago but the realisation, the real realisation, occurred as a result of tests. I knew something was wrong years ago. I went to the GP to tell him so. He ordered a static ECG. This has different names in different countries but it's the one where they lay you down, stick about a dozen electrodes to you and measure electrical activity in your heart. Or at least that's my take on it. I should say that I'm not a doctor. You knew that but I thought I'd say it and of course I'm not offering advice. Just a story and a sharing of my experiences. These static ECGs are apparently useful in diagnosing some conditions but pretty poor at showing blocked or clogged arteries, which to my understanding is the main game. So that was fairly useless then. In fact, worse than useless. It gave me a false sense of security. 'You're fine. Nothing to worry about.' I was told. Hogwash, to coin a phrase.

So I'd had this sort of pressure in a spot in my chest on my left side, 3 or 4 ribs down from the top. Worse after I had done exercise or was doing some physical activity. That to me said 'heart', or maybe 'lungs'. Now since then I've had some acupuncture and there I was informed that in that system of healing, heart and lungs were deeply connected. We tend to have a siloed, segregated approach in Western thought about the body. If one organ is having trouble, then it's the only one. But of course, in a deeply interconnected system like the human body, that simply cannot be true.

Another aside here. The brain is supposedly the most important organ but that comes from our thoughts. Does the heart feel it is the most important? Maybe. Aren't these guys all meant to be working together? That makes me a bit suspicious of thought and its creator the brain. Thinking is supposedly a Western disease. Animals don't think to our level as far as I know and they suffer far less from stress type diseases. They get stress in small cages not from interacting with the world, but outside of that they just get on with life on a daily basis. Maybe we should do the same. Maybe being in our 'cages', i.e. our offices and our houses is what causes us stress. Being outdoors in nature is well known for reducing it, so I guess that makes sense.

Anyway together with this sort of pressure area, what tipped me over the edge to get back to the GP were two dizzy spells. I had never had a dizzy spell in my life, apart from being alcohol-induced in my late teens/early twenties. The first recent dizzy spell when I was skiing. It could be put down to altitude perhaps although I hadn't had altitude sickness at that resort or anywhere else before. I felt awful, truly awful. I became hot and nauseous very quickly. To some people that may not be much but to me, as I say, it had never happened before. Then a couple of months later I had another. This was worse. It came when I was just being at home after a big day organising the house and family to go on a trip to Australia and Japan. I woke the next day at around 6am and the room would not stop spinning. Again, I had never had this before. I closed my eyes and dozed but every time I opened my eyes I could not get my vision stable. This lasted over five hours. I prayed that I would get through the trip alive and vowed to see the doctor when I got back. I did all that and was referred, somewhat reluctantly perhaps, to the chest pain clinic by a GP.

I saw a young heart specialist there. She seemed nice and quite aware of things. Because of the serious nature of my symptoms (I had struggled to walk the twenty minutes to the hospital), they skipped the usual next step, the treadmill test and went straight to an angiogram. I say they did that. They recommended that. It is the patient's right to accept or refuse those recommendations. I accepted as I was concerned and after the visit possibly even more so. So a few weeks went by with my anxiety levels fairly high, and I started to read.

I read voraciously. I like to be fully informed particularly on medical and health matters, especially concerning myself, but when my wife was pregnant, I think I could have had a good chance of passing the theory part of a midwifery exam. I tend to do that, for good or bad I don't really know. It certainly can annoy the doctors at times, especially if I question them on their opinion of the latest research when I presented it to them. There's a Seinfeld routine where he talks about drug adverts. Anyway, he suggests drug companies want us a dumb consumers just doing as we are told. Some doctors do seem to want this, probably as they are over stretched and under resourced. Others are much more discursive if that's the right word. I mean they are prepared to discuss and let the patient decide. Good on them! Although it seems many people don't want responsibility for their health and are happy to hand it over to anyone in a white coat. Others seem to hand their whole life over to someone else. Religions seem to attract these people. Anyway, I wanted to be informed so I read. Books, healing, websites, anything. If it had the word 'heart' in the title I was there. That's how I'm hoping this will sell. It's just another viewpoint on the matter but not one that is easily heard. So along came the angiogram or cardiograph or whatever it's called where you are.

Essentially, they shove some radioactive dye in your heart and x-ray it getting pumped around to see what's going on. Now, a couple of things here. Shoving radioactivity into a vital organ. Would that be something you'd recommend to people as a general rule? No, clearly. So already we've taken a vital organ that is ailing and made it worse. How much worse? Who knows? But the official view is that it's worth the risk. What's the unofficial view then? I don't know or at least I didn't get to that before time for my test came along. I did at some point early on come across the marvellous Dr.Dean Ornish. Funny name. Like the Amish or Hamish or something. Anyway he talks about another test that shows the same thing without being so invasive. Possibly an MRI, I believe. We have this massive blight in our country of people dying left and right from heart attacks which if not totally preventable are at the very least substantially delayable. Not sure many people would say, 'Oh if only my heart attack had come along sooner.' I say not preventable just because something has to get us in the end. We can't go on forever. But we have not invested in non-invasive heart test machines. About time we did I say.

Bang! In my face, my mortality. There's one of the things which comes along with serious illness. I guess it comes with age too and doubly so with both. Do we come to terms with mortality well? Possibly not. I saw a nice flyer for some workshop or other once. I had it in my car for ages. It was about death and it suggested that death in the West was seen as unfortunate at best but largely as a failure. Of course it is a natural part of the cycle of life but we don't really treat as such. Or at least I haven't really and I don't know any others who really have, and that's me who has been involved in Buddhism on and off for years. Religions at least get into a bit of death. In fact, it's one of their biggest sellers. That and schooling, well in Australia at least. Pretty much need to be in a Church school there if you want decent grades. God knows what it's really like but the stories aren't all that great, considering the decades of seemingly systemic child abuse that went on.

So, there am I on the operating slab. On the table. Go in. Get undressed. Stick on the ridiculous gown and sign some form. Thankfully I'd read all the stuff that was on the form previously. Otherwise if you wanted to read it and discuss it, you would have got to see it for the first time that very day. Waiting lists in the UK can be horrendous. You may need a perpetual calendar. So plenty of time to warn me upfront of what I needed to sign but that didn't happen. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. Anyway, as I understood it the surgeon could pop a stent in if they came across any blockage as they had opened you up anyway. It would save a second operation to put the stent in and save another dose of radiation. This made some sort of sense, but the Brighton NHS trust or whoever runs things there decided they wouldn't do that unless it was an emergency. I suspect it made the stats look better that way but I don't know. On the upside I did get more time before the operation to put in a stent to do research and as it turned out to get another opinion.

So anyway, back on the slab for the first time. I'm wheeled in on a trolley to an enormous cold room. And I mean enormous. I can't visualise dimensions well but perhaps 30 metres by 20 metres. Huge it seemed. There were about 10 to 20 people in there it seemed. OK more like 10 than 20, and some modern music playing. Someone's iPod maybe. Quite odd. I shook like a leaf. Really. All over. Limbs oscillating perhaps an inch or more either side of a centre point creating such a movement in my knees and elbows. I almost needed strapping down. They shaved me. I had done this already but the instructions weren't clear and I shaved the wrong point. Shave your groin I was told. It wasn't there that needed shaving. It was the front of my leg at the top. Anyway the radioactive stuff goes in. I get a hot flush, feel pretty off and a couple of minutes later I'm done. The heart surgeon started to get unprepped as it were. Packing up to leave. I felt awkward but I stopped him. 'Er...did it show anything? Was there any blockage at all'. 'Narrowing' he corrected me bruskly. Fine, it's good to be accurate but I can't help feeling I had an old school slightly arrogant pedant on my hands. Great just what I needed in my hour of distress, a semantics lesson. 'Oh yes', he informed me brutally and quite cheerfully, 'about 70% narrowing of the LAD and 50% of the RCA. You'll need a stent'. Thankfully I at least knew what the terms meant. LAD and RCA are two of the three arteries in the heart. The other one, the circumference, was clear so something to be grateful for then. The nice crew, and they were nice, talking me down to get me to stop shivering and shaking when I was on the slab, had a few little jokes with me as I was wheeled out and went back to the relative normality of the hospital ward. There I was wired up to a few machines. Had some tests done for a few hours, whilst I chatted to my wife and tried to come to terms with the news. Borderline by-pass was 70% according to my reading. 'This is serious' was about all I could process. Whilst outwardly I was saying all the right things. 'Well at least I'm lucky they found it now' and the like. I couldn't help feeling cheated by the GP who had let me go on for four years, letting it get worse because he, and the system I suppose, didn't really take me seriously or couldn't be bothered to find out. More likely I was just down the list in priorities. 'Would I mind please going away while we deal with people with more noisy and apparent illnesses'. Thanks guys. You know what, I don't feel that lucky right now.

Chapter 3 - The Tools I Use(d)

So my first port of call was the internet. Where else does one go these days? The information is by its very nature of immediate publishing, generally far more up to date than the doctors' information as they probably don't have much spare time or the drive to read it. I can't blame them. After a day at work who wants to come home and read about it some more? But if you have a heart problem, your motivation is high, very high.

The first book that grabbed my attention was Dr.Dean Ornish, 'Reversing Heart Disease' or some such. Reversing? Hang about that runs completely contradictory to what all of my doctors have told me. Now I know I'm a bit conspiracy theory-ist on a few things. It's probably my partly cynical and untrustworthy nature coming through but then again, I do believe in miracles too. I believe people, all people, are capable of extraordinary things. Tales abound of people who refuse to believe the accepted norm and are proven to be correct despite people calling them fools. I suppose tales abound of fools as well. Maybe I just don't listen to those ones so much! Anyway, I found myself buying a copy of Dean Ornish's book and pouring over it. Now, I should also say I'm a believer in this wonderful organism's (and all organisms pretty much) ability to heal itself. That's how humans have adapted and survived so well. Rest and the body will heal itself. This is where I come to one of those dreadful things that maybe we can call 'wordisms'. Do you know the things, very popular with hippy types, where they pull apart a word or invent a word and its really awful? Well, I loathe them but having just created one myself (i.e., wordism, so sorry), I'll now use another, but do watch out for them, they're horrid! Anyway, the one I like is 'dis-ease', implying that illness is due to a person not being at ease. And really, if we are at ease, with ourselves, our environment, the people around us, the body should be able to heal itself. Does this cure everything? Well, the lack of ease may well be the root cause of all illness. That in itself is a major thing and not at all an accepted view in the West, or at least I didn't live as if that was true and nor it appears to me do many other people. Now when I say West, I think I actually mean Anglo-Saxon, which is actually a fairly limited cultural group but its influence is very pervasive and seemingly still growing. It could just be the deferred gratification model. It has been so successful in the past, e.g. in the Victorian Empire-building years that it got exported to far-flung places, chiefly USA and Australia/New Zealand I think. But its roots are quite limited geographically to the North-West corner of Europe. I'm not sure you could include the Dutch, and almost certainly not the French, but it got to America, a land of opportunity and it seems to work in some way there, rightly or wrongly. It has however created a rather skewed society, a real mixed bag. We are somehow getting to grips with it and it's odd ways. Community seems to be a big casualty of right-wing conservative politics and policies, and 'community' is really another way of saying 'the needs of all the people' to me. So society now looks after itself rather than the people of which it is constituted. Very odd. The asylum has taken over the asylum, rather than the lunatics. So with that, the ease and well-being of people is being sacrificed for the greater good of, well, no-one (i.e. the 'system'). Sure, some people are doing very well financially but at the expense of almost every other aspect of their lives. We are the richest sick people that ever almost lived. 'Almost lived' because a full life simply is not like the ones most of these rich people have, and often I suspect they know it full well, oddly enough. They just use strange mechanisms to get their needs met. Ah, now so why are we so poor at getting our needs met? Because we live in a society that does not value our individual needs. It cares not a jot. Remember the asylum has over taken the asylum. The asylum has different needs to that of its inmates (us!). Its needs order, calm, regularity, predictability, cleanliness and so on. Do these sound like the world of a human being? No, not at all, not in the slightest. I give you a person. You see apparent chaos, an utter mess, a wonderful loving dream-filled, foolish, misguided, all-over-the-place, trying to get itself together, trying new things, forgetting to finish old things, mess. Beautiful, creative, capable but a mess. Do these two competing sets of needs and ways of being coincide? No, of course not. All the while people are prepared to accept and be trained in society's needs, society is happy, but what happens? We created sick people. The individuals are repressed, coerced and fooled into society's needs but on the rough end of the deal are people, most importantly (to me anyway) me! So I got overruled. Taught that what I needed and wanted was less important. In fact not important at all. I am treated as if I am bad for wanting such things, for trying to mess up the order of the asylum. The asylum must be kept in order at any cost. I am expendable, in 'their' eyes. Who are 'they'? They are those who uphold the system, which is pretty much everyone. So to get well I must break ranks? Yes, yes, and yes again. Doesn't sound easy. No, it's not. One has to forego some of the support ones gets from the system and yes it does very much try to help those who help it. It rewards its supporters financially and in other ways.

So how does all this come from the title of a book? Well, because 'Reversing Heart Disease' goes against the norm, and to be fair, there is evidence that the asylum is paying attention a little and allowing a bit more freedom, but only round the edges to those who still play nicely but it's a start. Of course now, everyone with Heart Disease would like to reverse it presumably, but we've said above it's not easy to buck the trend. The asylum presents a model whereby the magicians of our age, some doctors and what seems like pretty much the whole pharmaceutical/medical industry (it is massive, by the way) will make a load of money and give you some pills and an operation and you will go away and not be messy any more. You might function better for a while before you're back in a few years for a bit more. Just what businesses like, repeat business. That's how successful parasitic businesses work. Hook you in on some promises, give you some short-term gain then you can't get out and you're then entirely dependent upon them. Now consider a heroin-dealer. Draw any parallels? Oops that's too scary, 'I'm not going there' you say. Fine you don't have to but just be prepared because when you start challenging accepted ideas it gets kind of catchy and you start seeing wrong things in a lot of places. I see that as good because only then can we improve them but if you've got heart disease you are not always in a mood to take on the world. In part that's how you got here. So hence the title of this book, "Letting Go into Heart Disease". Let go of your old ideas and old patterns of behaviour. See what is useful and keep only that. Not easy but then the alternatives may not be that pleasant either.

Poor old Dean Ornish. He's waiting in the wings here. I've mentioned him a few times but keep going off at tangents. Hopefully they help and hopefully I circle back (sorry, an Americanism) to where we left. Now Ornish is American and Californian at that so you'd expect all that goes with that. I'm used to reading American books and their way of writing and doing things. That said, I'm probably writing in a more American style here. Not my usual style but hey-ho, don't knock it if it works. America must be the most confident culture on earth or something like that. They took our capable but meek Protestantism and decided to be confident. They don't care if they are completely wrong, they get back up and keep going with the same level of confidence. Amazing! Sure I'm generalising over 275 million people so it's nonsense I know but on some level its stereotypically true if nothing else. Anyway, the lovely Dr.Ornish got into yoga and meditation and that sort of hippy stuff to help himself with the stress of getting through medical college. I suppose those lessons stayed with him. Look, I'll break off again here. Do some good yoga. Do some good meditation. Not all teachers are good. Some aren't but it's rare to find a really bad one. When you do it, when you relax deliberately anywhere, on holiday, on a beach, watching a movie even or reading a book, you feel better. Headaches and other pains lessen. It's obvious. It works. On some level I'd be surprised if not everyone knew that. And I mean 'know' it not in the academic sense but in the feeling it sense. It feels better. I feel better. And that's what health is really. Feeling better. If I feel better I am healthier generally although heart disease can unfortunately be an exception here. You can apparently feel good but then die the next day. I'd question how truly well people felt and how truly at ease they were but it's what I have been told and read so it may well be true. But the more I feel better the healthier I will be. It's a positive cycle, rather than the vicious one. How telling that we have a common phrase 'vicious cycle' but not a common positive opposite. Anyway, health is a lack of dis-ease or better, the presence of ease. The more continuous and present the ease, the healthier we are. Yoga and meditation promote ease. Throw in a good diet and some moderate exercise and you're pretty much there. Ornish did much more than that but in a nutshell that's it. The piece for me that gels it together is the emotional side. Now for whatever reason, the heart is seen as the seat of the emotions in the body. You could as easily choose the gut probably as long as you get to a real 'physical sensation' you can feel rather than a thought, it doesn't matter much to me.

So Ornish put these elements together and tried it out. He took some volunteers who were all in a mess with their hearts. Some had already had heart attacks, some were awaiting by-passes, all that sort of serious stuff. These were people on the edge, all of them I think more screwed up than I was physically and it appears most of them were screwed up personally, e.g. emotionally as well. That is, all they could do pretty much was their jobs so the asylum was OK. As soon as their ability to work fell away, the asylum takes note. How often is it then that we define ill-health by not being able to work? Are you doing what you want or what the asylum allows you to do? I should say the whole 'asylum' metaphor is my thing. I don't want to tar poor Doc Ornish with my stuff. If he agrees then fine but he seems to be able to straddle the medical fence a bit, thankfully as he is a doctor. I'm not qualified in that way. And guess what? The patients in his study got better. Improvement rates in the 80-90% in a genuine scientific study over a number of years. If you want more details then read the book. I can't précis the entire book. All I can do is recommend it. It seems the most balanced of all the heart books, and I think balance is important. Getting rid of the heart disease is probably the most important thing you can do or at least getting it under control to reduce its impact upon your life. Oh and by the way, you'll be much more sensitive to heart attacks or heart issues occurring in entertainment etc. I saw a play last night that had a heart attack in it. Although Abigail's Party is a really good comedy, I struggled to laugh from then on. Thankfully it was near the end of the show. Now one thing in Ornish's book that has hardly appeared anywhere else is support. I'm going to quickly mention it before I pause here just to remind you and myself that it is vital. The better the support, the better for you. I mean get good support. Pay for it if you have to. You may well need to.

I'm giving support its own paragraph because it's so important. I've found mine largely from a couple of therapists; one acupuncturist and one emotional healer for want of a better description. Also my art group helps a good deal. My family support me but I also support them so it doesn't feel like 'extra' support even though I require much more than I usually received, and I needed extra support. Still do. I need more. More and more. I'm not sure I could ever get enough. Maybe that's just me but Dean Ornish gave his patients tons of support and when you may be going against the grain of the medical establishment, at least a little, it's dead handy having someone to talk to, providing a different perspective. Unfortunately, for good or bad the medical profession seems to operate mainly on fear in my opinion. I suppose that's not surprising because how does one become a doctor? By studying and doing very well at exams. How do exams work? Are they an all round assessment of your skills at helping people to heal themselves? Clearly not. They are fear-ridden pressure tests. Those who operate well in a climate of fear can do well. So people wishing to be doctors who cannot operate in such a climate are filtered out. Shame. So we can end up with some fearful doctors although that situation appears to be changing for the better in recent years. A patient is given an informed choice supposedly. Have you been in that situation and wondered what the doctor would recommend you do? I don't think I have. Without directly saying it they seem to frequently imply 'take the drugs', 'have the operation, you'd be fool to yourself not to'. If they don't say that and you choose to blame them for your decision then they want the might of the pharmaceuticals behind them. They wouldn't back the doctors so readily if they said 'don't take the drugs. Find a healthy natural way through. You'll feel much better in the long run', it is simply not in the drug companies' interest in terms of profit.

Anyway, I recommend you read Ornish and then do what you will. He also has a website with an online community. It should be a source of support. I wish it were more so for me but that's as much my fault as its. I don't go on it very often but I'm sure some people do. I'd like there to be a local at least UK based natural healing circle or some such but I don't want to set it up. Perhaps I'll put it out there and see if anyone wants to do it. Should be do-able. OK maybe I will one day.
Chapter 4 - Diet

Or more accurately, what you eat. As soon as we see the word diet we think 'restriction', 'not allowed', 'tasteless and boring'. Well, yes it can be all of those things but the recommendation is to approach it from another way. Choosing how you fuel yourself, or choosing how healthy you want to be. The taste monster is an addictive beast. Essentially taste buds are comparators. They tell us this item is sweeter, more sour, saltier etc than the last. After eating cake, a cup of sweet tea does not seem as sweet as when we have the tea after a savoury dish. Get used to savoury dishes if you're going down this road. So the Ornish/Esseltyn approach (although they differ slightly) is cut out the fat. (I'll get onto Esseltyn a bit more later). Cholesterol is made from fat, therefore less fat means less cholesterol. No more blocking up arteries and in time the narrowed arteries will gradually remodel themselves flowing around the slowly shrinking plaque. That's the theory. Esseltyn is the stricter of the two in my book. No added fat at all. That's it. If its fried or had oil added anywhere don't eat it. Also avoid higher fat natural foods like avocado, nuts and seeds. Avoid processed foods is another one, but before we get drawn down the 'you can't eat this' route we need to stop. It's not so much about avoiding bad stuff more about getting the good stuff. Apart from learnt and acquired tastes, why would we want to eat food that is unhealthy? A simple sane and rational choice is to eat the food that makes you the healthiest and gives you the most energy. Otherwise we are choosing to be ill. A strange choice. But that is what the overwhelming majority of the West including myself for many years, chooses to do. We throw in the odd salad and think that we are eating well. Wake up and smell the coffee, it ain't true! Now I have been to many a restaurant with my new natural food eyes opened and there is not a healthy meal on the menu. I have been into food shops where the only truly healthy item is the bottle of water and that may have some strange stuff in it too.

So choosing healthy foods. Essentially mostly raw, mostly vegan, mostly wholefood. That is the challenge. Put all that good stuff in, make a reasonable balance of vegetables, proteins, grains etc and avoid too much sugary stuff including fruit. Oops there's my Achilles Heel, fruit. I have to say I have been trying all this stuff not in a house shared with vegans but with three people two of whom are meat-eaters and two of whom are children (but not the same two - make a Venn diagram). So there is an abundance of tempting tasting foods and plenty of 'nearly' good food to help me miss the target! But, it's not a perfect world so on we go.

Perhaps if I go through what I eat typically then you'll see where I'm coming from and the myriad of decisions that need to be made. Well breakfast for the past year or so, wasn't. i.e. I have been trying to fast for the first and last couple of hours of the day. I find it quite easy for the first couple of hours. I have no solid food before lunchtime, or at least 11 o'clock anyway. So this isn't an Ornish/Esseltyn thing, at least I didn't get it from their books. It came from Kris Carr to me. Fasting is generally contra-indicated for heart conditions but somehow it seems to stick with me. That said, I'm now thinking that the last couple of occasions when I have had breakfast for a week, being skiing and a week at Embercombe, I generally felt really good. Now that could have been from the exercise, the community feeling, the relaxed atmosphere, the connection with people, so hard to tell. But even then I never ate as the first thing I did. I would always do some exercise and/or some meditation. I'm a big fan of meditation in case you hadn't guessed by now. So no breakfast for me but if you do and you probably do then I'll tell you about my brunch as it's essentially a late breakfast.

The first meal of the day has revolved around fresh vegetables and oats, with some freshly ground linseed (or flaxseed as it is also called). The linseed provides omega-3 and possibly 6 as well. It doesn't keep so needs fresh grinding. It doesn't grind in many things so I have a special brass Turkish linseed/cumin grinder. It cost about ten pounds on eBay. Coffee grinders and pestle and mortars, and sharp knives didn't work. It doesn't cope with being heated so don't cook it either. It's very temperamental stuff. It doesn't like daylight either. I keep my seeds in the fridge and grind them every (or most) mornings. The oats have tended to be raw (rolled or jumbo) in Summer and cooked with water to make porridge in Winter. When I remember I cook oat groats (they are the 'oats you get before they are crushed' bit). These seem even more wholesome but take longer to cook (30 mins) and can be hard to digest. I have a fairly sensitive stomach so too much fibre is the tipping point in my diet. If I eat what I 'ought' to I can't quite cope with the fibrous nature. Digestion takes a lot of resource from the body so with a heart issue, I can little afford to be giving too much resource away so I have to walk that line. It's important then not to overeat. Reminds me of the Buteyko principles where its suggested we tend to over breathe, over eat and over sleep. Buteyko has techniques to reduce these things. For me, get some meditation in as well as that will support you in all things, including regulating these tendencies.

Anyway back to the diet. The morning veggies have for a long time been blended greens for me. Leafy greens, cucumber, pretty much anything green. With Winter upon me now and some digestive challenges (the odd tummy upset), I tend to be going for a raw pepper, some tomatoes maybe (OK not green), some cucumber or any other green veg that I can eat straight from the fridge. I gave green juicing a go for a couple of days. This gave me a really strong stomach cramp that lasted for 6 or 7 hours so I pulled back from that swiftly. Clearly I need to moderate my approach to green juice. Having been on blended green veg for months I thought green juice would be easy. Just goes to show doesn't it?

Lunch tends to be easier. A salad for lunch is not very hard to find but remember just because it's called a salad doesn't mean it's healthy. First, lose the regular dressing. Vinaigrette, Mayo, Olive Oil, sorry. Lemon or Lime juice are what I have. Ideally freshly squeezed. Where does one get the time to do all this food preparation? Good point. Time is a big factor in how much we can do. We can get very used to convenience. This is my latest bug-bear (where does that phrase come from?). Convenience almost certainly means a loss of control of your food intake. 'Normal' compromises are I'm afraid generally not natural. If the food is processed, you're probably eating more sugar, more salt or more fat (and chemicals) than nature intended that food to have. We have evolved to eat what nature has provided so when we start changing that, it is almost certainly not good for us. My son is chomping on a bag of crisps behind me as I write. They are a definite no-no and a real convenience food in my previous life. I try to educate my children on healthy choices but I'm not sure I'm doing so well. Unless my wife becomes convinced of the benefits of this diet, I will be unlikely to win that battle. But anyway, make sure the salad is a real salad.

Now I've got this far without raising the most common question I get asked, 'What about the protein?' It's a good if slightly misguided question in my view. So much of what we hold to be true about food may simply not be true. 'Breakfast is the most important meal', maybe not. 'You need plenty of protein', maybe not. 'Milk is good for you', hmmm, and so on. Frankly, question everything, especially what I am saying! Anyway, I must answer the protein question as it always gets asked. Beans, beans, beans. Now that is a quote from someone but I can't recall who. Eat a lot of beans, or more accurately legumes. Beans come in many different types (not just baked ones) and peas are a good source too. Back to more fibre again. On this diet you will not lack fibre. I try to have them not processed but this is a bit of a weak spot for me. I think I have had bean poisoning a couple of times. Many types of dried bean need soaking and pre-cooking it seems. If I leave this out, sometimes I have been caught and the stomach cramps were debilitating to say the least. Fermented soy beans, like tempeh are apparently good. The taste is quite an acquired one and I am about half way down that road I think. But I eat plenty of tofu as well but watch for the fat content on these, some are up around the 15% mark. I go for the 'Clear Spot' brand usually which is around 4% I think. Beans I often have tinned now. Organic if possible with no added salt etc. They are processed but until I get my dried beans cooking sorted that will have to do. I also eat the occasional oily fish. I aim for maybe once a fortnight for about 100g of wild salmon (but often go over that I'm afraid and diet is probably where I rate myself best of the various factors that are said to contribute to heart disease). I note here that Ornish and Esseltyn both are strictly vegan in their suggested diets so the fish is my thing.

What else can go for lunch? Well we start to get into meals that will do for dinner (or whatever you call an evening meal). So wholewheat pasta, brown rice (real brown rice not the coloured stuff) are staples but remember, let the veggies be the largest ingredient. Often we allow the grain to be the largest (or even the protein, e.g. meat) but we are vegan here, well almost, and my aim is to eat mainly veggies.

Ok a couple of diversions here. First the 'how' and second the 'sugar v fat' debate. How. How do I change what I eat? Well what's your motivation? Mine is to stay alive. That for me works. I have had a serious health scare and decided to do something about it and as naturally as possible. Why I spend hours choosing to sit in front of a screen writing this beats me. It doesn't feel very natural! But as I said at the outset, I want to help and to find a way of making a living that I enjoy. You'd think I would learn to type as well wouldn't you, but that hasn't happened either. So how to change? I went pretty much cold turkey as it were. I had already been a vegetarian previously on moral grounds but had lapsed for 6 or 7 years and quite liked well-cooked tasty veggie meals not that I ate a good deal of them. Previously I was pretty much on a cheese diet. I was better off with the meat probably. Anyway the change or at least the decision to change was fairly easy for me. I imagine if I presented that choice and the evidence here to 100 people, less than 5 would fully adopt it. Just a guess but everything I have heard and seen suggests people are just not prepared to do it. They would rather take a pill and take less drastic measures. Who's to say they are wrong? But that's not my choice. So it has taken me a couple of years to adjust and I am continually doing so and of course adapting to circumstance. When I had stomach cramps, the high fibre diet had to step back for a while so a few softer, refined products were allowed in for a week or so until things settled down. I am always coming across items that people recommend in various articles. Blueberries are great for something, tomatoes for something else, 'avoid this, eat that' there is no shortage of it out there. About the only things I have never seen anyone suggest you should not eat is leafy greens, although some of the meat adverts in the UK suggest you might as well not bother because supposedly you need to eat some huge amount to get something or other in equal quantity to meat. Iron I think is the mineral they go on about. This type of advertising makes me quite angry. It falls into general acceptedness so that meat becomes normal, and spinach becomes odd and people live their lives based on this information. All done so farmers don't have to change what they do in my opinion. One could be forgiven for considering them as stuck-in-the-mud, mentally lazy and deficient, but I would never stoop to that! OK the meat and dairy industries are not my favourites as you can tell.

Ornish and Esseltyn provide tons of recipes in their books. I don't really follow them. That's just me I'm not a good recipe follower. I've never quite got the right ingredients, and as far as I can tell, it's an awful lot of salads, soups and the like. What I eat anyway. My soups are quite experimental, i.e. whatever veggies I've got left at the end of the week, particularly as I have a weekly organic veg-box delivered. There's usually some stuff in there that I wouldn't normally buy. What I need is a course in how to cook with herbs and spices. You'll be pleased to know that these seem to have a carte blanche in this diet. As many and as varied as you like. Turmeric is supposedly good for hearts, garlic is famous as a blood anti-coagulant ('thinner' in lazy speak). Ginger, cayenne pepper, thyme, basil let yourself go. There aren't many areas where you can. I really need to do more here!

So I haven't given you a meal plan have I? Well, read the Ornish and Esseltyn books or their online stuff as I say if you want recipes. But overall, plenty of veg. No, loads of veg. The veg is the main ingredient. Every meal if you can. Try to have some of it raw. Aim for organic where you can. Start with an organic salad every time you can. Avoid processed foods (90% of the supermarket it seems!). If you're reading the nutrition information label then it's almost certainly processed and you're in the wrong part of the supermarket. Fill the basket/trolley with veggies. Go bonkers with 'em. Oh and don't shop hungry, you'll be likely to buy rubbish.

Just by way of an update in the edit. I've mentioned fasting but to further support this a piece of research I heard about suggests that undereating (calories) by around 25% means we may be three times less likely to develop aging diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Sorry I can't quote the source of this information beyond, I heard it on the radio. Eat well and eat less.

OK the 'fat' vs 'sugar' debate. I saw an excellent BBC Horizon programme on this. They took two genetically-twin doctors and gave one an almost exclusive fat diet, the other a sugar-based diet. Neither was particularly healthy by the end but the one eating mostly fat seemed to come out worse. But the critical piece was the research at the end. It seemed to suggest the answer as to which was the most harmful was, 'both - in equal combination'. That is, what really harms us is foods high in fat and high in sugar in a 50/50 ratio. Sugar on its own is fairly unappealing as is fat, but when you mix them together, BAM! It seems to make us feel satisfied, wanting to snack more, less likely to eat a larger, healthier meal and has plenty of detrimental effects on the body. Avoid cakes, biscuits, ice creams, desserts you name it! So you already knew they were bad for you but I'd recommend watching the programme. Very insightful.

Right, that's it for food.

Chapter 5 - More Tools

So we've read Ornish and there seems to be a better way than just drugs and some minor lifestyle changes, i.e. no drugs and more major lifestyle changes, in fact comprehensive lifestyle changes. So I made them as best I could. Out went the fat in my diet. I started reading the labels on all the processed foods I bought. Anything with more than 1% fat was out. This was a change. It lead to me eating a certain amount of cardboard. Some of the 'foods' were dreadful but some good so all in all I was prepared to do it and I stuck to it. Over a couple of months, I weaned myself off of nearly all the drugs, especially statins and clopidogrel, a real strong blood anticoagulant (often called 'thinners', but they aren't, they are anti-coagulants - stop the blood clotting so easily and who knows what side-effects). I loathe drugs. It's weird as I quite happily partook of so-called recreational drugs when I was in my 20s. I gave them up when my then girlfriend (now wife) took umbrage at it and I gave up alcohol at around 30 when I got myself so ill from binge drinking that I should have been hospitalised. Anyway side-effects I have experienced directly and witnessed. Perhaps I am just very sensitive to drugs, more so than others maybe. Entirely possible but then maybe I'm not. Either way I loathe them. I have to make an occasional exception for paracetamol. When you are in pain that is seemingly refusing to pass, a 2 pence paracetamol seems like God's greatest miracle and of course pain killers for dentistry are a must. I'm sure drugs could be so much more if they were used less. So many phenomena, once they have success in one arena think they have the right to dictate into every other arena. E.g. western medicine as it's called. It can perform absolute miracles, so what happens? Some charlatans jump on the band wagon and claim that they are western medicine too and that we can now do anything and everything. Please just stop and accept that you are one brilliant piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle. There are alternate therapies out there that can and do work miracles. What happens then? The exponents start thinking they can cure anyone and everyone of every possible bloody disease. As a friend recently told me, 'when you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.' They may be able to improve almost everyone but some people will not be receptive or it will plain not work on them for some reason. Accept some miraculous results and move on. Leave people alone and accept your limitations. Many wonderful people do. Thank God for that.

I think the next tack I went down was Patrick Holford's view. He's a real supplement exponent. Pull apart the organism, analyse the ingredients and add what's missing. For hearts he's big on Vitamin C. He reckons dumping cholesterol in our veins was genetically successful during times of scurvy. Scurvy, caused by a lack of Vit C, causes arterial walls to collapse so those people predisposed to dump cholesterol in their veins would have had some protection against this. Hence his view that if you have clogged arteries, pump in the Vit C and unless you want to face the consequences of eating a vast mountain of oranges every day, pop a pill. Well it's OK isn't it? But popping pills sounds a bit like the pharmaceutical thing and I was trying to avoid that but never mind. I went a pill popping. A couple of hundred quid later I was fully supplemented up. Vegan, gel capsules all that malarkey. Of course, the nub with all these approaches is do they work? More to the point how can one tell? The pharmaceuticals do all the scientific stuff to supposedly prove their results but they are hardly independent are they? They have an almighty axe to grind in that if their results do not prove anything all that money is wasted. No profit, no pharmaceutical company. Who else can afford those sort of trials, particularly when there is no patent in meditation to recoup those costs? Then when I bring it down to my individual level, I don't have the time or the inclination to try and use just one technique for 3 months and see if it works, and anyway with two kids, a wife, a dog, a mortgage and a life to lead (that being the whole point!) how can I keep everything else equal? Basically, it can't be done and anyway, I want to get well. I'm not going to give up meditating for 3 months just to try and prove if vitamin C helps or not. So I just have to use my judgment I guess. I know some things work for me, especially if I go in to a therapy session feeling bad and come out feeling good. That at least is simple. And then with everything else, well it's a sort of package of things. If I'm getting better then the package is working. Which components are having the greatest effect and which are making no difference is then hard to tell, but if it's working I'm prepared to leave in some ineffectual bits if indeed there are any.

That was a long precursor to my feeling that a multivitamin certainly has some beneficial effect. Like anything, I guess there is some kind of side effect but overall I'd see that as positive. I also see the risks associated with vitamins and supplements are pretty low. Unless you're taking vast quantities of something that is known to cause issues in some people then I just push on and hope that the worst is that it has no real effect. Wherever possible of course it's better to eat the wholefood rather than the pill, e.g. eat garlic rather than take a garlic pill, and that's really where the rubber hits the road as they say, for me anyway. It's about getting back to real food. If you need Vit C, eat an orange, put some lemon juice on your salad. Must be better for you than a pill. But are some vitamins or minerals hard to get? Sure, so try harder and if you haven't got there yet then a pill is probably better than missing out until the diet gets all that you need naturally. I've vacillated on supplements for years so I don't suppose that's going to change anytime soon.

I'm adding in a piece here in the first edit. Since the time of writing originally, I believe I've come across the reason we dump cholesterol in our arteries at all. It seems to be that it is used as a sticking plaster in effect. Why would I need a sticking plaster? Well to cover a wound of course. Now that seems to be the heart of the matter if you'll excuse the phrase. If we could prevent the initial wound then the body would be less likely to want to put any sticking plaster there. How do the wounds occur in the first place. Well in a few different ways I imagine. Excessive blood pressure would be one. Now, blood pressure there's a thing. Blood pressure is a reflection of how fast and strongly the heart is pumping blood around the body. If the arteries are partially blocked that would create more friction in the movement of the blood so the blood would need to be pumped at greater pressure to travel the same distance. But naturally we need more or less oxygen at different times so blood pressure will rise and fall throughout the day and a lifetime. The 'point in time' tests we take are just that. A better picture can be obtained by more frequent readings at different times of day on different days and in different situations. But overall, high blood pressure, particularly consistently high blood pressure that is not returning to a lower more normal level can, I understand, damage the lining of the arteries. So, hence some damage that needs fixing. Alcohol and drugs can also cause damage. I'm not sure if this is direct or via the same blood pressure route. Possibly both. I understand that the arteries have a layer of smooth muscle that allows them to constrict and expand as required. The whole system is so dynamic and inter-related to so many other parts, it's hard to get a static picture. So whatever can damage muscle, be that physical, e.g. over-straining it or compositional, e.g. dietary, then a wound can occur. Wound needs cholesterol. Cholesterol blocks artery. There appears to be another mechanism whereby this cholesterol 'patch' hardens over time and calcifies somehow. It appears that this must come from the blood. I wonder if living in a hard-water area where there is more calcium around makes a difference? I've never read that anywhere in any useful text, I've just made it up so take that one as you find it! Anyway, back to my journey I just wanted to complete that picture as it were.

Oh and by the way, every source of advice on these matters says quit smoking. So if you smoke, quit. Can't say it more simply than that. Most of the texts advise cutting down on alcohol. I cut it out. To be honest I'd hardly drunk since I was 30 so it was no real biggy for me but for you it may be. I'd really much rather get high on entertaining people and wonderful real connected experiences than alcohol any day. As Simon Pegg the actor (a fellow non-alcohol drinker) said in an interview the other day. 'If you're with people who are drinking alcohol, at around 10 o'clock they all become arseholes'. Even the nicest and best friends are not exempt. I tend to go to parties early if I can to enjoy the connective experiences before people get drunk. It really is very boring after 10.30pm! On the upside you get the sleep, you don't get the hangover so don't lose the next day to temporary illness. Way-hey an extra day. So in effect, you are living longer twice. Got to be good. Apparently something in red wine (resveratrol or some such) is good for the heart, but alcohol isn't so eat some red grapes instead. Apparently they have it too. But not too many. Too much sugar can be one of those damaging things to the arteries.

Now that brings me to refined sugar. Avoid. Now and forever. It never was any good. Pure white and deadly as the book is called. I haven't read that one but my feeling upon eating sugary foods has long been, 'this isn't doing me any good'. I resisted that truth for many years to my long-term detriment. If you are younger please listen. If I could get my kids to give it up somehow it would be great, but at least they hear the 'refined sugar is bad for you' from me almost every time I see them eating some. I have gone on at length about diet but that is the most time consuming of all the changes I have made. Meditation can be 20 mins a day. Yoga maybe 30 minutes. Exercise another 30 minutes. Emotional work 20-30 minutes maybe. But dietary changes are an additional 30 minutes for most meals. That can be 90 minutes a day. Wholefood vegan eating is time consuming. It's far far better but time consuming. As you can see, if I add up all these different changes it comes to a few hours a day. I haven't had as much time for work as I used to have! But still I have managed to write a book (and a couple of plays and half way through another book - fiction this time). It is a commitment. That's for sure. It may not be for you of course. You will need to make your own decisions obviously but I'm just explaining what I did.

I'm putting another tool in here in case I left it out. Buteyko breathing. I finally saw it mentioned in third party article relating to heart attacks. It was in relation to seemingly fit and healthy athletes. I think it was on the Dr.Mercola website. Modern life apparently makes us breathe more than is optimal, possibly due to poor exercise, diet and all those classic factors we have been discussing. The Buteyko approach seems to be to get the chemical balance right by adapting the breathing back to how it should optimally be and let the body then sort itself out. Some people swear by it and I find it helpful so again I'd recommend further investigation.

I suspect it was about this time, about 3 months after my diagnosis that I came across some medical herbalists. Yes the plural. I went to see one at a festival and there were four of them together. It had just been raining hard and I think I was the first to emerge so they had been cooped up sheltering with no customers so I think my appearance was quite welcomed, which was nice. To have four intelligent thoughtful learned alternate practitioners listening to my case and proposing things I should try was a wonderful experience. I think quite a lot of healing happened in that half an hour or so. So what did they suggest? Well herbally, they focussed on hawthorn. I think the leaves are the most potent. As I write it's early spring and the leaves are just coming out. Perfect time to collect some and make myself a potion. I must get the details but I think they just need drying and putting in alcohol. Clearly fresh is better so I'll gobble some down over the next few weeks. The other one was an Indian herb Ashwaganda. [A confession - it is now late Autumn and not much hawthorn gathering happened this year. Maybe next!] Well another edit and it is now next year as it were, Spring 2014 and the leaves are out. Let's see how I go this year!

Now a couple of other things come to mind. I did try seeing an Indian lady with regards to Ayurvedic healing. This seemed to consist of a rather expensive massage and a quite nice pouring of oil on my head, together with a couple of herbs, Ashwaganda being one and I don't recall the other. But for some reason or other, although she was nice to talk to, I didn't feel like it was getting very far very quickly. She spoke interestingly about cooling my system and the Ayurvedic system but I let that go after three sessions I think. It's not that it didn't help at all but it was expensive and I just wasn't feeling it as they say.

The other thing I don't think I've mentioned yet is the whole process of getting plaque, stuck in my arteries. How does this whole cholesterol - plaque thing work? Well as far as I can tell, blood cholesterol is made from fats in the body. So the Ornish (and Esseltyn as well) theory seems to be to reduce the fat, therefore reduce the cholesterol, so no more plaque. Then the body will adapt to the existing plaque, either by sort of stretching around it or gradually wearing it down with blood flowing over it the whole time. So the body makes cholesterol to use in testosterone and other things (to be honest I don't know exactly what) but if it makes too much it bungs it in the arteries. Now that seems dumb but the Holford reasoning we saw earlier suggested it was an inherited response to surviving scurvy. Could be true, could be not. Who knows? Anyway, that's cholesterol. But then you get onto dietary and self-made cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol comes from your food, mainly animal products I guess; meat, eggs etc and the other stuff we make from fat. Now there is a real debate among the alternate theories it seems. Does dietary cholesterol make a difference or not? And then the more radical ones start saying actually cholesterol of any form is just a red herring. But I'm pretty sure from my own experience that eating too much meat is bad for you, or for me at least. It might be great for you, I don't know. Now none of this is new I just think we are not good regulators of how much is 'too much'. There was a study and I'm not giving you exact figures or quoting the study here. Remember this is my experiences not a scientific journal. But the upshot was that something like 70% of people felt like they were getting sufficient exercise but in reality only around 10 or 15% actually were. We lie to ourselves! We are not trustworthy. We should know this. So many people exploit this human weakness. Late night teleshopping, for example. 'I will use a home gym and get fit'. Great but I'd say something like 90-95% of them aren't used again after a month. Pawn shops, pay day loans all that stuff works on human weakness, or strength I suppose. Hope springs eternal. No matter how bad our lives are we believe we can improve and in truth I believe we can. We just rarely manage it. But sometimes, some of us do. Hurrah for those that manage to break out of the rut. That said, will power and good support are much more likely to be present in a successful version of that process than some late night teleshopping gadget!

Anyway, the point of that was when I say too much is bad for you, we need to be honest with ourselves about what 'too much' is. The media (i.e. advertising by people with a vested interest in you buying stuff) will have you believe cutting out meat in your main meal once a week is probably enough. Uh-oh. Let's turn that around. Having meat in your main meal once a week is probably plenty in my humble opinion. Quite a difference. Unless you grasp that you ain't getting anywhere. Where are you getting your information from? In the US the dietary recommendations are apparently heavily tied in with the farming representatives. Do you really think that picture will be unbiased? The odd thing is that its seems slightly perverse on the part of farmers. If we switched to a more vegan diet, what would we eat? Vegetables. Where are they grown? On land. Who owns/controls the land? Farmers. So they just need to shift from rearing cattle to growing corn. Really? There's quite a lot of fuss (and death!) to avoid that shift. Who would benefit from this? Well just about everyone I guess because we'd all be healthier. And everyone includes of course farmers! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. So the amount you are prepared to cut down and think you are doing OK is almost certainly not nearly enough. Sure it'll help but it might create a small delay but not much. The shift needs to be bigger, much bigger. It's like when you do anything, building an extension, buying a new car, having kids, taking on any project; it always costs much more and takes much more effort than you initially thought. Everything is like that, well pretty much everything. Why should changing your diet and lifestyle be any different? Well it isn't. Anyone who says 'it's easy', 'you don't have to make many changes, you'll hardly notice it' is either trying to break you in gently (not my style, you'll gather) or just plain wrong.

So did I finish with my herbalists? Not really. Apart from the experience being really lovely, one of them quoted to me from 'The Male Herbal' by Peter Green or James Green, I'll check and tell you later. I went on to buy but I haven't read much of it yet, although so far it seems to make sense. But the herbalists quoted a really lovely page in that book about what to do if you have heart disease or at least steps to help your heart. Only one of these was herbal, the rest were emotional and lifestyle changes. I kept what was written out for me. It's faded in the sun but I think it's still legible. I'm going to get it now.

So, it's James Green. That's that one sorted. Now let's re-read the advice. He calls them '6 principles to keep your heart safe'. That's a nice title. Firstly, put your emotional life in balance. OK I don't suppose he put that at the top of his list for a laugh or out of chance. This is such a biggy for me and most other blokes I know probably. Expressing my feelings is so hard for me. Perhaps that's why I've taken to writing. I may be more comfortable in this environment, although I am a lousy typist! He focuses on expressing all emotions but especially the appreciative caring ones. Oh boy, do I have some work to do there! Expressing my gratitude and appreciation. How often do I do that? Hardly ever. And who do I do it to when I do? Strangers mostly. Am I appreciative of those close to me? Not as often as I could be and do I express that? Almost never. Oddly, my fingers went to type 'Often'. Maybe that's my natural state that has been allowed and helped to be suppressed and fade away. It is of course up to me to rectify this. Nobody's fault now but my own although I dare say I've been scared into my habitual stance all too frequently!

Next up is to Laugh and Play frequently. OK nought from two. If my score on his recommendation was that of a football team, promotion would be a faint dream at this point with relegation looming. Almost certainly the manager should be looking at the job ads. So I do like to watch funny shows. I've done some improvisational comedy and have now co-written a sitcom so laughter is not too far from me. Perhaps I could talk myself up to half a point there. Laughter is the best medicine. OK I'll try to remember that.

The third is another toughy for me. I should prefix it by saying that I am not violent physically by nature but emotionally there could be work to be done. I'll expand shortly. The third is to reject violence with your whole heart. It seems to reference violent emotions such as hate, rage, depression and regret. The last two are a little surprising to me. Sure hate and rage can easily be seen as violent but depression and regret? Well I'm certainly guilty of the latter in bucket loads. It seems almost every time I do something and it's not perfect I carry some regret. Given that nothing is perfect then that's quite a lot of regret. And if I hang on to that without letting go then it is going to build into some stockpile of regret. I feel like I'm working my way through it. I suspect the way to deal with regret is to grieve on the one hand and to look at the glass as half-full on the other. Plenty of work for me there then. So really items 1 and 3 on the list are about the emotions. I'm not doing particularly well on either, nor item 2 really. OK relegation is definitely on the cards unless we get a new manager that can really turn this team around.

Next is exercise. OK phew at least we are back on familiar ground here. This includes gentle stretching i.e. yoga-type activity. Again, phew. I currently do around 30 mins yoga most days, i.e. 5-6 times a week. I set myself a target of 20 mins but I usually go well over that, which is a good thing. It also talks about productive heart exercise. I'll have to look this up to see exactly what he means, but I know what it isn't. Ornish wrote about the only guy to die on his program and that was a fitness nut. He did really competitive exercise. Trying to beat his personal best all the time. Oh dear, that was the exercise I was doing. Bored with doing it for its own sake I'd try to beat my last time and often do it straight after eating. So no prize there. Now at least I do walk regularly, probably not enough and I don't do much else so again a bit of work to do. Would you believe I am really focussed on getting better? I'm not working (in the traditional sense) at the moment and dedicating at least half my time to such matters. I suppose on the upside I am now doing what I need to do and no-one said it was going to be easy. So even if I have work to do, I have at least started and I suppose, what more can one do but to begin, so I should feel good about myself really. Better than I do I suspect! As Goethe probably said "Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

Above this list, the herbalist that wrote it out for me also wrote 'Be gentle with yourself' in capital letters. What a great reminder. If I can just soften towards myself and others then I feel some of the constriction will pass. Arteries are lined with muscle I believe and contract under stress etc, so given that I had a tendency to stress (I use the past tense to encourage myself) there would have been constriction. Again, relaxation will ease this along will dealing with emotional factors. I came across something yesterday, that I dare say I'd come across a number of times before, that seemed to say that dwelling on stressful situations provoked a similar reaction in the body as the original situation itself. In other words, the thought of something can cause the body to react as if were happening then, which of course makes perfect sense experientially, i.e. that has happened to me. A thought can occur and make me cry or get excited and stimulated. Nothing has actually occurred it is just the thought. Now as I have had a tendency to dwell on the past particularly things I have regretted, my body will have been reliving a whole load of stressful things and putting out various chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline. So in effect even when my life may have been reasonably calm and restful, if my thoughts weren't I'd have lived a very stressful life. If you add the actual stressful events then boy what a load my body has been through. A quick mention here on stress. Originally coined in the 1930s I believe as 'an inappropriate reaction to an event' or some such. Interesting. Inappropriate. I wonder what the appropriate reaction for one would be. I guess the answer will be at the very least, 'something else'. So try something else. Get out of the situation, or as my Reverse Therapy training would most likely suggest, talk about how you feel. Express one's emotions. Again, not something I have done well in the past but I am learning and trying to be better at it. I dare say I can only improve. So this thought thing. How do I stop myself thinking about the past, what might have been, how I could have done things better? Well, I am at least now meditating regularly. That is a good mechanism to help one understand one's thoughts. Hopefully that will pay dividends over time.

I'm breaking in here again in the edit. You see time has moved on and I have come across a great book. A friend recommended it and I recommend to anyone I think might listen seriously and be in a position to take it on. Anyway, it's 'There is Nothing Wrong with You' by Cheri Huber. An easy read (suits me!) and full of brilliant concepts, simply explained. It seems so much of the toughness in my life is now put on me by none other than me! I'm doing it to myself. I have grown up somehow hating myself and this has caused no end of different problems. It's a real eye-opener. I try to love myself more now by putting it in my meditation every day. One of Cheri's brilliant tips is that when you catch yourself beating yourself up for something, reward yourself. Yes have a treat. Book a massage or something like that. Self-hate gets so baffled so quickly it doesn't know what to do. Brilliant! I love that book. OK back to the journey...

One thing I did notice was how much time I spent thinking about 'imaginary conflicts' as I call them. It is as if I am a naughty boy expecting to be told-off the whole time and I am preparing my answers and responses to whomever I imagine will be in conflict with me. Now of course these conflicts almost never happen and would probably happen even less if I didn't spend time looking out for them. But they also must be triggering negative or preparatory reactions in my body, i.e. 'up the adrenaline, we're about to fight!' I'm trying to replace these with 'imaginary harmony' when I catch myself. Imagining meeting the same person again and having a pleasant and positive exchange. It feels so much better! Even if I am just learning. I dare say the imaginary conflict thing comes from a childhood where getting told off or reprimanded in some way was a regular occurrence. Some of it may have been 'deserved' (I doubt Cheri Huber would agree!) but I strongly suspect that my parents and teachers handed it out much more freely than was healthy for me!

Another add in here. Kris Carr, the woman who was pretty much 'written-off' with stage 4 cancer 10 years ago recommends fasting. Either one day a week and/or in the mornings. I have taken to not eating solids for the first 2 or 3 hours of the day. I adapted surprisingly well. Now this one comes with a contra-indication for people with heart trouble but I got so into my new diet that I thought I'd try. It seems good to me. I have a tendency to over-eat anyway and I suspect that that has put pressure on my heart. Digestion really puts a workload on your system. Over-eating seems to really make your heart work unnecessarily; once to digest then again to get rid of when all the time it was not needed. More work for me there. I comfort eat. You wouldn't know it to look at me, I'm as thin as a rake now. I have a 32 inch waist. Down from 34 and rising before. I'm back to where I was when I was 18. Apologies if I mentioned fasting before but on reflection most things in the book get at least a couple of mentions!

Another add in: Bill Clinton, ex-US president is in on the Ornish-style diet. Switched to veganism. What an advert for it. The US President is about as apple-pie as it gets. Meat and two veg and all that. If he can get converted and keep to it, there is plenty of room for others. Clearly he could afford whatever drugs and procedures he wanted but has chosen this diet and lifestyle change program. Excellent! That said, I suspect he has undergone some procedure or other as well. I'll try to look it up.

I'm also seeing a chiropractor to sort out posture, spinal and nerve energies. Does it contribute? I believe so. How much? Don't really know. But having an out of position spine and less than optimal nervous system isn't going to help anyone and the practice I go to is very holistic and seems to agree with almost everything in this book in terms of diet and exercise and emotional healing so chiropractic sessions are in the package!

Chapter 6 - Early Results

Well, I thought I'd let you know how I went with this diet and new lifestyle and approach. As much as anything I needed to start another chapter as the last one was getting pretty long. Anyway, almost immediately I was put on medications I started weaning myself off them. In fact one or two I never even took. I had some internal bleeding a week or two after my first hospital visit. Right, out went the stronger 'thinner' (anti-coagulant). I stayed on the small amount of aspirin. In fact that was the last one I ditched. I got myself off the others in about 2 months. One at a time. I later learnt that coming off the other stronger thinner left one more likely to have a heart attack than not being on it at all for about 90 days or thereabouts. Now are the makers of that going to sue me for saying that? I dare say they'd try if they read this but there was a study I read about on the internet that stated just that. So I'm going back to change the name to avoid having pharmaceutical heavies coming down on me. Back in a second or two. There you go. They have teams of marketing experts so they can say pretty much what they like providing they avoid actual illegality but leave us with a certain impression (and who has the time and resources to challenge them?), do dodgy tests and only give partial results or some such, but if I say anything negative about them they are down on me like a ton of bricks. Well maybe. Anyway, early results. I'm telling you this because I got myself off of all the drugs (I think even aspirin) for about 2 months before going for a blood test. Now my GP was happy to order the test. Unusually cooperative of him. Now there are a number of tests about cholesterol and various lipids, high and low density. In essence, the key ratio if I recall correctly is the Triglyceride to HDL (high density lipids) ratio. HDL in simple terms is the good one and LDL is the bad. Now that is an oversimplification which I do not like at all. If we allow doctors or others to decide a subject is too complicated for us then we are just dumb open-mouthed receptors of whatever gets thrown at us. And doctors are busy. Where does the latest information come from? Drug companies. OK if you've learnt anything about my approach it's that I do not particularly trust them. So risking oversimplification, the recommended ratio of Triglycerides to HDL is 2 or less. Most people are higher than this I would suspect. This, I understand, is believed to be the best predictor of a heart attack. My ratio was 0.75. Yes substantially under the recommended low figure. My cholesterol was also very low, 2.8mmol/l, although the other figure is generally regarded as a better indicator. In the UK cholesterol is recommended to be around 4 or 5 or below. Again a substantial reduction. In the US, a UK 2.9 translates to a figure of around 100. It's the same substance being measured just using a different calculation. A bit like feet and inches versus metres. The other useful ratio is apparently the Total Cholesterol to HDL ratio. Dr Ornish recommends this to be less than 3. Mine was 2.3. So all looking good.

So it appeared to be working. I went back for my cardiologist appointment. I was expecting a bit of a pat on the back and some level of interest, along the lines of 'wow, how did you get those results without using drugs?' But no, of course not. All I got was a 'your results seem OK. I suggest we discharge you. Feel free to get another referral from your GP to come back if you get any chest pain again'. Great. I may have achieved the supposedly impossible and he didn't seem to give a damn. I don't suppose of course if he'd give a monkey's if I lived or died. So much for the caring profession.

I'm editing this and I feel I can be much too harsh on the doctors. I know they are busy people and that patients can be an awkward lot and generally in the UK are more than happy to hand over responsibility for their health. People seemingly can't be bothered to learn stuff that is critical to them. Maybe they are just busier and more trusting than I am! Perhaps this is an over active need for certainty and control in my life. I just realised that a friend with cancer seems to have that need in bucket loads. Hmmm. Perhaps, as the title suggests, it's all about letting go. :-) Anyway, bless the doctors they are just people. So, and I say this through gritted teeth are the pharmaceutical companies. I hear myself saying, 'so was Hitler', so some ways to go then for me on the forgiveness front.

At that consultant visit, I did get to see the video of my cardiogram or whatever it's called. The one where they shove the radioactive dye into your heart. The supposed 70% blockage didn't look like 70% to me. Sure I'd only seen half a dozen examples maybe so am not technically qualified to judge but my eyesight is good. I could see a white line (my artery) getting a bit thinner at a point. Unless I was missing something, it looked like 40-50% narrowing at most. Was the original heart surgeon drumming up business, incompetent, over-cautious or mistaken, or was I a complete numpty? It turned out that at least some of that view of the first surgeon simply had to be true. The second surgeon had questioned the original diagnosis. He thought I was borderline for a stent and did another test to confirm it. Do we place too much faith in specialists? Yes, if you want a simple answer. Remember we are still flushing out doctors from the system who had zero bedside manner, and may be purely academic dweebs with virtually no common sense. Harsh probably. Unfair. Sure. It's just that their jobs matter so much. Nobody lives or dies if, as a project manager, my project is late or goes over budget (which incidentally I believe they rarely did - well much less than other people's seemed to anyway). But of course surgeons are still human and they do a difficult job (although tend to be rewarded very well). Some of course are great and I really don't want to sound or indeed be ungrateful but it's that old human thing of knowing our limitations. Mine? Good question. Maybe I should just stick to my experiences without criticising too much. Point taken.

Those initial results were in the September of 2012, around 6 months after I'd started the whole lifestyle diet process.

Chapter 7 - The Not-So-Early Results

Well, I'm editing again 18 months after I started. What a long 18 months it's been. But a very interesting one too. I'm financially much poorer than if I'd still been doing my old job (although they were running short of work anyway due to the recession), but knowledge and self-development have been coming on in leaps and bounds.

At this point I want to point out that I didn't set out with a bunch of tools, put them into practise and watch what happened for 18 months. It has very much been a learning, experimental kind of journey so far. Some things I have stuck with but it's more like I added parts in as I came across them if I felt they would be useful and dropped anything that didn't seem to help much, as far as I could tell. What this has meant is that my overall package of measures; diet, exercise, emotional work and support has evolved and been refined over time and continues to be. Great, there's scope for a sequel in a couple of years' time. Typically, diet for some reason always seems to grab my attention in terms of time and modification. Exercise has remained reasonably static. Support is still struggling to get really going but is getting better and my emotional work continues at a nice steady pace.

It can get into competitive situations at times. I mean that one diet will say, 'OK you can have an occasional bit of oil provided it's kept to less than 20g in total per day', and another will say 'Nope no added oil at all. Forget it, Buster.' So one is left with a judgment call and I tend to tread a middle ground if I feel good about both recommendations, else let my favourite or gut-feel win out. What else can one do?

So, recent results? I'm looking now at the various scans available. When I say available, I mean technically available but they may not be available on the NHS or if they are they are reserved for priority cases. Which given the resource model is fair enough although I may still get one or more at some point, either paying for it or by being a test case of some sort if I could persuade the local NHS consultant unit to investigate these lifestyle changes more.

The last couple of weeks have seen some increased chest pain activity. Not promising but then again there was virtually none for the previous 6 months and I have in that time done heavy gardening, plenty of walking, even up to 3 hours in one go, and other exercise. Heavy lifting on the other hand has almost always caused me a problem. The next day or an hour or two afterwards I get some symptoms. But I am slowly learning that one, but boy is that a slow learn!

So, I am doing OK. How would I be doing without my lifestyle changes? i.e. does all this make any difference. Well to be honest I don't really know. I think only an angiogram with a clearly reduced narrowing would really be considered any kind of proof. I'm reluctant to keep going through that process but it may be necessary. If I have any kind of significant heart episode, the worst I can imagine being a heart attack of course, well at least we'll probably know more then. Although if it gets to that point soon, then it hasn't worked and I may be dead anyway. Sobering thought, not that I'm technically ever not sober these days. I haven't been drunk to any degree for nearly 20 years. Wow! But I can tell you I really don't miss it. I've looked up tests and most of them involve radioactive dyes. I think the CT scan dye may not be radioactive but possibly involves loads of x-rays. There's seems to be no way of doing it that I have found that is not potentially harmful in some way. More work for me needed on the risks of the various tests I suspect. Oh well, that'll keep me busy on the long winter nights.

In a nutshell, I generally feel OK. In fact, mostly I feel fine. And I do feel brave and somewhat pioneering which feels good. It gives me mental and spiritual strength and encouragement I feel which are good things.

Well, time has marched on again and I am editing again. It's April 2014 now. In February 2014 my doctor's surgery called up as it was time for my blood test. Really? This was the first really proactive step I had had from the health profession in the two years since my diagnosis, well certainly the past 18 months. Good on them. So I went for the tests. Had to badger them for the results but here they are. Triglycerides to HDL ratio is now 0.9 from 0.75 but still well under the recommended 2 and few people achieve even that so that was positive. Total cholesterol was still 2.8 the "conventional" minimum healthy level, and total cholesterol to HDL was 2.5 (from 2.3), again still well under the Dr.Ornish recommended 3. I was buoyed by these results and hope that sustained results like this over a period of nearly two years means that reversal of the heart disease is taking place. Or at least that I have created the conditions where it can.

The poster child for this method in the Esseltyn book was a doctor, 44 years old who was diagnosed with a narrowing more severe than mine but committed to the diet and two and a half years later, the narrowing of the artery had gone. What an aspiration! I may only be 6 months away from a similar result. Even if I get halfway there in that time or even a quarter, it would be great progress and encouraging enough to keep me on this path, possibly forever. I hardly ever slip. Yes occasionally there may be something with oil in it. I'm not a saint but really I mean every few months, no more frequent that that. Sustained programme, sustained results. I like it!

Chapter 8 - The Emotional Stuff

Well, for someone who has not been that good at the emotional stuff (read: terrible), this may not be a great explanation, although I may well be coming from the same perspective as yourself, so that at least may help. One lesson I tried to learn a few years ago is to speak up for the way that you feel. Wear your heart on your sleeve, if you like. But when you're not used to doing that it all feels odd, well certainly at times. More to the point perhaps is the difficulty I feel of knowing how one is actually feeling. I'm pretty sure I was taught that no-one much cared how I felt so 'please spare us the details, we're not interested' was the attitude I expected. In truth, that is probably still the case, but I understand the value comes from actually stating one's truth, how one feels, then 'bugger the rest of them', effectively. So get to know how you feel and then tell people. Sounds fairly easy. Well I don't find it so. Right now, I'm a bit tired. Bored perhaps? Don't really know. So there you go. That's me. Like I say, not very good at it, yet.

So I have seen a couple of therapists. I'm into pretty much any therapy going, providing it has at least some positive effect, as you may have guessed. Luckily, I found a therapist in EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) that also seems to work with a number of other therapies. So I have been seeing her roughly once a month (with a break when she went away). Quite simply, I would struggle physically to get to my appointment. Walk up the hill very slowly. Then feel fine after the session. That to me was more than good enough. Whatever went on was working. EFT involves tapping parts of your body, mainly particular points on the head and hands, whilst speaking out loud specific phrases about accepting oneself deeply and completely. There is doubtlessly some explanations on why it works but it does for me and seems to for many other people too.

An aside here (another!). I've just taken a break from writing for around 6 weeks. I went skiing (only for one week not six!). Now for me, that was a landmark. When I first got my diagnosis, there were a few things I went through. Firstly, shock. I'm not sure it's really apparent to the individual when they are going through shock. I only noticed it on reflection really. That probably made me worse than I would have been otherwise for a few months, but when I realised that I could do things and not die, I started to regain some composure. I suspect that was when I set myself the target of being well enough to go skiing again. Mostly this was because we had just discovered this as a family holiday, albeit an expensive one, that we all really enjoyed. Sometimes as a parent holidays can be hard work. Wonderful to be all together as a family but nonetheless hard work. Skiing is less like that. Once at the hotel it becomes a fun relaxing time in general, and anyway as the children get older, they are 15 and 10 now, they are becoming more self-sufficient giving more time for us parents to relax. And I really enjoy skiing, simple as that. Beautiful surroundings, excitement and relaxation, all at the same time. So a landmark was achieved. I skied 5 and a half out of the 6 days, taking it easy at first but going gung-ho by the end of the week, only once feeling like I had pushed myself too far and had to rest when I would rather have been on the slopes. So I called that success. I have booked again for next season and hope my recovery continues. My diet suffered a little when I travelled and since then I have been working to get back more firmly on my diet but there is a little way to go, but not too far now. But there you go, so I sort of figured if my blockage was not so bad as the 'poster-child's', (not nearly so bad on my viewing of the pictures) then I could afford to slip a little (and it was a very little) for a week and I would still be able to make progress. I wonder if he maintains the strict diet now or if he allows himself the odd lapse now and again. He was apparently very committed to the diet. I suspect it's one of those things where 98% is good enough but 95% isn't. You need to be spot on or very very close for it to work.

Anyway, why no writing for 6 weeks after the skiing? Well, the weather improved and I'm a sucker for gardening particularly the heavier side of things. I'm more of a slash and burn man than a nurturer. I'd rather be hacking back a hedge than planting azaleas, and until the hedge is sorted out, I can't even contemplate planting anything. This year I've spent days building and weeding veggie beds but haven't planted a thing (luckily my wife has). I tell you this so that when say I've done 4 hours gardening today, for me that means four hours fairly hard labour not 4 hours pottering about granny-style. So after the skiing when I did push myself a little far, I then spent a week in the garden, pushing myself a little too far. Guess what, I ended up getting some symptoms back again. Brilliant! I'm sure it's a typical human trait, but when I start to be able to do something again after being ill, I immediately seem to feel I can do anything that I used to be able to, and possibly more. Even though only days before I was ill in bed, not feeling up to doing anything much at all.

Since then I've managed to scale back my activities a little and now a further few weeks later I do feel like I'm back on track. Apart from the odd prickle in my chest, I seem to be fine, but of course that's part of the issue with chronic diseases, particularly heart disease, you can feel fine one day and drop dead the next. But surely, I can hold out for feeling better and doing all the 'right' things meaning I am actually healthier? Well, I suppose if you're reading this and I'm ninety years old and bungy-jumping then we'll know. Equally if I peg it in a year's time then we'll know as well. Much as I'd like to be around at ninety, I'm not banking on it, however I'm not planning on checking out next year either!

So anyway, back to the emotional stuff (finally!). There's the Chinese medicine approach, as far as I understand it, that a symptom or illness occurs at a number of levels simultaneously. That is, physically, emotionally and spiritually for example. There may be other layers or levels and of course I may have these wrong but that to me is at least a way of looking at it. So for Heart Disease there are the physical symptoms and illness, e.g. blocked arteries and angina pain, as well as emotional and spiritual illness. Emotional illness to me is about not communicating emotions. All emotions are helpful and indicative of a need that needs to be met. So for being sad, we need to grieve, to appreciate that which has gone. But what is my need in such a case. Why do I need to appreciate something, or someone? I'm going to Google that one! One suggestion is we grieve to get closer to our authentic self. Ie the 'real' you. So by examining and going inward at any point in time allows one, almost forces one, to prioritise things and throw out the unwanted. So that means we get distracted from what is most important to us maybe, then grief gets us back towards our priorities. When we grieve we sometimes end up wondering 'why do I spend so much time doing this?' doing that activity that we don't value instead of those that we do. A natural process I imagine but probably made worse by typical modern western lifestyles packed with TV, media and advertising. The 'Male Herbal' by James Green talks of letting go of violent emotions like hate and regret. Regret, violent? Well that was a surprise to me. That's my not letting go of the past. So 'letting go', emotional honesty, communicating emotions. I reckon I'd have scored maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 for that. With all my work in the last year I may be up to a 4 or 5 perhaps. Still a long way to go but so much learning. I'm tired now and have a cold so time for a break much as I'd like to write more. This is the most intermittently written chapter so far. Is it timing or is it that emotional stuff is just like that, chaotic? Well it has to be more chaotic than ignoring emotions surely. Although keeping a lid on emotions can have the pressure cooker effect. One day it all just suddenly explodes. I don't know how well I can let the lid off from time to time but I must be getting better. I went to a workshop the other day, family constellations. A quite unique therapy in many ways but it plays aspects of one's own life story back. As an aside, I've just seen a Christmas item on a shelf and yes it really does come around quicker every year! Anyway, the therapy was great if you like having aspects of one's life shown to you that you didn't even realise you had. I was shown that I hadn't grieved certain losses in my life that I hadn't really realised were losses. So little we understand of our own lives and so much work to do to understand ourselves. It feels really good to do this work on myself. I am offering myself as a therapist to people to share this stuff, starting now. I want to run a course to help people to show them what is going on. There is just so much stuff to do. Next week I'm off to Embercombe for a week on The Journey. Five days of self-discovery. Should be interesting. Tax return to do before that. Might not be quite so interesting but I'll get into it. In fact, goldfish attention span that I have these days I might start now.

OK, it's a few months later now in the editing phase. I really just wanted to report back from Embercombe. Well, wow what an amazing Journey it was. I've been through lots of therapies so it takes something to astound me. As I said to a fellow Journeyer who hadn't done any therapy before, 'You are really in at the deep end here'. And deep it was. It's going to sound like a cult now as I was about to go through some of the processes but they ask that people don't as it somehow weakens it for other people. All I knew before was that people said glowing things like 'the best and hardest week of my life'. I can see why they said that, and it some ways it was that for me too. It felt like being stripped back to basics and being rebuilt from there. I can only recommend it.

Anyway the emotional stuff leapt forward during and after that week. So much became clearer and I see my emotional journey as one that will keep going but I will grow as I do. Oh, I saw a Tony Robbins video yesterday on TED (check out the YouTube videos) saying humans had 6 needs; certainty, uncertainty, to feel significant, to connect, to grow and to contribute. Sounds about right to me. Why is this stuff coming to me at 48 not 18, ah maybe it did. The teacher comes along when the pupil is ready as they say. A bit like the brilliant book 'There is Nothing Wrong with You' by Cheri Huber. It came along at the right time but the learnings in it are really profound. They have really supported my emotional journey. It's about self-love but with practical steps on how to actually do it not just want to do it which is about as far as I'd get before. Yes, I did mention that earlier too! I am repeating myself, you aren't going mad!

Emotional stuff, there is so much to it. I expect I'll return and add more in the next edit. Oops I'm already there. My 'EFT lady' does hypnotherapy too. Excellent it is too. It really challenges and chips away at the hard core, trying to soften and dispose of ideas no longer needed or old pain that has not been understood. Simply marvellous. What great things I have learned! What a privilege!

Chapter 9 - The Scary Stuff

Dear Diary it's been 6 months since I last had a drink. Well, OK not quite that long since I last wrote here but it feels like it. Perhaps my reticence to return to this book has been having nothing to say. That's should be plenty enough to stop writing else what's the point of writing if you have nothing to say. But now I do and here I am. Faith. Got to keep the faith. What I want to talk about now is the scary stuff, by which I mean the times when I get scared. I get scared when I get any symptoms. The stronger the symptoms, the more scared I get. I get thoughts like, 'Is this working?', 'Am I being a fool to do this?', 'Who do I think I am, thinking I know better than the doctors?'. That sort of stuff. I get a stiffness in the middle of my back sometimes. I have it now. It feels like insufficient support. This past week or so I have had some symptoms. A heaviness in the chest, the odd stab of chest pain and general tiredness. I get so scared when a sudden stab of chest pain occurs that I don't know if it's my fear that is taking my energy away or my heart not pumping well. I imagine there could be tests that could help with that but they are not going to be easy to access on the NHS, or at least that's what I believe. There are cardiac MRI scans that are much less invasive than an angiogram that squirts radioactivity into my heart. (Having looked it up it seems an MRI uses radioactive dye also. Another option is a CT [computerised tomography - if that helps] scan but that uses a number of x-ray images which I suppose is tantamount to the radiation). The medical profession believes it is worth the risk, in general terms anyway. But given my approach, I'd like a regular test maybe every year to see how I'm doing. So my quest at the moment is to get a scan of some sort and get the NHS to support me in my lifestyle changes. I don't think my GP will help but he only needs to get me to the heart specialist. Then I need the next door opened. One step at a time I guess.

So off topic again I guess or at least off at a tangent but then again how else do I make I sure I cover everything. Who knows? Perhaps I'll leave this to the editor or maybe I'll just publish it 'raw'. How to deal with the scary stuff, the times when I am scared? At the moment there is a fair amount of panic and worry when it happens but I suppose I do maintain some type of equilibrium. The more it happens the more familiar I am with it but the more it happens the more I think there is something wrong. I've been through what seems like a very long period without symptoms. Hardly anything in 6 months probably. Which then tends to make me feel like I am better and I can do anything. My main trigger seems to be things that raise my blood pressure or at least that's how I interpret it. So lifting heavy objects, pushing myself too hard physically or mentally or getting over-excited or 'hyper' as it might be called. I only include the last one because it happened last week during a comedy improvisation session. One can get pretty hyper in those. There's loads of laughing, spontaneous energy but it's hard to remain properly grounded or at least it was then. So I must introduce 'grounded improv'. If not 'must' but I shall consider running a class with grounding as a feature.

So what wisdom do I have to impart when things seem to be going wrong. I suppose the first caveat is that they may well be going wrong to the extent that an ambulance is needed. Don't discount that as an option. I don't want to scare you but I certainly don't want to kill you either. That said, my experience has been that once the NHS gets you in its grip you could be at the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies fear-mongering. My view is that you are already very scared (I toned that wording down) so it's very easy to get you to make a fear-based decision. 'Best be on the safe side'. But what is the safe side? Of course, over prescribing drugs or too many procedures very rarely lead to a negligence case. Not doing anything could do so they are covering their behinds, as I probably would be very tempted to do if I was in their position. But where does that lead you? Down a road of drugs and interventions that eventually have you in what is a comfortable position for western medicine, i.e. not bothering anyone and preferably on a heap of expensive drugs 'for life', and if they don't work then they don't stop them, they add more! OK, rant over. They're doing their best within the framework of human emotion and experience, as indeed we all are. So it takes courage to say no thanks to drugs and intervention. A great big heap of it to start with and then more and more as time progresses. I am here battling for my health on a daily basis looking to eat healthy, be emotionally honest and keep my body and mind in shape, whilst being father to a 15 and a 10 year old, look after a house, cars and all that malarkey. Not easy. The promise of the magic bullet, a stent, some drugs and all will be fine and easy is a tempting one. I may of course go down that route one day as my best option, who knows? I may die before that or may never do it. I just don't know. How much funding is put into this effectively 'free' way of treating one the biggest, most expensive health care issues in the Western World? Almost none. How much goes into pharmaceuticals and operations? Billions and billions. How stupid are we people? How duped have we been by the pharmaceuticals? Well it's our lives. Would we rather live scared and under their thumb? I would say that that is the way we act. Poor, very poor as some comedian used to say.

Have I helped you? I'm not sure. Other than to acknowledge that it is scary sometimes, if you're going down this path. To be honest, I dare say it's pretty scary going down an intervention path as well. I had a look down it and it scared the bejabers out of me. But acknowledging the feeling is half the battle. Then at least you can have the option as to how you want to react to it. Just because one is scared doesn't mean we have to act in a certain way. As Susan Jeffers' book says 'feel the fear and do it anyway'. Easier said than done that's for sure but there are plenty of books that can you help you deal with fear. Meditation. Ah, I'm tempted to do that instead of writing right now. I'm in a meditation centre. Meditation. I hope I've extolled its virtues at length already. It bears repeating I'm sure. In case with all this fear talk, you've gone down that road. I'm not sure how much benefit there is writing about meditation. Many have felt compelled to do so, presumably in the spirit of helping others and encouraging them to do likewise. I can only salute those efforts but reading about it is not it. Meditate. As the saying goes, 'It is important to sit quietly for 20 minutes every day, unless of course you are too busy, in which case you should sit quietly for an hour each day'. I'm sure you get the point. Dean Ornish recommends it. I recommend it. The Buddha recommended it supposedly. Buddhists are amongst the most together group of people I know. That and getting into nature.

Well there's my other favourite technique of dealing with symptoms. Finally I remember the point of this chapter. Boy, I hoped you've managed to stay with it so far! Things I do number 1. Walk. Walk in nature. Walk in nature for however long feels comfortable at whatever pace feels comfortable for you. These are YOUR symptoms we are dealing with here, not some hypothetical or typical person. You are not average, believe me. I personally take a slow walk at my pace for as long as feels OK. Once I build it up to about an hour, I find that the symptoms seem to be under control and I am back on the mend. Back on the path again. So walk. It's great. Really good. I got a dog. Badly behaved and a real pain but a dog nonetheless and he needs a walk. So I get a walk. I walk more because I have a dog. My walks are more stressful possibly sorting out my pain-in-the-butt dog but I am out there, every day and that's a good thing. In the lousy weather when I am not feeling up to it, out I go. By the way, I live in the south of England. Your weather patterns may be entirely different so adjust for your own situation. If you live in a city flat then a dog may not be a good idea. I suppose I am trying to get back to 'this is what I do in my set of circumstances' and let you draw your own conclusions. I wouldn't recommend following what I have done to the letter as you are, as I say, different. The same but different, of course. How very Zen of me. :-)

So if walking is one, going to see one of my emotional therapists is another. I'm going to see them both next week, and after what had been a dodgy week, I am hoping for great things. Who knows? Might not make the blindest bit of difference this time. But previously I have struggled to make it up the hill to the session and bounced out of it. So much of heart problems seem to be emotional. Certainly for me anyway! My acupuncturist sessions tend to rebalance me which lets my body sort itself out, get back on track, focus its resources in the needed areas. Well that's what it seems to be anyway. Of course, acupuncture is not usually considered an emotional therapy but my acupuncturist is very good at that stuff as well. My emotional therapist does EFT, hypnotherapy, reiki and probably other techniques as well. Whatever feels appropriate at the time.

Well I'm pleased I seem to have managed a chapter in this session. Not sure what I'll write about in the next one. Perhaps there isn't a next one. We'll just have to wait and see! But before I do, I just had some symptoms today and realised that the first thing I did was to stop. Take a pause. I guess that's always obvious to me and now I do that regardless of what I'm doing or where I am, unless there is some life threatening reason why I couldn't but I haven't come across that one yet! I suppose the other fatalistic or realistic or however one wants to approach it is that, now that you have heart disease there's a good chance that it's going to get you in the end. On the grounds that something is going to get you, a known problem may well be the one. But one can only hope for a peaceful end surrounded by loved ones at a ripe old age. At 48 I don't suppose the odds are in my favour at the moment but I'm trying to turn that around. Being naturally healthy seems to me a good way of trying to achieve that. No drugs means no side effects.

A quick update. I've had the two therapy sessions and feel a bit better. More excitingly (for me anyway) was the insight that came in my meditation yesterday. It was about 'letting myself go'. Letting go of propping up some image of myself that I believe to be somehow more palatable version than the real me. When I live that thought then so much rigidity falls away along with holding, worry and all sorts of frankly unwanted stuff. That feels really good. I expect it'll lead to further feelings of connectedness but it might not but it feels like a really good step. The emotional therapy turned out to be a massage to help release some of the old stored tension in my shoulders and back. There's certainly plenty there still! Haven't gone for particularly long walks this week. I'll try to extend them if I feel up to it.

Also, in today's meditation was the feeling/thought to go ahead and have the stent. That was a real surprise. I have been contemplating it for the last couple of weeks but that came as a bolt out of the blue as insights tend to do. I wonder where that will lead. Perhaps an update will arrive to clarify, perhaps not.

Well possibly a final edit, for this version anyway. It's been a two year journey so far. I went skiing again last Xmas. I'm 49 the kids are 16 and 11 and I'm still keeping the programme going. I'm more seriously looking to get back to paid work. I've taken on a few courses including blacksmithing (pretty physical), cricket coaching (physical again) and being a funeral celebrant (OK not an obvious choice and possibly not going anywhere!). The ski trip was good but I really pushed all week in trickier conditions and was absolutely exhausted by the end of it. It took about 10 days to get back to 'normal', e.g. going for reasonable walks with the dog etc. I seemed to have some stomach bug as well so all a bit much.

Chapter 10 - Conclusions

Well what to conclude from these experiments in life and health? I've given it a go and am still doing so. I've made plenty of mistakes and I'm learning on the run. I had dreadful stomach ache yesterday from trying to keep modifying my diet. These things are ongoing as I try to perfect the formula, although perfection was never my aim. A good result? To live to be around for my daughter's 50th Birthday in acceptable health. That's 35 years away and I'd be 83. I'll take that. Given where I am now. If I get there I doubt I'll be so keen to give it away at that point.

I want to add in that in general, my energy levels are good. I have not had any dizzy spells at all in the past 2 years. That was the most disturbing symptom and I have managed to avoid it. Now some of that is by not pushing myself as hard as I did to get that symptom. But I have since been skiing twice and going as gung-ho as ever by the end of the week with no ill-effect the first time and pushing myself too hard all-week the second time. That said I have had some symptoms of chest heaviness and some sharper pains in the past couple of weeks so nothing is perfect and those symptoms have scared me at times. I carry my Nitrous spray a lot now when I am out and about at the moment after pretty much ignoring it and not knowing where it was for the previous 6 months but I do feel the need to be as honest as I can be with you.

What would I like you to have gained from this book? Well, it is purely intended as a 'This is What I Did' account. Whether you'll gain anything from it, I really can't tell. It probably depends very much on where you are coming from and your state of health.

Probably my only advice is to make your own decisions. Get as much information as is practical for you and decide. Your doctor is supposed to be there to help you with this. You'll come across some great advice and probably some not so good. How to choose between them is an art form that will never go away. My sincere hope is that you enjoy it either way. For many people, these warning signs are a blessing in disguise. They cause us to re-evaluate. To take a look at the way we live our lives and focus in on our priorities. I hope that you know better now what your priorities are.

If I can find a poem, I'll add it at the end. But we are all connected in some way. I am sure of that and if these are the last words I ever write, I hope that they send some love and connectedness your way and that I and others may receive your love in return.

In the final edit, I want to say I feel OK. I feel 'normal'. Not some "I can do anything Superman fitness freak capable of jumping tall buildings" or whatever it is. I feel pretty much like I can take on almost anything I would have done before my diagnosis. I am more careful as you might expect and I do take less on. I stop more easily but I'm also not so hard on myself. It's a sunny day but I have a bit of a cold (as do a good number of people around me, it's not unusual) so I'm not working in the garden today. If I had felt better I would have but I didn't. That is the way I tend to be now. I don't push myself as much. Indeed I am grateful for the opportunity to finally finish this book! It's been hanging around for nearly two years now. I can only hope you enjoyed it. I dare say you may have some questions. I'll put an email address at the end. Oh the poem, "The Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, what else?

I wish you the best of health and the very best of luck on your journey.

Love Lionel x

