Training Back to Life: My Heart Attack Rehab Story
On September 24, 2019, I died. And then, miraculously lived again. (I’ve used that opener before, but one must make the most of it.) Not too many people make it back from a Widowmaker heart attack. I’ve read the survival rate is 3%, and that is only if the person receives CPR immediately. For 40 minutes they CPR’d me, they defibrillator’ed me, they hooked me up to a piston that pounded away at my chest (I can still feel that, by the way). No luck. Clinically dead. Because I was in good physical condition, they got permission to transport me, hooked up to a LUCAS machine that gave me mechanized compressions. When I reached the hospital, the occasional arrhythmia gave way to a weak pulse. I had a stent put in one artery, and then they put me in a medically induced coma for four days, lowering my body temperature to aid in healing, and, hopefully avoid brain damage.
The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step
My wife just reminded me that she had to help me use a walker to get to the bathroom in the beginning. Sometimes that first step needs a helping hand. My first workout was five squats to a chair. Tough WOD. Nap. That was two days after coming out of the coma. A couple of days later, I got permission to go on walks by myself. Am I the only patient that ever did timed laps around the cardiac ward? I don’t know. But there’s probably not many of us. There were only four of five of us “Walkers” on the cardiac ward. Every day, I thought, “We’re the ones that are going to make it.” Then I started saying to the other walkers--”We’re the ones that are going to make it,” and they returned a smile.
Training Buddies
All my training buddies from Butcher’s Lab came to visit me. It usually followed this pattern:
Me crying
Them crying
“Wow, this is crazy” conversation
Encouraging words
We train (laps around the cardiac ward)
All were essential to my healing and rehabilitation. Each day I tried to break my record for lapping the cardiac ward. Each day I broke it. I tried to do laps at least four times per day, spaced evenly throughout the day. The nurses told me it wasn’t a race, but I had to fight for something--and a new lap time was the thing.
That Pain-in-the-Ass Heart Monitor
Man, I couldn’t wait to get that heart monitor off. Swinging around, coming unplugged, affecting the way I slept--what a pain in the ass. And then, they took it off. Hmmm. Cascading waves of fear. And they’re not getting better. So, now no one is monitoring my heart while I’m doing my laps? So, I could just drop dead again, and someone would have to find me? Wait a second, did my heart just do something funny right now? And right now? This is not going to be so easy. And that was when I was still in the hospital. When I got home, I had to have someone with me at all times. I was fortunate to have my oldest sister with me, and my wife, most of the time. My first workout at home was 20 squats. I slowly built up to doing 100 squats a day, and took a couple of walks a day. I got very tired, very fast.
Cardiac Rehab Class
Baseline fitness test: Max Squats to a Chair in 30 Seconds
Score: 33 (I’m not sure they had seen that before)
That was after I had been home for a week, 17 days since the heart attack. The body’s ability to recover is truly mind-boggling. My cardiac rehab class was filled with almost all men, very overweight, and 20 or more years older than I was. I thought, “This is a joke.” It wasn’t. Those guys were tough — fighting for their lives. And the physiotherapists pushed you hard. The philosophy was to push yourself to the max there, in the hospital, where you can get help immediately, if need be. And that was so good. It gave me back a little bit of trust in the heart which had given out on me. But after a few weeks of that, I was becoming the jerk that was lapping everyone and doing twice as many reps as everyone — and I knew it was time to go back to Butcher’s Lab.
Back in the Lab
I think of my training buddy, Bjorn Baldvinsson, as my guardian angel. Every day he could, he picked me up, and we went training at Butcher’s Lab. It was an exaggerated version of why training partners are so important — accountability, motivation, encouragement, understanding. My first day back in the gym, I had it in my mind that I could do a muscle up, so I tried. One muscle up. It’s hard to describe what that meant to me. It gave me hope.
Training Phases
My training quickly went through phases:
Gently get the heart working again
Hey, can I still do this? This? This?
High reps make me feel sick
Let me try some conservative single-rep lifts
Fuck this, I’m getting as strong as I was before!
I would not recommend the last one to recovering heart attack patients. The heavy lifting put some pressure on my chest cavity that it was not ready for, and I ended up in the hospital again one night — not being able to distinguish the chest pains I was having from the chest pains you have before another heart attack. So, live and learn. (Slowly.)
Saved by a Virus?
The coronavirus lockdown was kind of another wave of “Ok, slow down, take a look around, and change some things,” that I had been through already after the heart attack. Butcher’s Lab offered to lend out some equipment, so I got myself a 32kg kettlebell. I covered a lot of this in another blog called “So I Stopped Doing CrossFit, Now What?” What I didn’t mention in that article, is that the fact that I couldn’t lift heavy anymore, helped my body heal tremendously. My mind also healed. I realized that I couldn’t put pressure on myself to be the strongest old guy around anymore. I fully embraced a new way of training that has helped me feel good throughout the day, without any big energy crashes. So now, I’m training for life. Staying strong, yes, but not whacking myself with super high-intensity workouts and max lifts all the time. As a fellow heart attack survivor advised me, “I’m playing the long game.”