Back in 1992 I had a heart attack and it was a result of a tremendous stress accumulated over two years of time, literally tremendous stress. I was very fit, never been a smoker in my lifetime, I was always mild to moderate drinker and very much into sports and activities, all sorts of activities. Just something happened in my life between 1990 and 1992 and it was just too much to cope with and that stress caused a spasm in the heart muscle and it blocked the coronaries for a while and then I had a heart attack, a major heart attack. Of course I was hospitalized straight away for quite a, quite long period. After that they took me through to do an angiogram and they found out three of the coronary arteries were blocked completely. The myocardium was infarcted and part of the LV, there was an aneurysm in it. So they said "You have to rest for a few months," and in 1993 I had the by-pass operation.
They by-passed three of the coronary grafts, repaired the LV aneurysm but I'm, you know I'm left with the myocardial infarction and now it's about twenty percent of the muscle in the LV, in the left ventricle is dead. I mean it's infarcted, that doesn't function and that's what's caused the heart failure. That's the history of the disease and that's when I first knew about it. It definitely, I mean what I want to stress is the cause of my heart failure wasn't high blood cholesterol, it wasn't fat, I was a fit man, very active, just stress. So that's, that's a very important factor.
I can brief a little bit but like all sorts of things happened to my life in 19, between 1990 and 1992. I lost my father and brother in two weeks time, suddenly we lost all our money, all my father's savings in a bank that collapsed in 1991. My life changed dramatically from a spoilt teenager to you know someone who had to face all these, the reality of life which I didn't see before. It was, it was beyond description really it was tremendous. There's more of it, I mean there's more detail but just really it will just take you three hours to tell you about it. |
