Helen's Journal

It’s been nearly two years since I had surgery to have my aortic valve and root replaced. I am just about to turn 47 and this was my second lot of open heart surgery( being a congenital heart patient) and as it was felt I would not probably survive a third round of open heart surgery, a mechanical rather than tissue valve was used. The down side of this is a life time on anticoagulant drugs. Apparently I am fixed for life now... For all of you people about to have surgery or just post op I wanted to write to encourage you and also share something’s I have learned. Here are some of the things I was struggling with post op and how things are now: Weakness This does go. It feels at times as if you will never be able to do normal things again( like climbing stairs, talking and walking quickly, lifting, running etc) you will. Just give yourself time and everyone is different. It took me a good 3 months before I felt able to go back to work and I still have the occasional dizzy spells. After a few months I did notice how much better I felt and so much less tired. I am now able to do things I haven’t done for years and years (including riding a bike). Dizziness Commonly reported after valve replacement. No one knows why I get this and it does not seem to be linked to heart rate or blood pressure. I think it’s mainly due to bending down and getting up too quickly and also stress. I try not to worry about them too much and I only get about one or two attacks a month now. Fast and erratic heart rate This really troubled me after surgery as mine was 120 when resting on the day I left hospital, and I had an irregular heart beat for a couple of weeks. I was terrified my heart was damaged for life and would never recover. I resisted taking beta blockers and it has come down to pre op levels now ( 65 on average).It took about 6 months though. Warfain/ Coumadim Ahh! I could write a book about my experience with this drug. This was what I was most concerned about pre op but after surgery it was the last thing I was worried about. Once I got better Warfarin and its possible side effects began to concern me a lot. I have suffered some adverse side effects. Warfarin creates a vitamin K and D deficiency which is not at all good for bones and teeth. I haven’t noticed any significant increase in joint stiffness, but my teeth have really suffered. After years of not needing any dental work, in the last 6 months I have needed four fillings (two were replacement) and also need root canal treatment which I have never needed before. The other side effect I have had is hair thinning. I have always had too much hair so to suddenly find a bald patch appearing on my head was a real shock. This could also be age related though as my sister has a similar patch developing (but her hair has always been a lot thinner than mine).My hair is also a lot drier and nails more brittle. I take lots of supplements to try and combat Warfarin’s pitfalls and they have largely worked (Biotin, lysine, Coenzyme Q 10, vitamin C, iron etc).My hair has grown back now and my nails are quite strong. My teeth are still not great though. I think Warfarin has an accumulative effect on the body. For this reason just after my INR blood test I always take a high strength vitamin K2 tablet. This does decrease INR but I think the risk is worth the health benefits. I would take vitamin K2 regularly but it pushed the Warfarin dose up too high. Some of the vitamins I take have affected my INR so my advice would be to be consistent with any supplement. It’s taken me two years to get my INR stabilised and that’s mainly due to my experimentation with supplements, but I have now found a supplement regime that works for me and keeps my Warfarin dose to below 6 mg. So after two years I still feel I am on journey. It’s been many years since I had a heart that works properly and so that’s wonderful. I have to remember though that my body has suffered a major trauma and I need to respect that, even two years down the line. I am so much more health conscious now. Losing my health (even though it was for just a couple of months) had made me realise what a wonderful gift being healthy is and I never want to feel that unwell again. So all the best for those of you about to take a similar journey. Its definitely worth it and I found it life changing.

Ok this is going to be my last journal for a long time which is sad as I have found writing it (and this forum) so very helpful, but I think anything remotely useful that I have had to say has been said. I found this forum when I was feeling scared and confused and it has such a brilliant resource of support and information and I have had such positive support from people I don’t know and will never meet. And even if nobody has been reading what I have been writing, I found writing it therapeutic anyway. I will do an update in 6 months time and I will check in often to see how everyone else is doing of course because I’m nosey :0) So to summarise on what I have learned from this difficult process of open heart surgery: 1. Recovery is an individual process. It’s not a race and it’s not a competition. No matter how many times people say well at week 4 or at day 5 you should be at this stage… your body will decide where you will be and will set the pace and just have to accept this and follow. Not guilt trips and no feeling a failure because you are not doing as well as you think you should. People who heal quicker aren’t better people they are just very fortunate :0) 2. Enjoy the inactivity while its lasts. I hated, hated it at first and feeling so feeble and pathetic, but in the end I just bought loads of books and spent my days lying on the sofa with my dog at my feet, my iphone by my side, surfing TV channels and the net, texting friends, listening to the radio, eating nice food, sleeping when I felt like it and reading magazines and newspapers. I actually got to quite like it in the end and became an expert on Top Gear. 3. There are different layers of healing and don’t underestimate the emotional impact of surgery. One of the great things about this forum is that it normalises what can be a confusing and scary process, but obviously heart surgery is not at an every day process. No matter how good the statistics are and how advanced medical science is, being cut open and having your heart stopped and messed about with is not a minor business. It’s ok to feel a bit mad and sad and confused at times, and sometimes the emotional healing will get delayed until you are physically well enough to cope with it. But that’s ok, you will deal with it when you are ready and able. 4. You learn who really cares about you. I have had so such much support from family and friends and people I hardly know. People who I didn’t even think cared about me or had forgotten about me because I hadn’t seen them in years, took time to ring, text, write or send a card. I was really touched by this.

I read Renee’s journal today about going back to work and I could relate to her dilemma. It’s such a hard decision. I will be back at work full time on Wednesday and really worried about how I will cope. My work life is pretty full on and I remember how shattered I was before surgery. Hopefully I will have more energy now and it all won’t feel such a struggle. I think perhaps I have stopped noticing the positive changes in myself and they will really be noticeable once I am back in my old routine. I have really wanted to get my heart rate down before I go back to work and I have been so frustrated that it has been stuck at 80 for so long. I have also wanted to get my INR stabilised but that’s gone haywire recently dropping really low. So this has been a challenge I have set for myself ....to get my heart rate to 65 for most of the time and a stable INR. I have decided the key to both these things is water and walking. My INR started to go haywire when I came off the water tablets and started being more active. I did some research around this and found a really helpful website where people on Warfarin spoke about fluctuating INR levels. A couple people mentioned that increased metabolism and increased fluid intake can affect INR levels. I also read something about diuretics being given to heart patients because excess water in the body can place the heart under stress increasing heart rate. I know standard medical advice is drink more water but this does not apply to people like me :0) I drink far too much water. I always have. I have never seen it as a problem, but I wandered if water is my problem now. When I was taking diuretics having too little water caused my low blood pressure to drop too low; but perhaps now I have too much water and it’s diluting the Warfarin in my body and making my heart work too hard. So I have stopped drinking so much water. I had my heart rehab appointment last week and the nurse told me that if there was one thing I needed to do to get better it was walk. But since I have been able to start driving again I have stopped doing so much of this. By week three I had no choice but to do a lot of walking because I was living on my own and couldn’t drive until week six. This meant lots and lots of walking to the supermarket, local shops and doctors. Although I caught buses as well I did make myself walk a lot and I covered miles. I walked really, really slowly and kept having to stop and rest and take my pulse and there were a couple of times I nearly passed out. At first I found this really hard and felt a bit sorry for myself, but looking back I can see all that walking really helped me. So I have been trying to walk for an hour a day. I have also upped my magnesium intake. I have been doing the water and walking thing for three days now and my heart rate has dropped to 65 in the evening when I am resting which is amazing. It’s still pretty high during the day when I am out and about but hopefully this is a sign my plan is gradually working.I have no idea what my INR is though. Next blood test is Tuesday.

I thought I would cheer myself up today by researching cognitive decline and heart surgery. Not sure how exactly I stumbled on this theme through Google but once there couldn\'t quite drag myself away. I am not sure which was most depressing…..the research that showed Cognitive decline is common after surgery or it doesn\'t happen after surgery because its there anyway. I stayed for along time staring at the computer screen trying to work out if I was a bit brain damaged and decided on balance I felt more mentally alert now than prior to surgery. Mind you this is not difficult. In the months before surgery it did feel like a mental fog had descended upon me and at times it was quite frightening. The day I went to hospital I went to the cash point to get some money out and then realised I couldn\'t remember my pin number. I never forget my pin number. I\'ve had it for years. Then came the realisation that this was not a temporary relapse caused by stress but a permanent thing. All the way to hospital I kept trying numbers out in my head but realised the information was gone, like someone had reached into my brain and just taken it out. I would get very confused as well, writing things down and then losing bits of paper, forgetting really important meetings etc. After surgery my Dad referred to a recent trip we had taken and I couldn\'t recall it. The other things I regularly do is not just forget names but mix them up. I really offended people doing this but I just can’t help it. Will my memory improve? I suppose only time will tell. I haven’t lost my ability to write and construct sentences though so that’s encouraging :0)

Ok here\'s my positive list of 10 things I can now do (week 8) which I couldn\'t do in the early days of my recovery: 1. Drive...yeyeah its been so good to be able to have my independence back. Still haven\'t gone on the motor way yet but I\'m doing that on Sunday. 2.Mow (actually strim) my lawn 3.Work....not just admin but have I been able to re-open the drop in I run for the children and young people I work with and that\'s been great. 4.Walk fast without noticing I\'m doing it or feeling dizzy 5. Run up the stairs...so important as I\'m always forgetting things and having to go back up again 6. Talk for long periods of time without getting breathless 7. Sleep on my side but it does make my heart sound too loud. 8. Go for hours without thinking about my heart rate which can be as low as 75 now. 9. Do a bit of yoga(but not alot) 10. Sing. Really missed signing. It still hurts a lot when I cough. I am beginning to hate my longer scar as I can\'t wear most of my clothes...but that\'s nothing really compared to what I can do. In six months time hopefully I will be bale to list all the things I can do which I couldn\'t do BEFORE surgery.

It will be 8 weeks since surgery tomorrow. I had such a good day yesterday, I almost felt normal and so I was going to write about all the things I can do now that I couldn’t do when I wrote my first journal just after surgery. But then last night I found myself lying awake for hours listening to my heart pounding and not understanding why it was beating so fast or why I couldn’t sleep. And when I did sleep I had the oddest nightmare. And I reminded myself the road to recovery from major heart surgery is slow. It is like walking through a long dark valley. There are days when the sun will suddenly break through the overhanging rocks and you can catch a glimpse of the other side, but on the whole it is just walking in the shade and trusting one day you will eventually emerge. Before surgery I kept finding myself reading from Psalm 23 ‘even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me’. And I said to God, ‘you know I am nor afraid to face surgery and death. I have done it before when I was 15 and I was very afraid, but you went with me and you brought me through the other side, and I am not afraid any more.’ When I was 15 long after the surgery was over and I had gone back to school, and long after my parents had stopped worrying about me and treating me like I was made of porcelain; I found myself standing in a very dark place. It was a place of oppressive sadness that I could not explain or lift, and it went on for along time. Then one day I suddenly realised I could see a tiny light at the end of the long dark tunnel I was in. It was a cliché and I heard other people talk about it, but when it happens to you it’s not a cliché, it’s a miracle. About ten years later I was talking to my sister about death, and I was telling her that I was not afraid of dying. I was afraid of many things but death wasn\'t one of them. And she said to me that wasn\'t actually most people’s experience, but then I had had to form a relationship with death at a very early age. I had lived in its shadow for most of my childhood and the boundary separating death from life that exists for most people had been removed when I had had heart surgery. And I realised that I had to work my relationship with death out, and that I mustn\'t stop the familiarity and almost attachment I felt to it stop me from engaging fully with life. So one thing I have learned from my past experience of heart surgery is that if you keep walking you do emerge out of the shadow into the bright light of day. But when you emerge you are not the same, something has irrevocably changed and the scars you bear aren\'t just the physical ones. But that’s not such a bad thing, and it can be life changing and life enhancing. It was for me before and I know it will be again.

I went into town today and managed to walk round all the second hand clothes shops without having to sit down and rest. This is a big achievement for me. The first weekend I was out of hospital I just wanted to go second hand clothes shopping, but I only made it to the bank and nearly passed out. I regularly read an article in one of our national papers by a woman who broke her neck in a horse accident. She describes her body as like a prison which she is trapped in and I have been able to relate to that a little since surgery. When I was in hospital I talked to my dad about the pain and discomfort I was in and how it was unbearable at times. He shared with me about his progressive arthritis and how it felt like he body was closing in on him, strangling him with pain. He described it as claustrophobic. I knew my pain would pass and my body recover but he’s probably won’t and neither will the woman who broke her neck. It has got me thinking how our bodies limit us at times and I think in my case this has been in a way a gift. Apparently I ran before I could walk and I have always lived my life in the fast lane. I walk fast, I talk fast and I do everything quickly. I am impatient and people find me exhausting and probably irritating. I have been described as being like a whirl wind. Even though in the months before surgery I began to feel like a clock that was slowly winding down, I still did everything quickly, I just couldn\'t do as much. I would literally keep going until I dropped. I was out with a friend a few weeks after surgery and I kept asking him to slow down because he was walking too fast. We both saw the funny side of this. I told him ‘God has struck me down to teach me to stop be so impatient’ and he agreed. How much I missed being able to walk at a normal pace! At first walking any distance was an effort and even when I could walk a mile it was such a painful slow process. Talking was the same. I couldn\'t finish sentences and had to be quiet which was a relief I am sure to people around me. I wish I could say this has taught me to slow down but it hasn\'t. If anything as I feel new energy pumping through my body I feel more hyper than ever. It has taught me though to think more about how other people are feeling:The person who is struggling to cross the road or lift an object off a shelf in a shop, the person waiting at the bus stop in a wheel chair or slowly counting their money at the supermarket check out. And I have told myself, one day you will be like that again. One day you will run out strength and energy because you are old and infirm. My body has limited me and I needed that lesson. Now I need to learn to live responsibly with the large resource of energy that has been given back to me……. while it lasts.

I had an appointment at hospital last week - my pre-op six weekly check up- and they told me that the water on my lungs and round my heart is gone. Obviously this is very good news and I am sure explains why I have been feeling so much better and my heart rate has dropped to around the 70s. It also means I can now stop taking the water tablet I have been prescribed each day. And this is very important because I have just realised that it is this tiny innocuous looking white tablet that has been causing me a lot of my problems. I couldn\'t understand why when I was in hospital they kept giving me potassium and magnesium supplements and why apparently my levels were so low. I did some research when I got out of hospital and discovered that these things were very important for regulating the heart and keeping it healthy. When I left hospital I was given a prescription with a long list of tablets many of which were pretty useless to me, but nothing to prescribe these minerals.Yet I needed them because one side effect of the water tablet is it diminishes these minerals in the blood. Thankfully I have been taking my own supplements (although I have only just started doing that the last week) and I am sure that has helped with my heart rate dropping. At first I tried get my potassium by eating lots of bananas and dark chocolate but gave up on this as I was getting sick of both. Another thing I didn\'t realise about water tablets is that they can cause low blood pressure. Despite all the things that have been wrong with my heart I have never had a problem with my blood pressure. So when I started to feel dizzy and sick I had no idea what was the cause and assumed it was my fast heart rate or the warfarin tablets.Worrying about the dizziness made me anxious about going out because I was afraid that I might suddenly pass out on the street Recently as my heart rate has drooped my dizzy spells have increased and this has perplexed me. So I did some research and realised that the dizziness probably had nothing to do with my heart rate or my exercise tolerance, but lack of water in my body due the little white pill So I am feeling quite cross today and also generally perplexed about medicine. I have been thinking about how one tablet which can solve one problem, can cause a whole lot of other problems which are actually in some respects a lot worse. I think my recent stay in hospital has left me with very mixed feelings about medicine. I am so grateful for the free, excellent, life saving help I have received. I couldn\'t speak highly enough of the professionalism and expertise of the Drs and nurses who cared for me. But on the other hand it has confirmed to me my suspicion of taking pills and tablets and how a lot of these are completely unnecessary. When my heart rate was very high in hospital they wanted to give me beta blockers. And I understand why. They didn\'t want me to go home and have heart attack (actually they didn\'t want me to go home at all when I did). But I insisted on going home and I insisted on not taking beta blockers. I just felt that hospital had been the right environment for me up until then but now it was doing me more harm than good. I needed to go home and be able to rest and sleep properly and look at my garden and feel free. And my body needed to be free from all the chemicals that had been pumped into it and get back to normal. And I knew if it could do that in time it would heal itself. And it has :0)

Something wonderful happened to me yesterday. I fell asleep at about 12.30 am and woke up this morning, at 7.30 am. I had had 7 unbroken hours sleep! I couldn\'t believe it, because sleep has eluded me since my surgery and my relationship with it has completely changed. Pre op, like a lot of people with progressive heart problems, I slept a lot and it was my best friend and greatest necessity. I craved sleep and panicked if I did not get \'enough\'. I slept at night, when I got in from work, at weekends and when ever I could. I rarely had problems sleeping, but when I woke I would look and feel tired. If I didn\'t sleep \'enough\' I felt and looked like death. Since surgery sleep has become my enemy. I remember lying in intensive care watching the clock for hours on end at night. I would drift off and wake up and wonder why the clock\'s hand hadn\'t moved. I swamped my body with morphine just to lose conciousness. Once I had been moved to the main ward sleep continued to evade me. I dreaded nights when everyone else was sleeping, and would pace the corridors restlessly longing for morning. I didn\'t feel tired (drowsy and weak but not tired) and when I tried to sleep I would have strange dreams and feel panicky. I have written elsewhere how my sister helped me understand this was a response to the trauma of surgery. She explained to me that the last time I had gone to sleep very bad things had happened to me in the form of the surgery and so on an unconscious level I felt it was unsafe to sleep. I had to stay vigilant and alert. She helped me resolve this by telling my inner child it was safe to go to sleep and the bad things were over now. This definitely helped but sleep came in short burst throughout the day and night....rarely for more than two hours at a time. After heart surgery lots of things can disrupt sleep: A loud heart beat, feeling uncomfortable at night, back pain, a changed routine, having much more energy than you are used to and the nightmares and anxiety. What has been waking me up for the last few weeks has been thirst (as I am taking tablets to expel water from my body) and back and chest pain. Gradually though my sleep periods at night have been getting longer and last night at 7 hrs was the longest yet. It is one of the things I know I need to get right before I can return to work and that\'s why I\'m so happy today. The odd and rather wonderful thing I have noticed though is that no matter how disrupted my sleep has been I always look rested in the morning. Now I have got over the deathly pale phase I look so well. My skin, eyes, hair all look so healthy and considering what I have been through that is to be wandered at. Before surgery my body was obviously unable to do much repair work at night due to my heart struggling to pump blood and oxygen around my body, and this had a huge effect on me. I didn\'t realise how much until now though.

I wanted to do an update about my concerns for my sternum wound and also how odd my breasts looked post op.I am sure there are a lot of other women who have concerns about this issue. Its 6 weeks since my surgery tomorrow and I can confirm that the magic 6 week mark re the sternum healing is true. The raised bone running from my neck to the top of my chest has gone now. I have one little bit of raised bone still by my throat but hope this will disappear soon. The scar is longer than before and reaches almost to my neck and only time will tell if that will fade. The rest of the scar is very neat and along the old scar line and hopefully will fade to what it was before in time (almost invisible in the cleavage). Its always been more visible higher up where the skin is more stretched. I haven\'t had any sternum wires sticking into me or showing under the skin. I spoke to my Dr about this and she said this rarely happens and usually only with elderly patents. Actually the scar is quite flat now. When the Dr first took the dressing off my chest in hospital she and the nurses looked at me with a little bit of concern and pity and I couldn\'t understand why. I thought the scar looked a lot better than I thought it would. I think it was how raised and bumpy it looked in places that bothered them and they said I could come in and have it flattened in time if I wanted. But the wound has flattened out by itself and has actually taken away the part of the scar just below my bra line that I had from my previous op which I have always hated. It still quite uncomfortable though and I still find it hard to sleep on my side. Breasts.....they definitely looked very odd after surgery, flatter and in the wrong place. I kept looking at my chest and wandering if they had stitched me up wrong, like a zip that\'s pulled up out of sync. All I can think of is that the breast muscle and tissue is damaged during the operation and this effects how the breast look and feel for awhile.Mine were definitely numb in places. It is temporary though and It does all heal and mine are back to normal now. When I first got out of hospital I read lots of helpful advice on this forum about wearing bra post op and I wish I had known that earlier. I was scared to wear a bra post op and this wasn\'t helpful as the breasts pulled on the wound a lot. I bought some soft non fastening bras when I got out of hospital and wore them in the day and at night at first. I can now wear my under wired bars again in the day and wear the soft bras at night. This definitely helps reduce the pain in the chest area and I think has probably helped the muscle and tissue heal as well.

I don’t know if something temporarily happens to hearing after heart surgery ( as it does to eye sight) but almost the whole time I was in hospital I was unaware of my loud heart beat. I remember this was such a relief to me when I first gained consciousness; as the intrusiveness noise of the mechanical valve was one of the things I had really worried about. When I was moved out of high dependency onto the main ward I had a fan in my room which was on constantly. I think this helped stop me from hearing my heart beat. The only time I noticed it was when I was in the bathroom. I used to dread going in there because I knew I would have to listen to the loud thumping in my chest. I said to the nurse who was doing my echo a couple of days before I left ‘I’m glad its not noisy and I cant hear it’. She looked at me like I was a bit mad. ‘oh you can hear it’ she said ‘its really loud’. Once I got home I suddenly became aware of the noise and it really freaked me out. I would go upstairs to lie down and have a sleep and find myself just sitting there listening to my heart. I would then worry the beat wasn\'t right.... it was too fast, too slow or irregular. In the end my dad got really cross with me and told me to stop listening to it. I said to him ‘can you hear my heart beat?’ and he admitted he could. I said ‘well if you can hear it from where you are how do you expect me to ignore it?’ He kind of saw my point. In the end we came up with plan that worked. I realised it was the fan in hospital that has some how broken up the sound waves stopping me from hearing my heart. So my dad got me a large fan and I put it right by my bed and at night or when I was napping I had it on high. It was bliss..suddenly I couldn\'t hear my heart any more and I was able to sleep. The only problem was on a cold summers day the fan did make me feel quite cold and chap my lips. I don’t use the fan any more as I have learned to filter out the noise but it’s still by my bed and I know I can use it if I need to and that’s reassuring.I am hoping when my heart beat has slowed down I will be less aware of it. On the positive side I received a letter from the hospital yesterday with the results of some tests they carried out on me a week after discharge. Apart from the water on the lungs they have no concerns at all and are very happy with my progress. They say there are no irregularities about my heart at all and it is working really well. So the noise is probably a good things…it shows its working fine :0)

I identified in my first journal that my number 3 worry on leaving hospital has been a stabbing pain in my back and left side which disrupts my sleep. I wake up every morning at 4.30am without fail feeling uncomfortable and have to get out of bed and move around for a couple of hours. then I can go back to bed and sleep (hence writing this at 6 am). I went to the doctors about this yesterday. I saw a senior nurse, who i found out used to specialise in cardiac care. She explained to me what happens to the back during heart surgery. When the sternum is broken they pull the rib cage right back to access the heart and she said this can cause a lot of lower back pain post op. She looked at my back and identified issues with my left side which is where I have been getting the pain. Having said that the pain is improving each day. I have accredited some of this reduction to my eating a bowl full of sugar free jelly every day. I do this because I have read that gelatine is very good for helping to repair muscles and joints. I\'ve tried eating plain gelatine powder it in all sorts of ways but can\'t stomach the taste. I don\'t like eating sugar free jelly because of all the rubbish added to it, but I add a packet of plain gelatine powder to this and an extra 1/2 pint of water. This dilutes the rubbish, strengthens the gelatine content and it then doesn\'t taste that bad.

I was lying in my hospital bed a few days after having had my second lot of open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve and root; when one of the nurses popped in to see how I was. She asked me if I was feeling the benefits of the surgery and if it had been easier this time round. The first time I had had open heart surgery was 30 years ago when I was 15. It had been less intrusive ( valve widened not replaced, no sternum wires although sternum was cut through). I didn\'t know how to say to this very kind and helpful nurse how awful I felt and how bad the whole experience had been for me. I tried to explain that maybe time had erased the pain of the first experience and I am a lot older now. Did I feel better? Hopefully one day I will but not yet. Not by along way. I can\'t believe how naive and blasé I was about the surgery and what my recovery would be. I even planned a camping trip to go on a couple of weeks after I left hospital.Thought I needed something to look forward to. Needless to say that has had to be cancelled :0). This whole process has reminded me how fragile we are as human beings and how much I have taken my health for granted (even though clearly my heart hasn\'t been that well). I found this forum helpful because I have been able to find answers to the many questions and fears that have arisen since I have come home from hospital. All I have wanted is for someone to to say to me...\'all these things you are worried about are not worth worrying about. All this will pass and in a years time you will have forgotten how bad you feel now and the things you are stressing about.\' So here is my top ten list of things I have been stressing about since I left hospital. And I hope in a years time I will look at this list and be able to say ..all resolved and forgotten 1. Fast and irregular heart beat. Thankfully not irregular now and alot slower than when they first took the pace maker wires out. Still alot higher than I would like at 90/100 when resting. 2. Feelings of disorientation and sadness. Didn\'t have this when I was 15 but I did get very low. I came through it stronger and my faith in God was invaluable to me and that is what I am clinging to now...or who I am clinging to. 3. Stabbing pains in my back and side and back pain in the morning that disrupts my sleep( that and not being able to sleep on my side as its too painful) 4. What happened to my breasts? The first time I looked in the mirror after surgery I nearly had a heart attack at how awful and wounded I looked. People have told me since I look so much better, younger and healthier but when I look in the mirror I see a pale ghost like figure whose breasts and breast muscles appear to have been eaten away. This is getting better though with time. 5. Sternum wound.After surgery I had a huge lump at the top of my breast bone where it joins the neck and my skin was stretched over this causing the wound to split slightly. I have been applying zinc cream and,castor, neroli and rosehip oils as well as rain forest honey to the scar and it does look so much better now. Its still raised though and I worry about those horror stories of sternum wires coming loose and slicing into me. 6. Feeling weak and dizzy and generally feeble. I know my stamina is improving slowly but I have never felt so incapacitated and feeble in my life. 7. Loud heart beat. Embarrassingly loud. I asked a friend last weekend if he wanted to listen to my mechanical valve and he said \'I can hear it from here\' He was sitting across the table from me at the time. The loud thumping noise kept me awake at night at first but I am now learning how to filter it out. Its uncomfortable and even hurts at times though. How can a heart beat hurt? 8.Water on the lungs. Have it due to being on bypass for so long it and I worry it wont go away. 9. Warfarin. Can\'t believe I have put this as no\' 9 when it was my top worry going into surgery. Hate taking it and being tied to the blood tests and worried I will have a bad reaction to it. Feel sick alot of the time but that may not be the drugs fault. 10.Will I ever feel normal and well again? Will I ever feel robust and strong and stop obsessing about my pulse( which I can take any time of the day as its so loud). Well lets hope so. One day at a time and being patient.I don\'t know who said it buts its very true... patience and the passage of time do more than strength and fury :0)